You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Q: I would like to hear your views about the following. One group of analysts has a common medical vertex related to certain ideas about illness, pathology, aetiology, etc. Another group recognizes other vertices, such as the desire to earn money, to have power, to educate, to influence, to apply psychoanalysis to the individual or to groups. These form groups which are related and give rise to tensions in the practice of analysis when seen as a whole.
Bion: One fundamental matter with which we are all concerned is tension. Sometimes there can be so little tension between two people that they fail to stimulate each other at all. At the other extreme, the differences in outlook or temperament are so great that no discussion is possible. The question is, can the society or group or pair find the happy mean which is tense enough to stimulate but belongs to neither extreme, either lack of tension or too much? Can a nation achieve both sufficient homogeneity and sufficient tension?
This problem applies also to the categories of science and religion. How is a proper balance to be achieved between a scientific vertex which could be said to be devoted to truth or the facts, and a religious vertex which could equally be said to be devoted to truth? Similarly, the sincere artist is also concerned to depict truth. If Vermeer can paint the little street in Delft, and if people can look at it, then they will never see a street in the same way again. The painter has brought about a change in the individual which makes it possible for him to see a truth that he has never seen before. It would seem absurd if the tension between these three groups – science, religion and art – which are all fundamentally devoted to the truth, was either so slack or so tense that they were unable to further the aim of truth.