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Chair: Joseph Aguayo (Los Angeles)
Presenters: Sira Dermen (London), Robert Hinshelwood (Wisbech), Bernet Malin (Santa Monica)
Reporter: Rodrigo Barahona
Dr Robert Hinshelwood started the panel off by describing the influence of Wilfred Trotter early on in Bion's career. Trotter, who was also Ernest Jones's brother-in-law, probably influenced Bion in the direction of psychotherapy. Although Bion qualified as a doctor in 1930, Dr Hinshelwood told the audience that, prior to 1941, there is very little on record to help us assess what Bion was like as a therapist.
Despite Bion's scorn for authority, Dr Hinshelwood said, he much admired Trotter's “unassuming capacity to listen,” which became the basis for his later ideas on reverie and the core to his approach. While working with the War Office Selection Boards during World War II, Bion was reading Kurt Lewin and was inspired by his social field theory. In addition to his respect for maintaining an adequate level of uncertainty when listening to groups of soldiers, he picked up an appreciation for the interaction between the individual applicant for selection as an officer and the context in which he was placed. John Rickman's encouragement here and during the Northfield Experiment in 1943 was crucial in the sense of how he understood the interview process and the psychoanalytic situation in field theory terms. According to Dr Hinshelwood, for Rickman the first requirement of the analyst was to learn to accept any role the patient puts upon him. Dr Hinshelwood explained that, from Rickman's approach, a set of principles could be derived, which may be thought of as having influenced Bion, although the latter rarely spoke directly about field theory: (1) subjective introspection by the analyst; (2) reflection by the analyst on that experience; (3) the formulation of their experience in terms of the role in which the analyst feels they are cast; and (4) the roles forming a narrative content of an implicit drama in the group th