THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN BIONIAN AND JUNGIAN VERTICES: A
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
JoAnn Culbert-Koehn
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a Jungian analyst's personal encounter with Bionian concepts
through analysis, supervision, and reading. The paper is divided into three sections that
deal with: a) some striking parallels between the ideas of Bion and Jung; b) the
impact of Bion's psychology on the author's understanding of Jung as a psycho-analytic
object; and c) the influence of Bion on the author's current clinical work. The
author concludes that Bion's discussions of alpha function, container/contained,
catastrophic anxiety, and bearing the unknown are especially valuable in helping her
patients increase their capacity to bear the psychic pain necessary for transformation.
INTRODUCTION
Several years ago I had a dream that I was in my consulting room talking to a woman
and Bion walked in the door. In the dream I was startled and awestruck, and I motioned to
him that I was speaking with a patient. Bion said not to worry, that he would wait to talk
to me until I was finished. At the time it was neither clear what Bion was doing in my
office nor the meaning of the particular patient. What was most clear was that the
dream-Bion had an important presence.
The woman I was speaking with is a colleague in my Institute, whom I see as tentative and
avoidant of conflict, who has difficulty being truthful with authority figures. As I've
had more contact with Bion's ideas, it seems to me that the pain of facing and telling the
truth is central in his psychology. At the time of the dream there was still some
resistance in me to a full encounter with this aspect of Bion's psychic reality.
At the time of the dream it was not clear where my experience with Bion's ideas was going
to lead. I had been very immersed in Klein's ideas for several years after completing my
Jungian training, and now here was Bion in my consulting room. My encounter with Klein's
ideas through reading, analysis, and supervision had led to a synthesis with Jung's ideas
on analysis. I've written previously that it gave me a more fine-tuned way of
investigating what Jung called "personal shadow" (Culbert-Koehn, 1993). But now
Bion's ideas were beginning to penetrate my psyche and I didn't know the outcome.
Obviously, this was creating anxiety. I am still learning about Bion's ideas (and also
still learning about Jung's), so that although anything I say feels tentative I do
believe, on the occasion of this centennial of Bion's birth, that Bion's ideas have
expanded my clinical work as a Jungian analyst and have also affected my perceptions of
Jung as a man.
This paper will be divided into three parts: some striking parallels between Bion and
Jung's ideas, the impact of Bion's psychology on my understanding of Jung, and Bion's role
in my clinical work now as a Jungian analyst.
PARALLELS BETWEEN BION AND JUNG
One of the most striking parallels between Bion and Jung is that both made rather
definitive statements about the effect of prenatal life on the adult personality. In fact,
the only known meeting between Bion and Jung proved relevant to this topic. In London in
1935 Bion took Samuel Beckett to hear Jung's third Tavistock lecture. The story is
recorded in Deidre Bair's biography of Beckett, who had been in analysis with Bion which,
according to Bair, had reached an impasse. As a farewell to the analysis, Bion took
Beckett out to dinner and to hear Jung speak. A casual comment by Jung during the
question-and-answer period seemed to affect Beckett most deeply.
In response to a question about the dreams of children, Jung mentioned a ten-year-old girl
who had been brought to him with what he called amazing mythological dreams. Jung could
not tell the father what the dreams signified because he sensed they contained an uncanny
premonition of her early death. Indeed, she did die a year later. Jung said, "She had
never been born entirely." (Bair, 1978, p. 209).
It was the phrase, "She had never been born entirely," which profoundly affected
Beckett:
Beckett seized upon this remark as the keystone of his entire analysis. It was just this
statement he needed to hear. He was able to furnish detailed examples of his own
"womb fixation," arguing forcefully that all his behavior, from the simple
inclination to stay in bed to his deep-seated need to pay frequent visits to his mother,
were all aspects of an improper birth. (Bair, 1978, p. 209).
Jung wrote in Symbols and Transformations that "Therapy must support the
regression and continue to do so until the prenatal stage is reached" (1956, CW5,
par. 508). Later (par. 654), he goes on to say, "The so-called Oedipus
Complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this [prenatal] level into a
Jonah-and-the-Whale Complex, which has a number of variants."
References to prenatal life and its impact on later development occur in many places in
Bion's writing -- his essay on caesura, the New York and Sao Paulo lectures, and A
Memoir of the Future, to mention a few. In an elegant statement written in 1976, Bion
says:
It seems to me that from a very early stage the relation between the germplasm and its
environment operates. I don't see why it should not leave some kind of trace, even after
"the impressive caesura of birth." After all, if anatomists can say that they
detect a vestigial tail, if surgeons likewise say they can detect tumours which derive
from the branchial cleft, then why should there not be what we would call mental vestiges,
or archaic elements, which are operative in a way that is alarming and disturbing because
it breaks through the beautiful calm surface we ordinarily think of as rational, sane
behavior? (Bion, 1976, p. 236)
The observation that analysis with certain patients may need to go back not only to
pre-oedipal levels but to prenatal life is one of many parallels in the work of Bion and
Jung. Both men emphasize pre-birth influences. For example, there is a similarity in
Bion's use of preconception with Jung's use of archetype. A preconception is
looking to mate with a realization; an archetype is looking for a specific human
experience to manifest. Intrinsic to both Jung and Bion was a highly intuitive or mystic
part in their personalities which they struggled to integrate with a strong and gifted
scientific observing capacity. Both men speak of transformation of psychic energy and both
have a grid. Jung's work on alchemy can be seen as a kind of grid organizing the imagery
of psychic change. In both Jung's and Bion's psychology myth serves an important psychic
function. Both men describe the importance in analysis of looking not only backward but
forward psychologically. Jung encourages the analyst to see the prospective function in
dreams and symptoms. Bion speaks of the language of achievement. Bion's concept of
"O" bears resemblance to several of Jung's usages of the Self. Grindberg defines
"O" as "ultimate reality, absolute truth, or unknowable psychic reality in
the Kantian sense which can only be known through its transformations" (Samuels,
1985, p. 131). Jung also insists on the Self as ultimately irrepresentable,
observable only via its manifestations. Bion's conviction and passion to know
"O" as closely as possible is similar to Jung's individuation instinct.
Bion's writing has often been quoted in the Journal of Analytical Psychology which
is published in London, and references to Bion are found increasingly in Jungian journals
in the United States as well. The keynote address by Jef Dehing on the transcendent
function at the 1992 International Meeting of Jungian analysts in Chicago included major
references to Bion. A pioneering course, designed by London-trained analyst Mara Sidoli,
is based on combining the ideas of Jung, Klein, and Bion on transference and
countertransference. Taught in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the past six years as an adjunct
to formal Jungian training, this course attracts participants from all over the U. S.
In 1994, at the National Conference of Jungian Analysts at Lake Tahoe, California, I was
asked, as a member of the younger generation of Jungian analysts, to present my images of
Jung. I realized as I wrote the paper that my image of Jung had moved from using him as a
spiritual father to seeing him also as a containing mother, and that Bion's ideas,
particularly his concepts of alpha function and container/contained, had helped me
understand my relationship to Jung in a more expansive context. My understanding of Bion's
concepts changed the way I saw my relationship to Jung as a man. My presentation in Tahoe
was titled, "Jung as a Man of Passion and Integrity: Spiritual Father and Containing
Mother."
BION'S IMPACT ON MY UNDERSTANDING OF JUNG
My introduction to Jungian psychology came when I read his autobiography, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections (1963). The passage that affected me most describes Jung's
struggle to avoid a particular painful thought. At the time of this struggle Jung was a
pre-adolescent in Basel, Switzerland, where his father was a parson in the local church.
Although I could not have articulated my reaction when I first read the following
often-quoted passage in my early twenties, I realize now that I was probably impacted by
the fact that a young boy could bear such immense conflict and psychic pain. Bion called
this capacity alpha function. Jung (1963) describes his boyhood experience as
follows:
One fine summer day I came out of school at noon and went to the cathedral square. The sky
was blue, the day one of radiant sunshine. The roof of the cathedral glittered, the sun
sparkling from the new, brightly glazed tiles. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the
sight, and thought: "The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made
all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and..." Here
came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only:
"Don't go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming, something I dare not even
approach."
That was easier said than done. On my long walk home I tried to think all sorts of other
things, but found my thoughts returning again and again to the beautiful cathedral which I
loved so much, and to God sitting on the throne -- and then my thoughts would fly off
again as if they had received a powerful electric shock. I kept repeating to myself:
"Don't think of it, just don't think of it." I reached home in a pretty
worked-up state. My mother noticed that something was wrong and asked, "What is the
matter with you? Has something happened at school?" I was able to assure her, without
lying, that nothing had happened at school.
That night I slept badly; again and again the forbidden thought... which I did not yet
know, tried to break out, and I struggled desperately to fend it off! The next two days
were sheer torture, and my mother was convinced that I was ill. But I resisted the
temptation to confess, aided by the thought that it would cause my parents intense sorrow.
On the third night, however, the torment became so unbearable that I no longer knew what
to do. I awoke from a restless sleep just in time to catch myself thinking again about the
cathedral and God. I almost continued the thought! I felt my resistance weakening.
Sweating with fear, I sat up in bed to shake off sleep. "Now it is coming, now it's
serious! I must think" (1963, pp. 36-37).
Finally Jung comes to the conclusion, after reviewing his family history and the family of
humans going back to Adam and Eve, that it is God's intention that they should sin
-- and that, as painful as it may be, God wants him to have this thought.
I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and
let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His gold
throne, high above the world -- and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the
sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder... (1963,
p. 39).
This remarkable memory of Jung's lends itself to many levels of interpretation. On a
personal level, we could analyze the memory in relation to Jung's parents. His father was
a parson and Jung had hostile feelings toward his father's theology. Jung's intuition told
him that his father's ideas weren't working. His father was hardly invigorated or animated
by his faith! Was the turd, then, anger at his father's hypocrisy? Did the church
represent the body of his mother, who recently had brought forth a baby sister? Did it
symbolize both parents, possibly?
As an adult, Jung took this memory beyond the personal realm to the level of the
collective unconscious, and he saw the shattering of the church walls as depicting the end
of the Christian era, the collapse of the Christian myth. Jung believed that the collapse
of established religious structures -- Nietzsche's "God is dead" -- would
heavily influence psychic development in the years ahead. Humankind would be without an
orienting myth.
What resonates for me now in this passage is Jung's capacity to tolerate acute psychic
pain and confusion, even in pre-adolescence, and then to accept its meaning. Both Jungians
and Bionians agree that the psyche grows when the individual can tolerate and then
integrate the symbolic communications that are presented in dreams. Sadly, it is not
unusual to have a patient who brings dreams regularly to sessions but does not have the
psychic "muscle" required for integration. In Ego and Archetype (1972),
the American Jungian Edward Edinger tells of a patient who consults with him following a
suicide attempt and two-and-a-half years before the patient's death in his late fifties
from a cerebral vascular accident. Edinger reports that this man's dreams were rich in
symbolism -- indeed, they were veritable lessons in metaphysics. Nevertheless, Edinger
states that the sessions could hardly be called analysis because the patient lacked the
objective, self-critical capacity to assimilate interpretations that would lead to an
awareness of what Jung called shadow, by which he meant, "the thing a person
has no wish to be" (Jung, 1954, CW 16, par. 470). When the capacity to
assimilate shadow qualities is lacking there is often an inability to tolerate the psychic
pain of facing one's own destructiveness and its effects on others.
What I find hopeful in Bion is the idea that analysis can expand the capacity for alpha
function. It was Bion's notion of alpha function that helped me see that Jung had the
capacity to bear ongoing psychic pain at an early age. Once I began to think of Jung as
having a well-developed alpha function, I could understand why I had been attracted to him
in my early twenties as a man of passion and integrity. If passion means to suffer,
as the etymology of the word suggests, then Jung did indeed demonstrate this quality at an
early age. For me, passion is the capacity to endure intense emotional attachments to
ideas or persons; passion is the ability to suffer the pain inherent in intense emotional
attachments, and in this regard both Jung and Bion revealed themselves to be men of
passion.
I then began to see that alpha function was related not only to passion but to integrity.
In his book Integrity in Depth (1992), John Beebe notes that the quality of
integrity is an interpersonal self-consistency which, though highly valued, is elusive,
hard to define, even mysterious. Though integrity is expressed in the outer world in terms
of individual, discrete actions, it is experienced internally (and sensed by others) as a
pervasive, ever-present state of being. There is a quality of continuity to it, an
ongoingness that perhaps could be described as "organic." There is something
very continuous about the struggle for meaning and integration in Jung's life, starting in
his youth, which also seems to be true of Bion.
From the beginning of my training as a Jungian analyst, I had experienced Jung as a
spiritual father, as do most Jungian analysts. It was not until I finished training and
read Bion that I realized I had begun to use Jung as a containing mother as well. As
London Jungian Andrew Samuels (1985) has pointed out, Jung's writing on the infant-mother
bond is rarely emphasized. Jung wrote that the mother-child relationship is the deepest
and most poignant one we know and says further that "It is the absolute experience of
our species, an organic truth" (1960, CW 8, par. 723). Jung recognized the
extraordinary intensity of a relationship that instinctively impels the child to cling to
its mother, and he wrote about the vicissitudes of separation from the mother at both the
personal and archetypal levels: "With the passing of the years the man grows
naturally away from the mother... but he does not outgrow the archetype in the same
natural way" (1960, CW 8, par. 723). Samuels (1985) tells us that Jung saw
the infant as having certain archetypal expectations. If personal experience fails to
bring about a humanizing of the archetype there are severe consequences for personality
development. Samuels theorizes:
Thus, if bad experiences predominate in infancy over good, then the "bad" mother
pole of the range of expectations is activated and there is no counterbalance. The
individual may be said to be "possessed" by the image of the bad mother.
Similarly, an idealized image of the mother-infant relationship can lead to only the
"good" end of the spectrum being experienced and the individual will never come
to terms with the disappointments or realities of life (1985, p. 150).
Jung's ideas on the effect of archetypal images on infant states of mind have some
resonance with Bion's concepts of infant development. Bion sees the baby as entering the
world with what he called preconceptions, which are then mated with realizations.
The process by which the baby's preconceptions find realizations in the human world has a
dramatic effect on the future course of personality development.
I think Bion is more specific about the mental functions of the mother than Jung. Bion
describes the importance of the mother in helping the infant metabolize unmanageable
painful feelings and early terrors. Bion's idea is that the mother takes in, or mentally
digests, what the baby cannot handle. She sorts through what the baby has discharged and
feeds it back to the baby in manageable amounts by her response in feeling, voice, and
gesture. The mother's task is to accept the baby's "beta element projections"
and metabolize them, turning them into what Bion called "alpha elements" -- that
is, psychic contents available for mentalization. If the beta elements, or undigestible
mental contents, are not taken in by the mother they may be violently projected into the
environment or lodged in the body. Bion describes this unavailability of a mother to
receive the projective identification from her infant as a "psychological
catastrophe."
Although Jung, like Bion, emphasized containment, he does not link it to the mother's
state of mind as Bion does. In 1925 Jung wrote an essay in which he conceptualized
marriage as a psychological relationship between the contained and the container
(1954, CW 17). The container is also emphasized in Jung's writing on alchemical
processes in the image of the relationship between analyst and patient, described as a
sealed vessel. The container must be strong enough to withstand the transformation
process. In his writing on the therapeutic value of abreaction, Jung suggests that the
presence of an "other" -- in this case the analyst's ego strength -- is
necessary in order to integrate painful emotions and traumatic memories (1954,
CW 16). In his writings on the transference Jung indicates that the analyst's
unconscious, not just the ego, participates in the process of assimilating unconscious
contents.
Although Jung's writing on contained/container predates Bion's, what Bion made explicit
was the connection between the contained/container relationship and the process of reverie
between the mother and her baby. Bion's writing helped me recognize and give clinical
application to some of Jung's ideas to which I had already been exposed.
BION'S CLINICAL ROLE
There are three major areas where Bion's writing has helped me to expand my clinical
work as a Jungian analyst. The first is his description of alpha function and its
importance in psychic integration. The second is his concept of catastrophic anxiety and
its relationship to birth and change. The third is Bion's idea that as consciousness
expands the proportion of the unknown to the known increases.
Alpha Function. Three years after my certification as a Jungian analyst I began
consulting with a supervisor who had been in analysis with Bion. I had several cases who
were in what is called "classical Jungian analysis," where, despite dreams being
brought into the analysis and talked about, and despite a cooperative,
"insightful" attitude on the part of the analysand, there was considerable
somatization, and the insights from dreams did not seem to bring about further integration
or forward movement, either inner or outer. Increasing the number of sessions and learning
to take things up more actively in the transference was helpful, but I think it was the
idea that alpha function could be expanded through the analytic relationship that made the
work hopeful. It felt as if the inability of the patients I was concerned about to
metabolize certain painful feeling states was leading to the somatization and the
difficulty with psychic integration.
Catastrophic Anxiety. From my Jungian training I had familiarity with psychic death
and rebirth as a part of a transformation process in analysis, but I was not aware of the
subtle ways that psychological birth can be felt at almost any time of transition or
growth. I also did not understand how catastrophic the anxiety around psychic birth can
feel, whether it is the birth of a new idea or an important life transition. Furthermore,
I was not sufficiently aware of the anti-change forces; that is, the way that fear of
catastrophic anxiety is intensely defended against and therefore blocks change. I was
relatively unconscious of the hatred which new birth can arouse internally and in the
environment from the anti-change elements in the unconscious. Bion's writing and my
experience of these ideas, conveyed to me through analysis and supervision, helped free up
my own life in this area and profoundly affected the way I practice.
Bearing the Unknown. Although as a Jungian analyst I was taught to respect the
unknown in the form of the mystery of the unconscious and to respect the autonomous forces
in the unknown, the pain of bearing the unknown and the inherent anxiety and loss of
omnipotence was rarely spoken of. Jung's psychology places special emphasis on the
individuation psychology of the second half of life. His idea is that, having emerged from
the unconscious and hopefully established a life's work and significant relationships, one
would spend considerable time in later years forming a relationship with the unconscious
in which parts of the personality that had been left behind or unbirthed could be
integrated in a movement towards psychic wholeness before death. What Bion makes explicit
is that the proportion of the unknown to the known expands as consciousness expands.
Bion's vision makes it clear that the capacity to bear the pain of not knowing must
increase if consciousness is to increase, and that a failure in this regard can be a
barrier in later years. If one continues to grow as one ages, one must bear seeing in the
unconscious potentials that are unknown and not yet born, even as the life span is
diminishing.
Bion wrote in Attention and Interpretation:
The domain of personality is so extensive that it cannot be investigated with
thoroughness. The power of psycho-analysis demonstrates to any practicing psycho-analyst
that adjectives like "complete" or "full" have no place in qualifying
"analysis." The more nearly thorough the investigation, the clearer it becomes
that however prolonged a psycho-analysis may be it represents only the start of an
investigation. It stimulates growth of the domain it investigates (1970, p. 69).
CONCLUSION
For both Jung and Bion the psyche was mysterious, complex, and infinite. Jung wrote,
"The psyche, as a reflection of the world and man, is a thing of such infinite
complexity that it can be observed and studied from a great many sides" (1960,
CW 8, par. 139). Bion would have said "multiple vertices." It is in
the spirit of looking from multiple perspectives that I, as a Jungian analyst, wish to
honor the centennial of Bion's birth. In June of 1996 I had the pleasure of participating
in the first conference of Jungians and Freudians in the United States, sponsored by the Journal
of Analytical Psychology. It became clear that many Jungians in the U. S. have an
interest in re-examining the Jung-Freud split and in a closer reading of the ideas of
Freudians, including Klein and Bion.
I believe that the emphasis of Jung, Klein, and Bion on integrating the innate destructive
aspects of the psyche is of critical importance as we move into the twenty-first century.
I believe Klein's ideas can help Jungians elucidate the shadow in the
transference/countertransference relationship within the here-and-now of the analytic
relationship. Bion's ideas help us understand the pain of change and how to help a patient
increase the capacity to bear the psychic pain necessary for transformation.
REFERENCES
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Beebe, J. (1992). Integrity in Depth. College Station, Texas: Texas
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Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. In Seven Servants: Four Works
by Bion. New York: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1977.
___________ (1976). On a quotation from Freud. In Clinical Seminars and Four Papers.
Edited by F. Bion. Abingdon: Fleetwood Press, 1987.
Culbert-Koehn, J. (1993). Integrating Jung and Klein: the mother wound revisited. In Proceedings
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___________ (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books.
___________ (1954). The practice of psychotherapy. In Collected Works, Volume 16.
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___________ (1960). The structure and dynamics of the psyche. In Collected Works,
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____________ (1956). Symbols of transformation. In Collected Works, Volume 5. New
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Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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JoAnn Culbert-Koehn
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