Letters to the Editors: On: Whose Bion?

Dear Sirs,

I wish to compliment the Editors of the IJP for sponsoring a discussion on Bion in ‘Psychoanalytic Controversies’ in which a most important interchange took place (O'Shaughnessy, 2005; Ferro, 2005; Tabak de Bianchedi, 2005). Having been analyzed by Bion and having just completed a book about his work (Grotstein, in press), I naturally lean toward the views so admirably and scholarly expressed by Elizabeth de Bianchedi and Antonino Ferro, and subscribe to them without qualifications. Yet I am also sympathetic with much of Edna O'Shaughnessy's views. Bion was dense and enigmatic in his writing and his utterances and thus frustrating for many to comprehend. I have come to believe that his enigmatic style of presentation may possibly have been, in part, an offshoot of one of his greatest gifts to psychoanalysis, his radical conception of dreaming (by day and by night) along with his immersion in poetics. Perhaps what we read in and hear from Bion is the product of his poetic way of dreaming his ideas and his responses to us.

O'Shaughnessy is troubled by his having become less disciplined after the 1960s. I was in analysis with him in the 1960s and 70s and never found a more disciplined analyst or man in my life than he. I found him, as a matter of fact, to be a very disciplined Kleinian in his interventions with me. Moreover, I believe that it is important to note that the discipline that it takes to follow Bion's technique, i.e. the abandonment (suspension) of memory, desire, understanding, and preconception, is more strenuous and demanding than that required by other standard techniques, including Kleinian.

I think what seems to bother O'Shaughnessy are what appear to be contradictions in his writing. Were they contradictions or were they bringing opposites (as in the unconscious) together in a new way? She approves of K but not of O. H, L, and K constitute a troika of drives which Bion reconfigured as a troika of emotions, actually, emotional linkages between