Bion's Perspectives on Psychoanalytic Method

The task that Bion set out to achieve was to develop a universal language for psychoanalysis, one that would be sufficiently abstract and unsaturated with particular meanings to be used by all psychoanalysts whatever their particular theoretical allegiances. He also set out to describe the psychoanalytic process, paying particular attention to the states of mind the analyst needs to cultivate in order to fulfil his/her function vis-à-vis the analysand (Bion, 1963, 1970).

In an elaboration of Freud's prescription of free-floating attention Bion states that the analyst must abstain from memory, desire and understanding in order to be able to observe and to appreciate the significance of his observations. He advocates the cultivation of ‘Negative Capability’, the quality Keats (1817) identified as belonging to a ‘Man of Achievement’, that is ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. He describes a state of mind he calls ‘Patience’, which he suggests is analogous to the paranoid-schizoid position. He does not mean that the analyst is functioning in a paranoid-schizoid way, though he/she may be required to suffer feelings of persecution and depression, anxiety and confusion in response to the analysand's mental state. Rather he is drawing an analogy between the transformation from paranoid-schizoid to depressive position, which occurs under the aegis of ‘container-contained’ and the transformation from patience to ‘security’, that occurs at a point when the analyst's intuition supplies the key, or finds the selected fact, around which a pattern coalesces with meaning. He/she may then be in a position to offer an interpretation to the analysand which sheds light on something happening, in the moment, of which the analysand is not aware. He observes that with the shift to security the analyst will feel less anxious. A serviceable interpretation may well yield both a sense of achievement and fe