You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Analysts who worked at Bion's Learning from experience will be prepared for the style and content of his Elements of psycho-analysis. To be so is important, because the present book, addressed specifically to analysts, furthers, if not inaugurates, a new phase in the thinking of analysts about their work in scientific terms, and offers them a new aid to more precise assessments of events in the consulting room. The book assumes in its readers knowledge of psycho-analytic theory, and is not a small handbook of psycho-analysis.
Criticisms of dynamic psychology in terms of its unscientific basis have led analysts to recognize that, although resistance may unconsciously load the critics’ attacks, there is a need to clarify what it is that is being resisted. This is a task that analysts themselves can unconsciously resist as well, because of the pain of increased consciousness or even of the hard work that can be involved. Bion analyses the “non-loaded” reasons for the criticism that psycho-analysis is unscientific by showing that its ideas, in the form hitherto presented, have been (i) too “theoretical” (i.e. too much a representation of an observation) to be accepted as an observation, and (ii) too “concrete” to have the flexibility that allows an abstraction to be matched with a realization. A greater degree of abstraction ensures that a theoretical statement retains the minimum of particularization, with the result that its applicability is more easily apparent. Bion's idea is that there is an analogy between contemporary psycho-analytical theoretical formulations and the limited applicability of an ideogram. Contrariwise, just as an alphabet of relatively few letters by many combinations can form thousands of words, so psycho-analytical “elements” need to be isolated for use in various combinations to express a great variety of psycho-analytical theories or objects. These elements would Have to be capable of:
(i) representing the realization that they were originally