When one thinks of trauma theorists, not only does the name of Wilfred Bion rarely spring to mind. One almost never thinks of him. Yet, Bion, who along with Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott remade psychoanalysis, is the analyst most concerned with trauma. Klein created object relations theory. Winnicott and Bion developed it in its most distinctive variations.
Bion presents his encounter with trauma in a series of autobiographies. We must make the connection to his theory. Throughout his adult life, from a diary written for his parents, to several volumes of autobiography, to a memoir written forty years after the event, Bion refers to his experience as a teenage tank commander in World War I. By the age of 20 he had already been nominated for the Victoria Cross (Britain’s highest military honor), and awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).
As Kay Souter (p. 796) puts it,
His autobiographies have the quality of survivor testimony, with the associated emotional numbness, low self-esteem, grief and guilt. Editing the fragment ‘Amiens’ after his death, Francesca Bion [his widow], gave the title ‘Fugue’ to this account of 8 August, explaining it as ‘‘meaning ‘loss of one’s identity.’’’ Although she does not further explain, it is clear that she understood it to be an account of psychic flight and catastrophe.
Portions of Amiens are written in the third person, as in “Captain Bion had felt extremely frightened.”
Amiens refers to the events near the Amiens–Roye road on August 8, 1918, in France. A runner, Sweeting, accompanies Bion into battle, and amidst explosions Sweeting and Bion take cover in a shell crater, the young boy, as Bion calls him, pressing up against him. Suddenly Bion becomes aware that the boy’s chest has been ripped open by shrapnel and his left lung is gone. Gusts of steam emerge from the void in the boy’s side.
‘‘Why can’t I cough, sir? . . . . Mother, Mother, write to my mother, sir, won’t you? You’ll remember her address, sir, won’t you? 22 Kimberly Rd, Halifax. Mother, Mother, Mother.” (Bion, 2015, p. 255).
It is only in his last account, “Amiens,” that Bion describes his horror and repulsion. As Sweeting keeps begging him to write his mother, Bion began to vomit repeatedly.
‘‘Oh for Christ’s sake shut up’’, shouted Bion, revolted and terrified.
‘‘Write to my mother, sir, you will write to my mother, won’t you?’’
‘‘Yes, for Christ’s sake shut up.’’
I wish he would shut up. I wish he would die. Why can’t he die? Surely he can’t go on living with a great hole torn in his side like that. (p. 255)
Eventually the dying man is carried away by two medical orderlies, and Bion writes.
Well, thank God he’s gone, thought Bion, filled with passionate hatred of himself for his hatred of the wounded man. (p. 290)
Relevance to Bion’s theory: attacks on linking
Other theorists, such as Freud and Klein, made love and hate central. To this Bion adds knowledge, particularly the inability to know. The inability to know results from the failure to have found someone, generally in early life, willing and able to contain unbearable feelings, feelings that cannot be put into words, but have more the quality of fragments of feelings. It is only by encountering another mind willing and able to hold these unbearable pieces of feeling that one can learn to put them together for oneself.
More than one person who has written about the connection between Bion’s wartime experience and his psychoanalytic theory sees these thought fragments as equivalent to shrapnel, and containers as tanks that can both protect and destroy their occupants (Souter, p. 803; Mawson, “Introduction”). Who knows?
Uncontained emotional experiences result not just in our inability to know these experiences, but in the attempt to destroy connections between our associations, creating isolated islands of knowledge that cannot be connected in thoughts or sentences. Attacks on linking are an attack on the associations between thoughts that make knowledge possible.
Bion’s great contribution to psychoanalysis is to see that beyond the primary passions of love and hate there is an intrinsic desire to know, and that the frustration of this desire, or rather its fragmentation in the face of terror, is as destructive of Eros as hate. Ever since Plato’s Symposium, love wants to know, and hate would break what we know into pieces in order to save us the horror of knowing. Only it’s a doomed battle, the ignorance that would save us (what Bion calls –K, or minus K) emptying the world of the connections that give it meaning, and give life its vitality. Or as Bion (1967, p. 107) puts it, “it is a short step from hatred of the emotions to hatred of life itself.”
Trauma as rupture of the container
Bion recognizes that unresponsive mothers and others, anyone who fails to contain the fragments of early or unbearable experience, make it more difficult for those they care for to think. But in one of the less attractive aspects of the Kleinian tradition he tends to blame the victim, attributing the “failure to suffer” to a character flaw (Bion, 1970, p. 7; Levine, p. 188). By failure to suffer Bion means the inability to acknowledge and bear the reality of experience. Of course, character is itself an expression of upbringing, and so one could go round and round about who is to blame. In the end it doesn’t matter.
Or does it? What if we think about trauma as the rupture of the container? The ability to contain experience, that is the ability to link associated experiences, may be lost in the face of trauma, understood as unbearable experience. “Knowledge as disaster,” as Maurice Blanchot puts it. In the face of knowledge as disaster, the ability to link or associate experiences is lost. It has nothing to do with a character flaw.
Rupture of the container explains the symptoms of trauma
The failure of linking accounts for many of the symptoms of trauma, from flashbacks of isolated bits of experience, to the loss of a sense of time, in which a split off piece of time, the traumatic experience, is taken out of the flow of experience, and so never becomes part of the past. The inability to put words to the traumatic experience, or the enormous difficulty involved, is also a consequence of the inability to associate experiences, and so put feelings to words about feelings. More global traumatic reactions, such as the attempt to damp down all experience, are a defense against the inability to associate experiences. For in a dissociated world one can be surprised and overtaken at any time by bits of experience.
The trauma perspective changes the way we think about psychoanalysis
To characterize these symptoms of trauma as attacks on linking stands in opposition to the way Bion (1967, pp. 101-102) sees attacks on linking: as an act of what Klein calls paranoid-schizoid rage at experience, designed to shatter the experience and perhaps to protect the vulnerable container. From the trauma perspective, attacks on linking are not the result of an internal rage at experience, but an external assault, penetration, or blow—that is, trauma.
This reflects an important way in which the trauma perspective on psychoanalysis changes the way we think about inner and outer. From a strictly psychoanalytic perspective, all the action is within: people create links, people destroy links, and so forth. While there is recognition of the role of another person as container while these links are being formed, a role almost always attributed to mother, there is little acknowledgement of the external forces that can shatter even a securely built container (that is, self), and the links that have been made there. Instead, all the action is internal; external events are secondary.
Freud turned away from the idea that the sexual abuse his women patients remembered was real, and not fantasized (Freud letter to Fliess, quoted in Masson, p. 264). This was not a great moment in psychoanalysis. In a similar way, thinking about attacks on linking as an external attack on the linking medium, the container, caused by trauma, is not what Bion had in mind, but it seems to be the way trauma works. Trauma rips open even the most well sealed container.
Or perhaps Bion did have this in mind
In her account of Bion’s constant return to the experience of comforting (or rather not comforting) his dying runner, Souter says that Bion knew that he could not let Sweeting’s suffering in, for to do so in the midst of combat would have destroyed him. Bion could not contain such suffering alongside his own dread. And so Bion told Sweeting to shut up, and shut him out. But, this was not without cost. Immediate cost, as Bion vomited up his own insides, as though to empty himself of all he contained. And long-term cost, as Bion dealt with this trauma for the rest of his days, or at least well into his sixties. Bion’s guilt was in not making himself available to Sweeting as a container for his terror at dying. Who could? A nobler man than most of us who walk the earth.
But if Bion could not make himself available to Sweeting as a container in the midst of battle, he let himself be used as a container, someone who might hold the fragments of another mind together until the mind could take them back in the form of associations and links, for the rest of his life in his practice as psychoanalyst. He specialized in the analytic treatment of psychotics.
Bion was traumatized by war, which is why his theory is such a good trauma theory. Otherwise expressed, he recognized that along with love and hate, we need to know. And to know we have to be able to think, which means being able to put thoughts together. Trauma destroys this ability, whether it happens to an infant whose mother cannot contain his bits of thought, or to an adult whose own developed ability to contain his or her associations is destroyed by trauma.
At least with trauma there is something to work with, links that can be restored, new links that can be created. Judith Herman, whose Trauma and Recovery is still a classic text, states that the reestablishment of a safe space is the first step in recovery (pp. 155-174). Safety is a place of containment, as well as a person who can listen without being overwhelmed.
References
W. R. Bion, “Attacks on linking,” in Second Thoughts, pp. 93-109. New York: Jason Aronson, 1967.
W. R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation. London: Karnac, 1984.
W. R. Bion, War Memoirs 1917–1919, ed. Francesca Bion. London: Karnac, 2015, second edition.
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Howard Levine, “‘The consolation which is drawn from truth’: the analysis of a patient unable to suffer experience,” in Bion Today, ed. Chris Mawson, pp. 188-211. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Jeffrey Masson, ed. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. (Letter available at: www.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/ffliess.html)
Chris Mawson, “Introduction,” W. R. Bion, War Memoirs 1917–1919, ed. Francesca Bion. London: Karnac, 2015, second edition.
Kay M. Souter (2009), “The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W. R. Bion,” International Jr. of Psychoanalysis 90:795–808.
Dear Sir, thank you for this article & many others you’ve written. You work is valuable & has made an immeasurable contribution, helping me live with my history.
I am truly grateful.
I hope you have a very good, long life.
Thank you
Susan
Thank you Susan. A lovely note. Fred
I applied Dr. Alford’s thinking to a critical analysis of a recent therapy session:
Thoughts About Psychotherapy Session on May 23, 2019
I have formed tentative thoughts about my therapist’s interaction with me at our session on Thursday, May 23, 2019.
General Impression:
The therapist appeared to have a significant level of anxiety that may have been triggered by a dream write-up I had given to her at the conclusion of the previous session on May 21. I speculate that my autonomy (in the form of my thinking, my individuality, and my rationality) sparked persecutory anxiety and envy in the therapist, which, in turn was discharged in her projective identification. I suspect that my failure to regress, like a majority of patients, in the therapeutic situation — that is, to develop a sense of collaboration with her — is a source of anxiety for her. The therapist said that she felt “smothered” by my writings, that she perceived me as “high strung,” and that I tried to be my own analyst.
QUESTION: Does the therapist experience my depressive anxiety as a chronic stressor that continually threatens to arouse persecutory anxiety in her?
SESSION July 2, 2019: I told my therapist that I shipped a copy of my book Psychotherapy Reflections to a senior analyst at a local Psychoanalytic Training Institute. My therapist is acquainted with that senior analyst, and I suggested that to my therapist that she contact the senior analyst to offer her an opportunity to comment on the book.
JULY 4, 2019: No session because of holiday.
JULY 9, 2019: I opened the session by telling the therapist that I no longer wanted to see her twice a week; that I preferred once-a-week sessions. My therapist was strongly displeased. I told her that I thought that she did not allow me to express myself, that the literature said that people like me have to be provided an opportunity for free association, and that I felt engulfed by her. My therapist said to me: “You find our work meaningless.” I said, “Yes.”
My therapist said that I was “expelling” at this session (an apparent reference to what she perceived as my paranoid-schizoid anxiety); that I created “links” then destroyed them; and that my thinking was “ideographic” and not “symbolic.” She also referred expressly to Bion (and Freud).
I noted something else that struck me as important. At three points in the session, my therapist seemed to emphasize her priority as a psychoanalyst, as if she were emphasizing her authority. I had the sense that, perhaps, at this session the therapist felt that her authority as an analyst had been questioned. Could these feelings have been aroused by some communication with an unknown third party? I have no way of knowing.
a.) At one point the therapist said, “I am the analyst.”
b.) At another point when I said, “I thought you would register my desire to see you once a week as an administrative issue,” she said, “I am a psychoanalyst — nothing is simply administrative to a psychoanalyst.” Note the phrase, “I am a psychoanalyst. . .”
c.) I found the therapist’s use of arcane jargon (ideographic, symbolic thought, links, and attacks on links) as a meretricious display of knowledge — as if she were emphasizing her prerogatives as a psychoanalyst.
Let us revisit the May 23, 2019 session: “3. It is noteworthy that the therapist reduced my self-analysis or dream analyses to a behavior (or possibly acting out): ‘You try to be your own analyst.’”
DISPLACEMENT:
a.) The statement (July 9, 2019) “You create links then destroy them” can be read as a paranoid displacement. It is possible that the therapist was thinking about my relationship with her, “You created a relationship with me and are now destroying that relationship.” The therapist’s seeming use of paranoid displacement would fit a pattern. In effect, the therapist displaced her anxieties about my abandoning her onto my “destructive acts” against a psychoanalytical construct, namely, “links.”
Let us revisit the session on May 23, 2019, namely my thoughts about the therapist’s seeming paranoid displacement: “2. The therapist’s statement that I was in fact smothering her and that she subjectively felt smothered by me was clearly persecutory. At the conclusion of the previous session, I asked: “Can I give you these materials?” The therapist accepted the materials. She had free will; she could accept the materials or refuse to accept the materials. It was patently ridiculous for the therapist to claim that my giving her the materials was my act of smothering her in a situation where it was she herself who consented to accept the materials in the first place. The therapist’s statements about my smothering her were her persecutory fantasy. One wonders what it was about my writings that triggered her persecutory feelings. Why would an analyst apparently feel threatened by a patient’s written thoughts about a dream? It is noteworthy that at a previous session, the therapist appeared to show persecutory thinking in the session after I had given her one of my dream write-ups. I later wrote a letter about that session in which the therapist maintained that my primary care doctor had been afraid of me despite persuasive evidence I had given her that the doctor’s statements about his purported fears were false. I speculated in the letter I wrote about the session that the therapist might have displaced her persecutory fears about me onto my primary care doctor, so that it was no longer she who was afraid of me, it was the doctor who was afraid of me. I speculated that the therapist was showing a paranoid countertransference. That possible earlier paranoid countertransference (in the form of displacement) might parallel the therapist’s clearly persecutory statements at the current session that I was smothering her and that she felt smothered by me. In both cases, the apparent persecutory fears arose in the session after I had given her one of my dream write-ups.”
b.) My therapist is an analyst-in-training. In such a case perhaps we cannot rule out the operation of parallel process. Parallel process is a phenomenon noted between therapist and supervisor, whereby the therapist recreates, or parallels, the client’s problems by way of relating to the supervisor. The client’s transference and the therapist’s countertransference thus re-appear in the mirror of the therapist/supervisor relationship. What about the possibility that the therapist displaces her persecutory anxieties vis-a-vis her training analyst onto me, using me as a container for the anxieties aroused in the therapist/training analyst relationship. This merits attention because what I am suggesting is that I might be a scapegoat for the displaced feelings the therapist has vis-a-vis her training analyst. I have a lifelong history of scapegoating, first in my family and later in the workplace. Is there a mutual “dance” between me and my therapist in which psychologically I need to assume a scapegoat role even as my therapist needs to displace her persecutory anxiety onto me?
THE THERAPIST’S OWN DESTRUCTION OF LINKS:
a.) The therapist emphasized my act of “expelling” (i.e., projecting). She turned my negative reaction to her into an involuntary confession: In her opinion it was I who impaired free association, it was I who fragmented everything, etc. When I said, “I feel that your work is one step away from bossiness–and I don’t like being bossed around” she replied: “I feel bossed around by you.” Arguably, the therapist’s interpretation can be seen as an attack on links. By attributing my negative reaction to her to my act of “expelling,” she seemed to deny the transferential meaning of that negative reaction. What about the possibility that I felt that my mother did not allow me to express myself, that I felt engulfed by my mother and bossed around by her. In attributing my negative therapeutic reaction to an act of “expelling,” as opposed to transference, the therapist denied a link between me and my mother or me and some other significant figure from childhood. Is it possible that at this session the therapist was destroying links and expelling (or projecting) that “attack on links” to me?
b.) The therapist appeared to interpret my “attack on links” as an intrapsychically-generated persecutory reaction to her. She seemed to deny the possibility that my tendency to attack links might be a sequel of trauma. It is well to keep in mind that I have a significant trauma history. In fact my MMPI two-point scale is 4/6, an indicator that an individual experienced in childhood a traumatic reaction to frightening displays of parental anger. Other MMPI scales validate abuse and scapegoating in my background.
Prof. C. Fred Alford has offered the following observations about Bion’s work on links: “To characterize these symptoms of trauma as attacks on linking stands in opposition to the way Bion (1967, pp. 101-102) sees attacks on linking: as an act of what Klein calls paranoid-schizoid rage at experience, designed to shatter the experience and perhaps to protect the vulnerable container. From the trauma perspective, attacks on linking are not the result of an internal rage at experience, but an external assault, penetration, or blow—that is, trauma.
This reflects an important way in which the trauma perspective on psychoanalysis changes the way we think about inner and outer. From a strictly psychoanalytic perspective, all the action is within: people create links, people destroy links, and so forth. While there is recognition of the role of another person as container while these links are being formed, a role almost always attributed to mother, there is little acknowledgement of the external forces that can shatter even a securely built container (that is, self), and the links that have been made there. Instead, all the action is internal; external events are secondary.
Freud turned away from the idea that the sexual abuse his women patients remembered was real, and not fantasized (Freud letter to Fliess, quoted in Masson, p. 264). This was not a great moment in psychoanalysis. In a similar way, thinking about attacks on linking as an external attack on the linking medium, the container, caused by trauma, is not what Bion had in mind, but it seems to be the way trauma works. Trauma rips open even the most well sealed container.”
In asserting that my attacks on links are intrapsychically-generated, the therapist is denying the role of traumatic actors in my childhood. Once again, the therapist is denying “links” between me and a negligent mother, an abusive father or other aggressive and traumatogenic persons in my childhood. The denial of trauma can in itself be seen as an attack on the links between a patient and traumatogenic persons in the patient’s developmental environment. Again, the therapist’s statement to me “You destroy links” can be seen as her own act of expelling (or projecting) — a symptom of her own persecutory anxiety in reaction to me.
THE THERAPIST’S OWN ACTS OF EXPELLING:
The therapist’s references to certain psychoanalytic jargon (links, ideographic, symbolic thinking) were evidence of a close reading of Bion’s work. Bion refers to attacks on links in his paper, “Attacks on Linking” (1959) and ideographic thinking in “Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Personalities” (1957).
I find it peculiar and noteworthy that a patient could pinpoint specific technical literature a therapist has read simply by listening carefully to the jargon the therapist uses. I have a remote association. At autopsy, the presence of apple fragments in a deceased’s stomach is evidence that the deceased consumed an apple in the recent past. The apple had not yet been digested or “assimilated.” If the deceased had eaten the apple a day earlier, there would be no trace of the apple in the stomach; the digested or “assimilated” apple would have become a part of the deceased. Might we say that a person in a training program, such as an analyst-in-training, is engaged in the act of digesting or “assimilating” technical material and that in the trainee there might be a tendency to “expel” jargon as if they were fragments of a recently consumed meal? Whereas in the experienced analyst, the analyst’s technical knowledge has been metabolized and appears in the analyst’s work only as “molecular traces” that guide the analyst’s interpretations but do not intrude in recognizable chunks.
My point is — is my therapist’s (inappropriate and confusing) use of psychoanalytic jargon evidence that she is struggling with the anxieties of being in a training role, which involves the “digestion” or assimilation of knowledge?
Again, when the therapist states that I am expelling, is she not also expelling (or “vomiting”) her unassimilated fund of technical knowledge? Does the therapist’s act of “vomiting” on me point to unconscious feelings of nausea and disgust about working with me? One wonders.
What is the nature of the countertransference I am attributing to my therapist?
@Gary, I love your comment. Unfortunately, the therapist has identified with your aggressor (mother or father or parts of each). I am sorry you had this experience but more importantly I love your comment. I love the apple digestion metaphor. You are amazingly intelligent and will be out of the transference bind soon.
Is it possible that you are seeing the therapist way too much? May 21 and May 23? And then you are talking about autonomy? Perhaps you are giving her too much of your functionality. Just a thought. I found personally, I would take therapy every other week cause the frustration was too high until I learned that frustration was the environment I grew up where as a child, I could disassociate, here in therapy room, I was awaken to re-experience, albeit in my adult part present. It feels as if you do not have time to examine transference versus here and now in your normal outside of therapy. All mixed up to me.
“I speculate that my autonomy (in the form of my thinking, my individuality, and my rationality) sparked persecutory anxiety and envy in the therapist, which, in turn was discharged in her projective identification.” Is there a possibility this is your child part but not recognizable to you as an adult? A parent was not pleased you could be you and tried to oppress you and you adapted projective identification to be a compliant child? Rationally, why would a therapist care deeply you are autonomous and be envy of that, if anything maybe she is wishing you would come to realize your autonomy and your child part. I had similar experience where I acted like a child sometimes trying to make the therapist angry, so I could go to my usual sad and scared state and where I acted like the aggressor – my mother, and wanted to make the therapist feel like my child part – scared. And I woke up to both consciously and it was extremely frightening experience and yet freeing. Most people regress this learning but in therapy, those of us who were abused are lucky if we can see it clearly without identifying or attaching to this experience and go wow! Is that how I really felt? And wow was that how my parent was acting toward me? Also remember, all these words are images from your own memory back in the day that you did not have time to digest or process; hence not truly reality.
“I suspect that my failure to regress, like a majority of patients, in the therapeutic situation — that is, to develop a sense of collaboration with her — is a source of anxiety for her. The therapist said that she felt “smothered” by my writings, that she perceived me as “high strung,” and that I tried to be my own analyst.” Powerful. Maybe you can entertain, as a child or infant, you closed your soul to your parent (possibly your mother), she could not get you to act her way and you were further traumatized. The transference in therapy is showing how strong your resilience was in the face of adversity but rather than FOCUSING on the therapist, take step back and see this from a child’s perspective (you are in fact regressing and in transference – sorry to burst your bubble here with kindness). But you are scared, your mother/father/adult from your past, tried to break you in to do what they needed, feed or sleep or stop crying and here you are as an adult re-enacting with the therapist, except you so much identified with your parents’ aggression (please read sandor Ferenczi if you have not already about identification with the aggressor). In this re-enactment, you are your parent (sorry) and the therapist is of course her trying also not take your position as a child. She is (as you observed) resisting to be you as a child and trying to show you hey client, I do not want to be you in this re-enactment!!! It is absolutely painful to see this is how you were as a child, trying to please, understand and be respected and loved and nope! Abused and over-ridden your humanity. You will need a lot of compassion to switch this reference point in this enactment. You feeling the feelings you had when you were who knows 6 months, one year, 2 yrs or 4yrs etc! lost scared and wanting to love and the therapist being herself not carrying and resisting to take your position. Whe you see going back and forth (aggressor and you as a child), you may recognize the power in this transference. You must not be so attached you are right and she is right. No one is right and no one is wrong. It is just confused consciousness of memories in the body acting with your intelligence today and it is truly confusing. If you just meditate, I know so cliché and try to sit the therapist’s chair in your head, you may see hmmm you are both the aggressor and the scared child.
The word smothering is very powerful and could be (just my thoughts here) that you were smothered by your mother and you are displacing that awful feeling to the therapist. It is much easier to project in therapy than own a nasty feeling from our childhood.
I could go on with the rest of your amazing comment but hope this will suffice. Disclaimer: your experience is very similar to mine and it is possible I could be projecting my own experience so please be cautious. I wish you a swift recovery. If you stop thinking from the point view of the therapist about you and you start to think about YOUR OWN point of view as a child and as an adult, you may realize (in transference) the power of your body’s memory and impact of your trauma not to mention the power of recovery! Our identity was stolen in these type of experiences, and until we operate from ME point not from being observed point, it is a long journey to recovery.
Gary, I can’t really answer your question. But I have a thought: maybe you need a new therapist. Really. Fred
I eventually stopped seeing my therapist in February of 2020. The following is a link to all my writings about her.
https://dailstrug.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/aaftersteppenwolf-may-15-2020-1.pdf