Notes on the Introduction to Wilfred Bion’s Attention and Interpretation (1970)

Bion, in the first few paragraphs, states the following:

First, he doubts that anybody can understand his book unless it is related to psychoanalytic practice. It seems to me that this first esoteric statement can be cleared up to some extent by making a distinction between knowledge — an ego phenomenon, perhaps a defence — and know-how. The first opposition allows us to follow Bion’s statement that “reason is emotion’s slave.” The second introduces a new obscurity. Knowledge of practice, that is, a technique, savoir-faire, is essentially a pragmatic attitude or form of reason. The new challenge is therefore to distinguish psychoanalytic know-how from an overarching ideological framework prevalent within the ‘West.’

Western scientific capitalism, neoliberalism, is principally pragmatic and relies also on a know-how. Yet, it is a know-how grounded in a logic of disavowal, which is, as we know from Freud and Lacan, the central mode of ‘negation’ for the perverted subject (the other two main ones being ‘repression’ and ‘foreclosure’). The pragmatic psychoanalyst does not disavow but rather knows-how to work with the sinthome, through the process, perhaps, of invention.

The second claim is that the movement from the psychoanalysis of individuals toward the psychoanalysis of groups is also a movement from private to public communication. We already know this to be a problematic statement since there is no such thing as a private language. Wittgenstein spent a significant amount of energy demonstrating this (see his Beetle in the Box argument). In any case, this boundary between the private and the public is already demolished within the context of Western pragmatism. Its future is on full display from the past within India: India has always been post-modern, since its first villages.

The private individual of the clinic is private only to the extent that he has become separated as a subject from the Other of the modern city. The function of the group within psychoanalysis is no different. The group may be separated from the city, from the Other, and yet, in this way, the goal of psychoanalysis with groups is not to succumb to modes of identification or recognition. It is by this measure that we might want to speak about ‘mature’ groups versus more ‘perverse’ counterparts. The group, like the individual, might be constituted uniquely according to particular psychical knots.

Bion proceeded to differentiate the language of the group, what he names ‘public language,’ from the individual’s private language. Language, he maintained, consists in time and space via an extension of the subject’s durability. This mirrors Hegel’s claim that the concept ‘is the time of the thing,’ or, put in Lacanian terms, the logical time of the real. But the clinic also consists in time. And it is a question of the thread — real, imaginary, symbolic, or sinthomatic — that the clinic weaves. Bion wrote: “[w]hat I have said with regard to this book also applies to the psycho-analytic session; it is certainly my impression that the experience of psycho-analysis is supposed or intended to have an enduring effect.” In other words, the session consists of introducing a time, a time which might endure and not merely punctuate. It is for this reason that the session consists of an attempt to locate an expression, words, within a symbolic infrastructure abstracted from the obscure determinations of everyday life.

I am tempted here to suggest that Bion renders the clinic in imaginary terms. To endure is to consist and it is to cohere, it is a clinic that might very well touch eternity. The group shall consist, it shall endure — it is enough for it to continue. Lacan’s later teaching placed consistency also within the imaginary. We do not find that the clinic introduces a punctuation or a grammar, that is, an ambiguous cut that flashes like a moment of lightning: the signifier.

Language is therefore only of use for Bion here inasmuch as it weaves a blanket, a blanket within which the group might cuddle and remain warm.

Yet, Bion proceeds another step.

He remarks that “Freud felt the need to isolate himself — insulate himself? — from the group in order to work.” This is a trouble for Bion, and it allows him to situate his unique intervention against Freud. This approach is no doubt important for Bion because it allows him to extract himself from the Freudian edifice, from the Freudian Other: Freudian society. In this way, he makes a name for himself, places a symbolic mark within the tapestry of the Freudian imaginary. For this reason we have every reason to follow Bion. Yet, after his death, why can’t we interrogate it a little bit?

Let us examine Freud’s approach here. If the subject of the case study was isolated then it was to proceed on the basis of his extraction from within the immersion or alienation of the domain of the group; that is, so that Freud might relieve the subject of his alienation within a repressive Oedipal group. For Bion, conversely, the group identification can ensure some consistency precisely by punctuation, that is, by rendering the group consistent and coherent: it is sometimes as if Bion is in search of the group leader, the father of has gone missing in Totem and Taboo but was there prior in the Oedipal legacy.

What of the subject of the group — the group as subject as an originating condition of alienation, as a demonstration of the logical negation of perversion?: “I know very well that the subject is singular, and yet, at the same time, I shall treat the group as if it were of the scope of an individual neurosis.” And it is here that the group is analyzed also in terms of its constituent individuals. The lapse back to the individual demonstrates the tendency toward disavowal. Put differently: the Other, as group, must become for him a subject, the subject must become invented through the group and as the group. It is in fact the same process, then, only further obscured.

I find no trouble with this so long as this fundamental obscuration is interrogated.

But, it was not that Freud neglected the group. His later work did in fact focus on the group. It was that the subject must be supposed as derivative of the group, otherwise the condition of psychosis becomes the baseline: the subject becomes synonymous with the group, the Other. It is therefore no wonder that Bion has made tremendous advancements on the question of psychosis. He cannot but move in that direction and to try to find his bearings. The turn toward mysticism — outlined by Freud in his Illusion and Civilization essays — whereby immersion into the infinite Other, the real, the oceanic group, seems like a logical connection.

For Bion, so far, the approach is often to find out how the individual becomes immersed within the group: “the individual is similarly affected by the group emotional situation.” That is, the individual is affected by the real Other, and not, as it were, punctuated, by its symbolic infrastructure.

I look forward to continuing to read this book.