Bion at the Crossroads: A Contrarian Reading of “on Arrogance”

In “On Arrogance,” Wilfred Bion made a remarkable claim: “the analyst who is treating an apparently neurotic patient must regard a negative therapeutic response together with the appearance of scattered, unrelated references to curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity as evidence that he is in the presence of a psychological catastrophe with which he will have to deal.” However Bion came to believe this, he sought grounds for it in a reading of Oedipus that seriously distorts that tragedy. Since the clinical outcome in “On Arrogance” appears to be impasse, perhaps even iatrogenic injury, the text's value is perhaps best consolidated by historicizing its construction through a psychoanalytic lens. Thus, while “On Arrogance” has been canonized as prescriptive for the treatment of difficult patients, it can instead be read as the illuminating trace of a grievously difficult intrapsychic struggle, a personal reckoning that resulted in Bion's 1958 return to the battlefield at Amiens where he had “died” in the hell of combat forty years earlier. “On Arrogance” thus reflects a prodigious episode of sublimation that proved essential to Bion's lifelong development as a psychoanalytic writer and thinker.