V. Symbol, Sign, Epitome, Quintessence

The models of the mind with which analysts work in their consulting rooms may be as various as the individuals who practise this method, but surely the great division is defined by the basic stuff with which they imagine themselves to deal, whether it is psychic energy or meaning. This cleavage naturally leads practitioners either towards the natural sciences for their metaphors, or towards theology and philosophy as embodied in myth and literature. Freud can clearly be seen to have been divided in his approach, using one for his theories and another for the description of clinical phenomena. In a certain sense the same could be said of the usage of Bion, where one type of metaphor is derived from mathematics and chemistry, and another set taken from mythology. But in Bion's case there is no cleavage in the underlying model of the mind, only in the form of exposition. What he has borrowed from mathematics or chemistry are modes of thought for dealing with the model of the mind that he constructed over a period of twenty years, a model dedicated to bringing within the purview of the psycho-analytical method those disturbances of thought which bulk so large in schizophrenia, but which now, with the help of his schema, can be detected in lesser forms in less disturbed patients, including of course ourselves in the consulting room.

This chapter is devoted to tracing the implications of Bion's model of the mind for our understanding of symbol formation and its various defects as we meet them in the ordinary practice of analysis, where “ordinary” is taken to mean those patients whom we undertake to treat with some reasonable hope of benefit. For some people this may even include schizophrenia, patients with organic disorders, or psycho-somatic illnesses. His model, in brief, is as follows: the sense impressions of emotional experiences must be worked upon by an apparatus derived by introjective identification with the primal object (maternal breast) which can organize thes