III. A Klein—Bion Model for Evaluating Psychosomatic States1

The outlines of a model for construing the significance of disturbances in somatic functioning lie distributed throughout the writings of Wilfred Bion from Experiences in Groups to the last volume of A Memoir of the Future: The Dawn of Oblivion. (Clunie Press, 1979). The steps in its development cannot be well understood without some reference to the model of the mind as an apparatus of thought that he constructed during those thirty years. The total excursion of his creative flight of imagination has a strikingly circular orbit which started with the discovery of the mindlessness of the participation in Basic Assumption Groups, and ended with the suggestion that pre-natal parts of the personality tend to become split off at the “caesura of birth” and to remain in a state of primitive social organisation without the means of mental representation (the “soma-psychotic level” of mental life, equivalent to the earlier formulation of “proto-mental apparatus” as the substratum of Basic Assumption mentality).

In this condensed paper I will try to trace the steps by which this wide circle of imaginative conjecture was traversed, but it must be realised that this effort of abstraction, and, as it were, paraphrase, may seem to gain in clarity while its loss in evocative richness is less obvious. There is also the possibility of misrepresentation of Bion's thought in this my personal reading of him. Perhaps I should add, “in 1985”, or perhaps even, “in April, 1985”. For the sake of subsequent discussion and reference I will describe Bion's progress in steps despite the artificiality of such a method.

Man brings from his animal and prehistoric past the tendency to herd, group, to create a tribe or clan organisation in which the individual members participate in a manner more primitive than that characterised by symbol-formation, thought, judgment and decision. The mode of operation is in a sense purely logical, deriving all