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.
Bion has long appealed to a number of Jungians as he attempts to grapple with archetypal/psychotic areas of experience. At times this had led him, like Jung, to be portrayed as a mystic. According to Bion there is a necessary conflict between the mystic and the group. They both need and fear each other as, we might say, do the individual and the collective.
When Bion says that a good analyst must practise at the risk of insanity, we know that, in him, psychoanalysis has come a long way from when Freud asked Jung to keep the sexual theory as a dogma, as a bulwark, ‘Against the black tide of mud of occultism (Memories, Dreams, Reflections). Although he became a leader of the Kleinian Group there has not been a Bion School or, as Bleandonu puts it, ‘Bion's work was never written with the aim of establishing master-disciple relations: rather it lives on in the minds of creative readers.’
His courage and need to be creative must have played a large part in moving the centre of gravity of psychoanalysis further towards acknowledging the power of archetypal processes as expressed, for example, in his ideas of ‘catastrophic change’ and beta-elements and also of giving less homage to ego dominance (’ego capture’ or ‘ego possession’). This latter is demonstrated for example in his interpretation of the Oedipus complex (Intellectual Oedipus) where the troubles that befall Oedipus are seen as the result of Oedipus's over-valuation of the intellect or ego in finding remedies for the trials of life.
Bleandonu gives us a glimpse of Bion's Anglo-Indian background in India. We learn that he was, as was then the custom, sent to boarding school in England at the age of 8, from his home in the Punjab. He felt dreadfully alone when his mother left him at the school and, ‘there can be no doubt that this was a horribly painful experience which affected him the rest of his life’. By the end of the first world war his relationship with his mother was deeply fraught and he never returned to Ind