We-Ness As An Expansion of Bion's Psychoanalytic Function of Intuition1

Over time, I have become more and more convinced that Bion's thought represents the grafting of his theory of group psychology onto Kleinian psychoanalysis. This hypothesis helps me clarify how and why Bion increasingly shifts the latter toward the former, even if, to some extent, he gives the impression that he does so without really being aware of it.

In Bion, this gaze brought to the truth of what is happening in the present becomes extreme. In fact, he himself presents his contribution as a way of improving the precision of observation in psychoanalysis.

But how does Bion improve observation of the “facts” of analysis — for him, essentially the emotional experience?

He does so in various ways, and I would like to emphasize at least three: (a) if to peer into the depths of the inner world, the Kleinian analyst uses the optical microscope of early Oedipus and the processes of splitting and projective identification, Bion uses the electronic microscope of a new theory of thought; (b) he elaborates the concepts of transformation and intuition; and (c) as I have alluded to in my title, he gradually replaces the perspective of the subject with that of the we or the intersubject — a shift, however, that is only fully achieved in post-Bionian analytic field theory (FT).

Here I briefly address only points (b) and (c).

The concept of transformation, so central to Bion, is in contrast to that used by Freud of distortion, and the former is meant to focus all eyes on what is happening here and now in the session. But his insistence on the concept of intuition is also something that deserves the greatest attention — especially, I would say, because it acts as a handmaiden to that of transformation.

Intuition should serve as a way to “see” the transformations of the

unconscious emotional experience in the session — setting asid