Bion: A Freudian Innovator

There is one remarkably short paper by W.R. Bion which constitutes a sort of crossroads or nodal point for the understanding of many aspects of his work in general. In ‘Notes on Memory and Desire’1 he describes something, a point of technique, which is at the same time very Freudian and yet can also be seen to link up to a series of theories that make Bion seem to be one of the least Freudian of psychoanalysts. I intend to take this paper as my reference point and use it to show how Bion both continued faithfully within the main lines of Freud's thought and was also an original thinker.

Historically speaking, the question as to whether Bion was a Freudian or not has never arisen, because he was thought of as being a Kleinian, and since Klein had, though with some controversy, been cleared of the charge of being unfaithful to psychoanalytic theory, it would seem that her followers, or those who were thought to be such, were also automatically accepted as being bona fide psychoanalysts. Over the years, people have asked me questions about the ‘background’ which shows through every now and again in Bion's writings; the questions can be said to range from ‘Was he interested in aesthetics?’ to ‘Did he read Zen Buddhism?’ passing through logic, mathematics, philosophy and a great many other subjects too. Rarely, or perhaps never, have I been asked whether Bion read Freud, since I suppose that it is taken for granted that he did; and yet the ways in which Freud's thinking permeated Bion's, and the degree to which it did so, are neither so obvious nor so automatic - there is not too much ‘of course’ about it.

Freud's own requirements for those who professed to call themselves psychoanalysts were quite simply and succinctly stated: conviction in the existence of the unconscious and use of the transference as the primary therapeutic instrument. Bion certainly did not depart from these basic theories and, indeed, he is a great deal more faithful to many other Freudian theories a