I welcome the opportunity to review briefly and revisit Freud's (1921) classic text on group psychology, both in terms of what we have come to understand in the last 100 years about psychoanalytic institutes, the theoretical groups within them and organizational life. My particular slant is to take up how Wilfred Bion (1952; 1955) responded to Freud's ‘Group’ paper, and I examine it in the context of the history of the small Freud and Klein groups that operated in Vienna and London in the 1910s and 1950s. I conclude with a vignette from a 1967 meeting at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute where Wilfred Bion the Kleinian had a dialogue with Ralph Greenson the Freudian, my ‘case study’ example of how two analysts who spoke different analytic dialects attempted to speak to one another.
To get straight to the thesis of this brief talk: the importance of a group dynamic understanding of the behavior of psychoanalysts in institute groups is fundamental to our capacity as a profession to thrive and grow in the new millennium. This idea is in keeping with IPA President Stefano Bolognini's recent call for psychoanalysts to begin some sort of group relational training, so that it can helpfully augment the Eitingon model of training. It becomes the 4th pillar that amplifies the triadic importance of the training analysis, supervision and didactic courses.
The idea here is fairly straightforward: as analysts, we spend a lot of time learning how to understand ourselves and our patients in dyadic training situations, primarily the training analysis, supervision and control
cases seen, often leaving the issue of our ‘group identities’ relatively unexplored. So, what a strange culture shock coming to our first psychoanalytic meetings at our institutes can be! As Eisold (1994) pointed out in his riveting paper on the ‘Intolerance of Diversity at Psychoanalytic Institutes,’ it can often be quite difficult and challenging for candidates and members alike to learn how to shift gears from the freedom to explore and speak their minds in their training analyses, only to then feel stifled when attending institute meetings, where they now become group members in ways that seldom are explored from that angle.
Existing primarily in ‘pair-fetish’ groupings, candidates are often befuddled and confused when having to take up an identity as an implicit member of whatever group their analyst and supervisors are associated with. It is the unconsciousness carried by the group self that can often underscore the cliques and factions that are rivalrous and competitive with one another, in turn projected and acted out at institute gatherings. One way such endemic situations can be counteracted is through an appreciation of who we are not only as analysts and supervisors, but also understanding how we exist as group animals in these situations.
To the heart of my talk: in looking at the early history underlying how psychoanalytic organizations tended to include elements of cliques, factions and split-off groups, I start with the known history, looking at the early Freud group before taking up the less-known history of the London Klein group. I start with Freud's group paper, looking at it in the context of his preliminary attempts to understand man as a group animal, contextualizing it in terms of early psychoanalytic organizations. I then move to Bion's understanding of small group behavior at the mid-century point, applying his thinking about small groups to his own group, the London Kleinians of the 1950s. I examine both groups in terms of their work task functions and irrationally-driven ‘basic assumptions’ behavior; and finally, I will conclude with a case example of analysts in a Freud and Klein group having an interaction at an analytic meeting. Here, I play an audio excerpt of an exchange at a Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute group meeting in April, 1967, where Wilfred Bion had an engaging and spirted interaction with Ralph Greenson regarding the nature of borderline psychopathology.
Revisiting Freud's group paper, I am struck by the counterpoint that his primarily conceptual analysis represents against his living experience as a psychoanalytic group leader, who by 1921, had helped found the International Psychoanalytic Association as its titular head. In his review of the literature on groups, still a fairly new field at the turn of the century, Freud sought to understand how one's individual mind changes when joining a group. In the mind of the individual, he is never truly alone—there are always objects, imprints of family relatives and those outside the family—opponents, helpers. Thus, individual and social psychology are intertwined. Of course, Freud would have had a keen interest in understanding man as a group animal, as by 1921, he had had a lot of experience with men in psychoanalytic groups and organizations.
Compressing a bit here, in studies done of the early days of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, along with Freud's correspondence with his followers, such as Ferenczi, Abraham and Jung, we witness the small group struggles and conflicts that Freud both participated in and in a real way, also engendered and cultivated—at least in the estimation of writers, such as Roustang (1982), Eisold and Makari (2008), with whom I am in basic agreement. To take some brief examples: the group of physicians, art critics and salon devotees that frequented the Vienna Wednesday Society initially flourished when meeting at Freud's house in a spirit of open and often heated conversation about the professor's new discoveries. But the Viennese group faced a new set of challenges when in 1908, psychoanalysis became more than a local affair, taken up by respected colleagues like Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich. The freedom early on accorded to devoted disciples like Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel was in turn compromised by Freud's increasing need to marginalize the contributions of what he came to term the ‘Vienna rabble,’ in favor of now privileging the contributions of the Swiss group. So, the first dissidents came into being, as men like Adler kept on insisting on the freedom to have their own ideas and not be constricted by conforming excessively to Freud's libido theory.
Of course, the marginalization of the Viennese would be followed by Freud's dismissal of the Swiss after naming Jung the ‘crown prince’ (and heir apparent) to Freud as the aging kingly father. A close examination
of Freud's correspondence provides ample proof of what Bion would later call ‘pairing’ phenomena, where Freud would appeal to each disciple as a favorite, someone who possessed unique attributes with which Freud felt in harmony. To Abraham, Freud appealed to ‘racial kinship,’ (Rassenverwandtschaft) telling his Berlin colleague that the two shared a special Jewish bond that Gentiles like Jung would never understand, At the same time, in letters to Jung, Freud would criticize what he thought of as Abraham's ‘thin-skinned’ nature, urging Jung to overlook Abraham's touchiness and hypersensitivity. Treating his disciples as uniquely special children, Freud cultivated a paternalistic atmosphere where each disciple could feel themselves to be the favorite son, and as a result, felt identified with the Professor's antipathy toward rivals in the brother band. In short, in his correspondence with his disciples, Freud did his fair share to cultivate necessary friends, who could easily be converted into needed enemies. (Aguayo, 1995)
In Freud's group paper, when we come to his reprising the theory of the primal horde from Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1913), this bit of speculative anthropology actually fits quite well with the atmosphere that he had cultivated as the leader of the psychoanalytic band of brothers. Casting himself as the reluctant and aging despotic king in a primitive society, he would be the loved but ultimately hated and envied object, the target of all the brotherly rivalries to capture his throne after killing him off. The chief was killed and the paternal horde was transformed into a ‘community of brothers.‘
Freud further speculated that just as primitive man survives in every individual, so the primal horde arises when there is a collection of people. In fact, individual psychology arose from group psychology, not the other way around (Freud, 1921, p. 123)! Well, however these conjectures played out, they certainly are a credible psychological analysis that fits Freud's existence as the head of the small psychoanalytic movement. Not only did he maneuver his own followers, deftly playing one off against the other, he cultivated these rivalries against the backdrop of an atmosphere of the institutional endangerment of the young psychoanalytic movement. The enemies of psychoanalysis, real and imagined, had to be fended off lest it remain what he feared would be a ‘local Jewish affair.’ In a detailed study of Freud's correspondence with his disciples, the most
enduring and often used metaphor deployed by Freud was a militaristic/pugilistic one when referring to the ‘enemies of psychoanalysis.’ This flight-fight mentality left his followers constantly attempting to curry favor with their beloved leader, also endemic of a basic assumption dependency group.
After Freud and Jung delivered the Clark Lectures in 1911, and psychoanalysis became an international phenomenon alongside an international organization, Freud was now in a position to demand what Makari (2008) termed an ‘all-in’ allegiance from Jung to the libido theory. The Swiss researchers at the Burghölzli, primarily interested in psychosis, the word association test and other experimental methods, simply had their own aims and objectives. Bleuler would not allow himself to be cowed by Freud—and when Jung took interest in his own research, exercising his freedom to write about what interested him, it would result in a break with Freud. The ‘crown prince’ went his own way—and adept organizational thinkers like Ernest Jones—capitalized on Freud's fear of feeling surrounded by analytic patricides. It resulted in the formation of the ‘Secret Committee,’ a small group of dedicated men whose loyalty would not be compromised—at least not at its beginning .
Freud had helped to sow the seeds of internecine rivalry—and then felt persecuted as if those who disagreed with him would return and come back to kill him off; hence, Freud's obsessive fear that Jung harbored incessant death wishes towards him, not realizing that he had partially bound and tethered Jung by attempting to load him up with multiple duties as a journal editor, President of the IPA and other organizational functions. Ultimately, this administrative role was hardly satisfying to Jung, as it compromised his free time to carry on his own research. So, he had to go his own way and another brilliant mind was lost to psychoanalysis.
Some 30 years after Freud's ‘Group Psychology’ paper, Wilfred Bion (1952; 1955) returned to some of its ideas, stating rather forthrightly that his own analysis of groups differed from the professor's theories. Of course, by the time World War II ended, new psychological studies
were born that would have been completely foreign in Freud's time—the formal study of ‘intra-group tensions’ that eventuated in the birth of out-patient group therapy at places like the Tavistock Clinic in London. Bion was in a position to be much more specific than Freud about the organizing assumptions of small group behavior, differentiating between the Work Group, where there is voluntary co-operation in the performance of a group task, and the Basic Assumptions Group, whose emotionally-driven activities divert and obstruct the group from being a Work Group. Just as the ego could be in conflict with the claims of the id and super-ego, man existed in conflict with his ‘groupish’ nature in groups. However, just like Freud, it didn't occur to Bion to write about his own direct experiences as a member of a small psychoanalytic organization, the London Klein group of the 1950s. In fact, this has remained largely an unwritten history to this day.
So, the point here is to apply Bion's own principles to the functioning of the Work group that organized itself around the psychoanalytic ideas of Melanie Klein. In my view, it was the arrival of the Freud family in London in 1938 that occasioned the birth of what became the 3 main psychoanalytic groupings in London during the World War II era: the Freud group, the Klein group and the non-aligned Independents. The trans-continental clash between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein about the nature of child analysis, one held at a distance for over 10 years between Vienna and London, was now housed under one institutional roof at the British Psychoanalytic Society. (Aguayo, 1997; 2000) The protracted Controversial Discussions—between the two groups that had long argued about which side held the most truthful view about the early mental life of the infant—eventuated in the three-track training program at the British Society. Colleagues associated with either the Freud or the Klein group felt besieged and beleaguered. Many of Anna Freud's adherents, German-Jewish refugees, who had been displaced from their homeland and felt distinctly uncomfortable in a new country, with a new language and a psychoanalytic dialect of ‘Kleinianism,’ found it strange and untenable . Adherents of the Klein group also felt besieged, having to defend their conceptual model against Freud's daughter, who could and did claim the legitimate right to speak about what psychoanalysis consisted of—and what would be considered a ‘dissident’ point of view.
Klein's ideas, long popular with British analysts since she emigrated to London in 1926, now had to be defended in a much more strident fashion than the casual manner in which they had existed in the 1920s and 30s in London. During the 1920s and 30s, British analysts existed in an institute atmosphere that allowed for the easy integration between Kleinian and Freudian ideas. Robinson (2011) has called this group of primarily British analysts the ‘British Freudians,’ which included analysts like D.W. Winnicott, who had had both a Freudian and Kleinian analysis, and trafficked easily between the two systems of thought in the 1930s. With the arrival of the Freud family, the British Society polarized into small factional groups that rather quickly morphed into a ‘flight/fight’ mode against a backdrop of total global warfare. Whose view of the unconscious mental life of the infant would be privileged and ultimately prevail? This tense atmosphere accentuated defining positions and an intense stridency now accompanied the public discussion of such ideas.
Applying Bion's group dynamic understanding, the Kleinians were definitely a Work Group, one whose task was exclusively defined by Melanie Klein (1946; 1952), who in her paper, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,’ now set out the publication agenda of her small group. After the end of the Controversial Discussions, Klein was in quite a powerful position as both the institutionally-legitimized head of the group and the personal training analyst to a new trio of brilliant disciples—Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion. She was the dependency group leader and they were all quite reliant on her both as their personal training analyst and leader of their small group. In slightly different terms, since the primary structuring metaphor of the mother and infant dominated Klein's thinking, this trio can be perceived from a group vertex as the three privileged infants at the prized maternal breast. Drinking as they did from the originating source of a new theory, they existed in a pre-eminent position as different manifestations of a ‘pairing’ phenomena. But again, embedded in Klein's own theory, where the infant struggled with phantasies of entering the maternal body and murdering off rival babies, the seeds of internecine maternal oedipal conflict were also built into her system of thought. In this instance, Klein as a dependency group leader privileged the contributions of the new cohort of Kleinian disciples over and above her former supporters, whom she subsequently pushed out and marginalized.
As it was, this previous cohort of Klein's supporters, especially during the time of the Controversial Discussions—D.W. Winnicott, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and Joan Riviere—were for one reason or another—displaced from the center of the Kleinian group after World War II. In spite of the small size of her group and how imperiled Klein's position had been during the Controversial Discussions, she became increasingly strident about delineating what constituted being a proper Kleinian; she patrolled the boundaries of her own group and how behavior reminds us of what Freud earlier on said about his own movement: ‘I decide what psychoanalysis is and what it is not.’ Winnicott's increasing emphasis on the role of the actual maternal environment in the emotional development of the infant was not welcomed by Klein; and his work was dismissed when he insisted on publishing his landmark paper, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ in 1953. As Winnicott told Clara Britton, his wife, at the time, ‘Evidently Mrs. Klein no longer considers me a Kleinian.’ Paula Heimann, (1950) a longtime adherent and an analysand Klein by insisting on her own innovative views about the informing nature of countertransference, was also forced out of the Klein group by 1955. Joan Riviere, another long-term collaborator to Klein since the 1920s, also was marginalized out of the Klein group—though Riviere remained completely loyal to Klein; indeed, she left a significant endowment to the Melanie Klein Trust, and remained mystified as to why she had been marginalized from the group.
Looking at this small group phenomena from a Bionian perspective, Klein was the dependency group leader, one whose theoretical work set out the work task of the group. In remaining adhered to her point of view, her disciples had to display a certain originality in articulating her views, while treading carefully around the issue of innovating in a way that might incur Klein's displeasure. The fact that Rosenfeld, Segal and Bion were all psychiatrists was drawn upon by Klein as a legitimizing support that she much needed, as earlier on, her conjectures about the nature of psychosis had been interrogated rather critically by psychiatrists like Edward Glover. Hanna Segal once told me that Klein could tolerate just about anything other than someone disagreeing with her ideas. It was as if her ideas were like her children—to be protected and safeguarded at all costs. Recall here that at the heart of the idea of Klein's paranoid/schizoid position was the infant's anxiety about survival. I
think that Klein's anxiety about the survival of her small group was also partially embedded in her theory. In her Autobiography, written in 1959, Klein confessed that she feared for the survival of her ideas until a recent cohort of followers came forth in a strong advocacy for her understanding of psychoses. And so, one generation of Kleinian disciples displaced another.
Yet despite Klein's suspiciousness, her theoretical offspring—Rosenfeld, Segal and Bion—all flourished and wrote creative and generative papers on psychosis. I have outlined how Herbert Rosenfeld (1947) essentially helped to shape the formal and complete definition of projective identification, yet he also subordinated his work, making it appear that this complete definition was actually Klein's (1952) own innovation (Aguayo, 2009).
By the time of Klein's death in 1960, the question of who would head up the next Kleinian cohort implicitly arose. With the birth of the Melanie Klein Trust, designed to preserve and promulgate Klein's work, dependency leadership was institutionalized much as it had been in Freud's Secret Committee. By definition, there could be no one preeminent dependency group leader in the 1960s. Rosenfeld, Segal and Bion would remain pre-eminent as more and more candidates entered training with them and with other Kleinians, men like Roger Money-Kyrle. It was symbolized by the fact that Bion himself was elected to the position of the Chairman of the Klein Trust. Yet in the wake of the loss of Klein as a leader, her three main disciples sought to differentiate their professional work in separate directions. Bion (1962a;1962b) of course lost no time in striking in a new, theoretical direction, moving to amalgamate Klein and Freud's theories into something uniquely his own. Yet becoming the leader of the Klein group was clearly not his aim. As early as 1955, Bion was already showing signs of tiring of his former analyst, referring to her disdainfully in his letters to his wife Francesca as the ‘boss,’ even going as far as to say that Klein's followers treated her like Marlene Dietrich, like so many young Teutonic males poised around her, ready to fulfill any of her whims.
Distinctly uncomfortable with having been thrust into the center of leadership of the Klein group, Bion (2013) turned away from becoming a dependency group leader—and by 1967 he left the London group altogether
when he moved to faraway Los Angeles to live, practice, write his analytic works—and steer clear of all forms of institutional psychoanalysis. In one notable aphorism, Bion stated that ‘psychoanalysis has to succeed in spite of the fact that there are psychoanalytic institutes.’ He threw off the mantle of leader practiced in the administration of others—as he said in 1966, he did not want to be ‘loaded up with honors, so that he could sink without a trace.’ Ultimately, he did not want to be saddled with administrative duties any more than Carl Jung did, especially after turning 70 and realizing that time for research activity had been quite compromised by his administrative work. After his move to Los Angeles in 1968, Bion did not become a member at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, no longer gave papers at the International Psychoanalytic Congresses nor served on any IPA committees. Rosenfeld, (1964) also broke out in his own direction, turning to the understanding of clinical narcissism, an off-shoot of his work on the psychotic disorders. And finally, it was Hanna Segal who in my view, vied for position of titular head of the Klein group with her synthesis and overview of Melanie Klein's ideas in An Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, . In was Segal (in my view) in the 1960s, especially after Bion left London, who became the dependency group leader of the Klein group.
To bring together some of the strands of this talk on the legacy of the Freud/Vienna and Klein/London groups, I would like to look at an encounter between these two groups in 1967. In the 1960s, visits from members of the London Klein group happened yearly in Los Angeles. This represented a true anomaly in an America dominated by ego psychology. Kleinians were not welcomed at any other American institute at that time, but they stirred local and curious interest in Los Angeles. At the point at which Wilfred Bion had an encounter with Ralph Greenson, the analysts at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, (LAPSI) were merely interested to hear what London Kleinians had to say, especially about work with near-psychotic and psychotic patients. These were after all, the types of patients that LAPSI psychiatrists had thought long and hard about in terms of what to do about their treatment. Freud (1914) had thought that the analytic method with the treatable neuroses did not work with more seriously disturbed and
difficult-to-treat patients. Some alteration of method was required—and analysts like Greenson and his colleague Milton Wexler had experimented with such methods (Kirsner, 2000).
LAPSI also had a maverick identity among institutes affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association. The city of fantasy, cinema and reinvention, its analysts also had a penchant for what appeared to be rather unorthodox methods—at least when considered from the vantage point of the East Coast ego psychology psychoanalytic establishment. Leo Rangell , past President of both the American Psychoanalytic and International Psychoanalytic Association, put it well when he described the post-World War II analytic scene in Los Angeles:
“The very thing that brought me and so many others to L.A. after the war was the climate. Not only the weather, but also the emotional and intellectual climate. We quickly became the most important society outside the East Coast because this was an attractive place. It's not an accident that this is tinsel town—the movie capital, the excitement capital. With the glories of the climate comes the excitement of the beautiful, thrilling people, people who make great analytic patients. There was always great rivalry for patients. The point is that this is a place of exciting people and with it comes great ambition, visibility, exhibitionism, cultism, factionalism, exciting ideas—and eccentric ideas.” (Kirsner, 2000)
So, to set the stage: Bion arrived in April, 1967 to give a series of clinical seminars on very disturbed patients to the LAPSI members and candidates. It is also important to set Ralph Greenson in his proper context as a leading Freudian analyst in the 1960s, one who had long been regarded as a charismatic leader in the L.A. Society and was well-known for being a virtual clearinghouse for Hollywood entertainment celebrities eagerly seeking time on the few available psychoanalytic couches in Beverly Hills. Greenson was a powerful and influential analyst, venerated for his many skills as a teacher, lecturer and author of numerous and lauded analytic publications. 1967 was also a banner year, as Greenson then issued his famous text, Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I.
Many contemporary American analysts, especially those on the west
coast, were moved by his clinical and theoretical acumen, as he punctuated his theoretical presentation with many clinical examples. But one thing that would have surprised the American reader of the 1960s were his references to the contemporary Kleinian literature that focused on the treatment of near-psychotic and psychotic patients. If we look in Greenson's book, I think we find intriguing examples of how far-ranging his interests were: at a time when very few American analysts would cite the ‘heretical’ and ‘dissident’ work of Melanie Klein (the most often used epithets for her work), Greenson ventured forth some of his encounters with members of the Klein group. Accustomed as he was to hearing the Kleinians when they came to visit Los Angeles, he initially viewed their work with both interest and a searching skepticism.
There is one passage that sums up well how he viewed the Kleinians from London—and I cite his Technique book here. In a section entitled ‘Deviations in Technique,’ he described the approaches of Melanie Klein and Franz Alexander as ‘deviant,’ at least as far as ‘classical psychoanalysis’ was concerned. However, he then went on to write:
“Both schools of thought have been responsible for some valuable contributions to psychoanalysis, although they have also been the source of great controversy. For these reasons, the student should be familiar with their basic works.” (Greenson, 1967, p. 135)
I cite this passage because I think that the point often gets lost, especially in the subsequent and much more well-known polarizing encounters Greenson had with different members of the London Klein group in the 1970s. In spite of his disagreements with their approach, Greenson also thought that the Kleinians had made some important contributions. 1967 was a different time—and today, I bring some examples of how Greenson's interest, curiosity and skepticism were all on display at Bion's (2013) Los Angeles Seminars. Very few in attendance would have understood that at its root, this encounter represented a clash of analytic tongues. Its representatives had been trained in different analytic traditions in London and Los Angeles. We can hear examples of these analytical/dialectical differences, which would have been hard for contemporaries to understand. Both Bion and Greenson talked about Freud, but little did they realize that there was an English Freud and an
Page 130American Freud—the Freud of the topographic theory and the Freud of the structural theory. It was all too reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw's famous comment about England and America: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language.’
But for just this brief moment in time, there were elements of a genuine encounter in Los Angeles. Some examples of Greenson's spirit of inquiry: when Bion advocated that the practicing analyst ‘abandon memory and desire,’ Greenson (1967, pp. 30-31) generally approved of the idea of listening to patients with a fresh mind, but wondered if that attitude would suit the patient new to the analytic process, who might need to feel a bit more reassured in the early going.
Let's listen to an exchange between Bion and Greenson regarding projective identification, as it is a real highlight of their encounter in Los Angeles, (Bion, 2013, pp. 41-43):
[Greenson]: I'd like to ask you to clarify, something you said in relation to projective identification. It was in regard to this (I believe) that you brought up the idea or the concept of the container and the contained, and you then showed this in various ways. Now what I don't get in that, is the use of container and contained as symbols or metaphors for, let's say, male and female. I don't agree with this kind of metaphor. It would seem to me that if you're going to make a distinction of this kind, rather than talk about a container and the contained, one ought to talk about a container and an intruder. One is active, and one is passive, now the intruder can be contained, that's male and female, it also would explain to me better what happens in projective identification; that there is an intrusion into his object.
[Bion]: Yes. I see your point about it, and I quite agree about this, but I'd like to put it rather differently. I want to make a statement which is virtually meaningless. I want to make such a statement because I'm anxious to draw attention to a configuration. I want to draw attention to something which I have described (borrowing the phrase from Hume, the philosopher), as a constant conjunction. You may not be quite aware of it, but it seems to be a sort of
Page 131recurrent pattern. One gets a sort of feeling that what one is saying has a vague similarity to something else…..
….Now, if you take it as the container and the contained, I think it begins in a sort of way of trying to draw attention to the fact that this same configuration (let's call it that to save time; a sufficiently vague phase) crops up over and over again under different disguises. Now, let's introduce aggression. Or let's say this: You see a patient who is an aggressive person, his difficulties are related to his aggression, and so on. Now, container and contained changes. And I think that your description would meet that special case very well. Aggression–penetration into the containing object.
In the process of psychoanalytic work, it is essential that one should be able to do it. It is essential that one should recognize that there can be (well, for example) a loving sexual intercourse, in which the penis penetrates into the vagina, but that is quite a different thing from something (well, say from a rape) where the predominate feature of it is aggression, it is not love, it is something much more akin to hate, and so forth. So, if you have got a patient, in which the component (his personality) is one in which aggression plays a big part, then I'm certain that what you will see is what you've described in those terms.
While I would maintain that there was a point of contact between Greenson and Bion, both analysts would have been also served had there been a psychoanalytic translator at this event! Greenson was (in my rendition) attempting to find a clinically useful way of understanding projective identification, a core Kleinian concept that now dominated
their publications. The general idea originating with Klein that a patient could disown and project despised or unwanted aspects of his personality into others, also had a central corollary: there were imagined and/or real consequences to such projections when they landed on the analyst.
Greenson I suspect would have had no trouble with this definition of projecting hostile intrusion into the object. On the other hand, Bion was both in agreement with Greenson, and also attempting to make a broader point. While understanding that in both Freud and Klein's work, it was essentially two people focusing on the pathology of one person, Bion's move in the 1960s was to expand his understanding of the analytic dyad in a two-person direction. As a result of his treatment of many psychotic patients, all characterized by their destabilizing and disorienting impact on the analyst's mind and sense of emotional stability, Bion had begun to consider the internal processing and subjective sensibilities of the treating analyst these processing capacities went beyond the ordinary understanding of countertransference, which in ego psychology of the United States was understood still as a problem of the analyst's unresolved pathology. A newer understanding—that sometimes apparent countertransference reactions were also a function of unconscious-to-unconscious communication from patient to analyst had been enshrined in the most famous paper ever written on the subject—‘On Countertransference’ by Paula Heimann, (1950), who was incidentally Bion's first analytic supervisor.
As such, Bion was now interested in how the patient's projective impact on the analyst could lead to many more possible interactive permutations. From his perspective, Greenson's statement about projective identification was both correct and at the same time too narrow and limiting. By incorporating projective identification into a more general scheme of ‘container/contained,’ Bion thought he could talk about the analyst-as-mother and the patient-as-infant, male and female, penis and vagina, the individual and the group. In short, he thought there were more interactional possibilities with this broader scheme. But what would have eluded Bion was the more general statement that he was moving away from the one-person psychology of Freud and Klein and into a two-person psychology where both partners in the analytic endeavor had to be self and other-examining in a much richer and complex interactional world. Whereas with Freud and Klein, one had a ‘constant’
analyst with a pathologically ‘variable’ patient, in Bion's scheme, there was now a variable ‘analyst-as-mother’ with a variable ‘patient-as-infant.’
But in this and the many other exchanges during the course of Bion's four evening seminars in Los Angeles, he had no more spirited and engaged interlocutor than Ralph Greenson. We don't have enough time to do more than recap some of the other exchanges, especially those in Bion's Fourth Seminar, when he was again questioned by Greenson, this time about an extremely unruly and hostile borderline patient in analysis with Bion. His patient yelled, screamed and reviled Bion, then fled his office; and he was left wondering about whether he should have hospitalized her that day. He worried about whether she might be safe on the streets of London.
Bion took pains to point out her borderline pathology, but also elucidated some of the emotional difficulties he personally encountered in treating her. Bion's work here also dealt with the analyst's subjectivity and emotional processing capacities, his own abandonment of memory and desire when he exposed himself emotionally and fully to treating highly disturbed individuals. He exemplified clinically what Keats had termed ‘negative capability’:‘…capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’
When Bion then told his Los Angeles audience that he simply didn't know what to think, let alone what to say to his extremely hostile patient, I think he also identified himself as an analyst who could be baffled and stumped by psychotic forms of communication. He could make neither heads nor tails of this multi-dimensional ranting experience. Yet in a paradoxical way, he put his audience in exactly the same position in which he had found himself in with his patient. I think it was a subtle means of urging his colleagues in Los Angeles to identify with him in the face of indecipherable psychotic communications. Bion told his Los Angeles audience that in the midst of all of the patient's hateful screaming and ranting, when he could not get a word in edgewise, that he literally could not hear himself think. Bion again presented himself as unable to understand the immediate dynamic meaning of what had been communicated to him. Had his patient destroyed the communicative link with her analyst, so that no interpretation was possible, all to such an extreme extent that he had also lost a link with his own mind? It seemed so. The analyst
here appeared profoundly lost, despairing that he could make no satisfactory interpretation let alone think of an explanatory theory after the patient left the session.
In the course of the ensuing discussion about this case, Greenson raised a telling point: Was such a patient even treatable by psychoanalytic methods? This was a crucial and critical question, as Otto Kernberg (1968) had just started to publish controversial papers at that time about the alterations in technique required to treat the borderline patient. Well, as it turns out in this instance, Greenson made a solid point: within a year of his questioning Bion on this case, Bion indeed made attempts to interrupt this patient's treatment precisely because he found her creating such stormy and unruly conditions that he no longer felt he could work with her. As it turns out, he had to interrupt her treatment in any event because he moved to Los Angeles in January, 1968. Until Bion's Seminars in Buenos Aires were recovered a few years ago, we didn't know how this case was concluded; but in effect, Bion did say that some borderlines were untreatable with psychoanalytic methods.
So, if there is a historical moral to my short story tonight, it is simply that too often, as analysts, we forget that while we are all united by virtue of our membership in organizations like the American Psychoanalytic and International Psychoanalytic Association, we can and do become overly identified with whatever local analytic tradition we have been trained in. We are tempered in our localism and tribalism when we travel and visit other analytic tribes.
[Greenson]: But in projective identification specifically (what you call projective identification), isn't there always the element of an intrusive, possessive kind of identification as contrasted to other kinds of identification.
[Bion]: I think so, I think so. I think that that's one reason why I think that one might like to quarrel a bit with the existing definition of projective identification because it's not vague enough. And you're caught out in this, because if you're going to make it vague, you get a situation in which it's so abstract that it becomes meaningless….