Born in 1897 in Muttra, India, to a European father and an Anglo-Indian mother, Bion moved to England to attend boarding school at the age of eight. After fighting for the British in the First World War, he attended Oxford and then University College London for medical school. By the time he began formal analytic training at the British Psychoanalytic Society around 1946, he was already recognized for the originality of his thinking, especially for his experimental work on group relations, which he had begun as an army psychiatrist during the Second World War. One day, after Bion presented a paper, Klein, who was his training analyst and saw him as “prize catch,” “was found crying in the hall because Bion had not expressed his gratitude to her,” notes biographer Phyllis Grosskurth in “Melanie Klein: her world and her work“
In my own experience, I have found that the practice of psychoanalysis, in the Bionian way, is like writing poetry rather than prose: intuition is as important as intellect. While Freud's contribution to the legitimation of psychoanalysis led him to establish it as a medical science, Bion viewed it as an art form. He believed that psychoanalysts, like “artists, musicians, scientists, discoverers,” explore what may be “beyond our understanding or experience” and should not be limited to “what we understand.” Even the idea that what happens when we are awake is more real than when we sleep was for Bion “a prejudice… in favor of voluntary muscles.”
Bion's clinical work was guided by the conviction that the analyst “must be able to listen not only to words, but also to music.” In one case, Bion described a breakthrough after realizing that his patient was not conveying verbal meaning, but was “painting sound.” He once advised an analyst presenting a case to tolerate confusion: the confused story told by his patient “will form the basis for the interpretation you give six sessions later, six months later, six years later. That is why it is so important to have your senses open to what is happening.”
Bion liked to quote the phrase of the philosopher Maurice Blanchot: “The answer is the misfortune of the question.” As part of the analysis, Bion told an audience in 1976: “There is always a desire to give an answer to prevent any spread of the flood through the existing breach.” Analysts must resist the urge to close this gap—what Bion called “a disgusting hole where one has no knowledge at all”—with ready-made answers. Working with patients, I noticed that the unconscious is also a terrible hole. You can't predict what will slip away. This is why I especially appreciate Bion's portrait of the dynamics between analyst and analysand. “In every office there must be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst,” Bion said in an interview that same year. (His articles and interviews can be found in “Complete works of V. R. Bion“, edited by Chris Mawson.) “If they're not both scared, you might wonder why they're bothering to find out what everyone knows.”
Beckett, in a letter to McGreevy about his sessions with Bion, described himself as unplugged: “going with the pack with great freedom of obscenity and persuasion.” (“The Pack” was what Beckett nicknamed his analyst, who was nine years older than him and wore bulky knitted Scottish sweaters.) Within a few weeks, Beckett’s symptoms began to subside, and after another few months he noticed that “everything at home” was “easier.” However, during prolonged stays with his mother—something Bion did not advise—his symptoms returned. He would then resume the conversation with Bion and report that he was “feeling better,” which he believed was “a kind of confirmation of the analysis.” The sessions seemed to ease his writer's block: “I worked hard on the book,” his first published novel.Murphy“And it is going very slowly, but I don’t think there can now be any doubt that it will be completed sooner or later,” he reported in October 1935.
Analysis, instead of leading Beckett to adapt to the outside world, as his mother had hoped, led him inside. He experienced “extraordinary memories of being in the womb, intrauterine memories,” as he would later tell Knowlson. The writer began to consider his “morbid condition” as beginning in his “prehistory”, even before his birth. The analysis also helped reveal the entirely original style seen in Murphy, published in 1938, about a protagonist who would rather be tied naked to a chair and “come alive in his mind” than to pursue normative goals such as work, marriage, money. Dylan Thomas, who reviewed “Murphy” that year, called it “Freudian babble.” Beckett wasn't following anyone else.
On October 2, 1935, toward the end of Beckett's analysis, Bion invited the writer to dinner—“a hasty but good dinner at the Etoile on Charlotte Street,” Beckett McGreevy noted—followed by a lecture by Carl Jung. It was as unorthodox a move then as it is now. “I hope he didn’t do us both a disservice by inviting me to meet him like that,” Beckett mused. The lecture was the third of five in the series; Bion was present at two of them, so it is likely that he believed Jung's discoveries would have implications for his patient.
Of course, something Jung said seemed to be the catalyst for them working together. Jung discussed how children retain an extraordinary awareness of the world from which they came until the “veil of oblivion” falls and they adapt to the outside world. He spoke subtly about a girl who lived between worlds. “She was never born whole,” Jung said.
