Seminar 5. 4 July 1978. The Tavistock Seminars

Bion: That mobilization is something outside the group, the mobilization of the people who concentrate on the body, trying to keep the mind in its proper place. The development of the mind has been a frightful nuisance and has caused an awful lot of trouble. I think we are still frightened of it. That is why we [inaudible] … to what I call “wild thoughts”, and anyone who will give a home to those thoughts flying around looking for a lodging, looking for a thinker to think them.

Q: [inaudible] … brought together two different concepts of yours – one, the beta-element, and the other the protomental apparatus. I don't quite see how they wed with one another [inaudible] … only for evacuation, and now you seem to be talking about them as manifesting themselves in somatic phenomena, habits and things of that sort.

Bion: I invented the term with the idea that it could be vacant, a space “to let”, as it were, that could be borrowed for purposes of clarifying something or another. But there are things that do seem to me to suggest this combination between the body and the mind. Why do the old anatomists call part of the brain the “rhinencephalon”? Why a nose brain? Why is a patient always complaining of a rhinitis? Psychosomatic? Soma-psychotic? Take your choice. “Pure and eloquent blood spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought, that one might almost say, her body thought” [Donne, “The Second Anniversary”].

Some of the later developments of Confucius or his followers seem to suggest a sort of physical approach to what we regard as

mental symptoms, mental diseases, and the suggestion seems to be of an athletic form of activity, as if they thought an approach had been made to these very primitive levels of mind via the body. When you think of this tendency, I think you will find with your own patients that sooner or later they have taken up dancing or gymnastics or eurythmics because of this need and urge to sweep athlet