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As I was recently deepening my study of Bion's work, I was stunned to read his opening statement in the Tavistock seminars: “It took me a long time to realize that the actual experience of being psychoanalyzed was a traumatic one and it takes a long time to recover from it” (Bion 2005, p. 1). If psychoanalysis is traumatic for the analysand, is it also for the analyst? I imagine Bion would answer unequivocally yes.
For Bion the ontogenesis of thinking is infused with trauma. His classic metaphor of the mother-infant dyad highlights how the capacity to think unfolds and where the trauma lies. Bion believes that the infant is filled with overwhelming feelings and sensations suitable only for evacuation. Ogden (2004) reminds us of Bion's elegant yet simple ideas about the ontogenesis of thinking. He states that in the earliest stages of life (and in working with primitive sectors of an analysand's mind) it takes two people to think.
LaFarge explains this as follows: “Beset by affects and sensations that he [the infant] cannot tolerate or make sense of, the infant evokes these feelings in the mother” (p. 67). Implicit in this model of thinking is the trauma the mother withstands by being open and receptive to the tidal waves of raw emotion from her child. In analogous fashion, the analyst is at times bombarded with verbiage from the analysand, whose mind is not symbolically communicating lexically framed thoughts using language, but rather is expelling primitive feelings into the analyst. And the mother-analyst endures all this to help the child-analysand learn to think for him- or herself.
One of Bion's seminal constructs is that of the container/contained. This concept embraces the interpersonal developmental experience of learning to use one's own mind for thinking, especially in sectors of the mind where thinking has been stunted or has barely existed. What the mother-analyst endures on behalf of her child will one day become (if all goes well) an intrapsychic capacit