CH A P TER TH IR T Y- TH RE E

The influence of Bion on my research*

René Kaes
Libro de Origen:
Levine, H.B., & Civitarese, G. (Eds.). (2016). The W. R. Bion Tradition:
Lines of Development—Evolution of Theory and Practice over the
Decades (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429483738

I ntroduction
I carne into contact with Bion's thought somewhat belatedly, even though, when I began to take
an interest in the problems of groups, trying to understand, with the help of psychoanalysis,
how they functioned, Bion's work on groups had only just been published in France.
I was interested in three aspects of groups: first, I thought, as the research studies of that time
led me to conclude, that it was necessary to consider the group as a whole in order to under-
stand its specificity; second, that it was also indispensable to consider the group asan object of
drive investments and representation, as Pontalis (1963) had proposed, and as a psychic struc-
ture within each one of us; and third, that it was important not to forget that it is a component
element of social space and that this form and this elementary structure comprise a psychic
determination in so far as it informs the psychic space of the group and that of the subjects who
are its members. My project was complex and ambitious, nourished and sustained by my psy-
choanalytic experience, but also by my initial training and orientations of research.
At the end of the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s, at the time when Bion had brought
sorne of his own work together into the volume Experiences in Groups (1961), after studying
psychology and sociology, I worked on the social representations of the culture of French work-
ers. I had chosen to take a group approach to the formation processes of social representations,
and was interested in the relationship between these and individual representations. The focus
of interest then switched towards the psychoanalytic approach to groups, the foundations of

*Translated by Andrew Weller.

431
432 THE W. R. BION TRADITION

which had just been outlined by J.-B. Pontalis (1963) and D. Anzieu (1966). My own analysis
helped me to work on the more personal aspects of my interest in groups. Anzieu had also
just founded, in 1962, the CEFFRAP 1 : so I joined them, finding in this emerging institution the
atmosphere of team work and the stimulation from which my own research has benefited for
half a century.
Even though it was Anzieu who took the initiative of having Bion's book translated into
French by E. L. Herbert as Recherches sur les petits groupes (1965), Bion's ideas on groups were
ignored, put to one side, or reduced to a few summary propositions for quite a long time. 2 This
"ignorance" can be examined from several points of view, which I shall resume in broad out-
line, less in order to seek to justify it than to contribute sorne thoughts on the cultural context of
the influence that a powerful body of thought can exert on another when it is in the process of
constituting itself, particularly in another cultural space.
From my point of view, three main factors prevented Bion's work on groups, and the influ-
ence he had on French psychoanalysts interested in this form of practice, from being taken
into consideration earlier. The first is of a cultural order and concerns not only Bion but also
Winnicott, who was equally "discovered" late in France. The French psychoanalytic culture of
rationality, the cult of Freudian orthodoxy, and the exclusive focus on the adult individual is at
odds with the psychoanalytic culture of the English school, which is more empirical and open
(not without conflicts) toan extension of psychoanalysis to the treatment of children, psychotic
patients, and disorders of intersubjectivity.
The second factor is related to the conditions of emergence of the "question of the group"
in the context of the tensions and splits which shook the French psychoanalytic movement in
1953, 1964, 1969, and 1980, causing certain orientations to break up into multiple psychoanalytic
groups. These conflicts, and the use of splitting to resolve them, revealed certain dimensions of
the functioning of psychoanalytic groups and institutions, which had already been operative
since the origin of the psychoanalytic movement. This return of the non-elaborated repressed
turned group psychoanalytic research and practice into instruments capable of revealing what
still had to be excluded from the field of psychoanalysis by powerful defensive alliances. Those
psychoanalysts who ventured into this domain were marginalized or worked in a sort of sus-
pect clandestinity.
The third factor has its specific value, but is combined with those that I have just mentioned.
I would describe it as a phenomenon of withdrawal that characterizes a group in its phase of
discovery and creation. This process provides its members with the security of group belonging,
supporting the process of self-appropriation of its object of research and fulfilling the illusory
and foundational function of the found-created object. The history of discoveries, beginning
with that of psychoanalysis, provides quite extensive evidence of this process. This factor may
acquire a prevalent weight when, in the face of a "state of siege", the need to form an alli-
ance against an enemy imposes itself or, more precisely, when a basic "fight-flight" assumption
predomina tes.
The format of this chapter imposes limits on me concerning the description of these three
factors and obliges me, in particular, to leave out a finer discussion of the introduction of Bion's
ideas in France. 3
 THE INFLUENCE OF BION ON MY RESEARCH 433

I want now to focus on the subject of this chapter. Although I have been asked to speak about
the influence of Bion on my research, I am not sure that I will constantly use this term; it is more
likely that I will speak of correspondences, of confluence, of "bridges" and passages which were
established even befare the references to Bion's thought became more manifest and explicit for
me, and articulated with my own approach. In order to establish this recognition of the similari-
ties and true influences, I will begin by proposing to the reader a brief overview of my research
into groups.

Overview of my research into groups

In the first period of my research, I contributed to the necessary undertaking characteristic of

the foundational classical models of the psychoanalytic approach to groups, namely, of describ-
ing and conceiving the group as a specific entity endowed with its own psychic formations and
processes, as it is defined by the Freudian notion of Gruppenpsyche. Pichon-Riviere, Bion, and
Foulkes each conceived of the group in this way and expressed its characteristics in different
models.
The model that I constructed is different. It is probably different beca use the questions I was
concerned with were different from those that my predecessors, Pichon-Riviere, Bion, Foulkes,
and their successors, had tried to resolve: I was living in a different context of psychoanalytic
culture.

A model of the group: the group psychic apparatus

At the end of the 1960s, I outlined a model that could still only give an incomplete account
of the construction of group space. The principal proposition of the model that I called the
group psychic apparatus 4 (Kaes, 1976a) is that the group is constructed on the basis of psychic
formations that each member of the group mobilizes in order to forge links or bonds with the
other members and to form a new, common, and shared psychic space. When this common and
shared psychic construction has taken place between the individuals constituting this group,
there is not simply a collection of individuals, but a group, with specific phenomena. It com-
prises a non-differentiated and a differentiated level of investments, of object-relations, and of
defense mechanisms.
The model of the group psychic apparatus is an ergonomic model in the sense that it accom-
plishes a particular psychic work: it produces and processes the psychic reality of a group, in a
group. It is constructed asan apparatus for binding and transforming the psychic contributions
of its subjects so as to produce a specific psychic reality that is irreducible to that of the individ-
ual psychic apparatus: it is notan extrapolation from it. In this sense, it has its own formations
and its own processes.
However, the difference between this model and those that preceded it resides in the fact
that it distinguishes in the group three spaces and three levels of organisation of unconscious
psychic reality and not just one (the group asan entity): that of each subject, that of the relations
between them, and that of the group. The model I am proposing articula tes their relations in the
434 THE W. R. BION TRADITION

group as a whole. This model integrates complexity and implies the existence of several types
of organizers. To ensure the passage and transformation between the individual psyches, the
space of intersubjective relations, and the group space, the group psychic apparatus comprises
specific operators. Two concepts describe the principal ones.

The organizers of the combination and adjustment 5 of the psyches:

interna! groups and psychic groupality

I have called psychic groupality a general property of psychic matter: its associativity. The psy-
chic matter electively mobilized in the intrapsychic space of the participants is an organized
matter whose structure is that of internal groups that associate elements (drives, affects, repre-
sentations, objects) linked by a law of composition. In this way I describe and qualify the primal
fantasies, the oedipal and fraternal complexes, bodily and psychic imagos, and all the configu-
rations of internal objects obtained by the different modalities of identifications. Certain inter-
nal groups are acquired through introjection, others are inherent to the primordial organisation
of unconscious psychic matter, while others, such as the psychic groups described by Freud, are
constitutive of the primordial unconscious. All these groups of the "inside" are the expressions
of psychic groupality.
The form, the structure, and the function of these internal groups are mobilized in the group
process: they are unconscious psychic organizers of the adjustment (or assemblage) of the psy-
ches. I have commented on several occasions and from different angles on how a group organ-
izes itself on the basis of a phantasmatic organizer, whose generic structure is described by the
statement: "A parent is seducing/menacing a child". 6 A group psychic organizer such as this
fantasy accomplishes several actions: it mobilizes, channels, diverts, distributes, and binds the
psychic energy, identifications, fantasies, and mechanisms of defense of the group members.
The process of combination/adjustment that it organizes is accomplished through distortions,
displacements, condensations, and diffractions of psychic matter. 7
The process of combination/adjustment takes place in two principal modes: an isomorphic
mode of adjustment between an internal group and the real group, both formations tending
towards an identity or, in R. D. Laing's (1969) terms, a co-inherence characteristic of a psychotic
mode of grouping; and a homeomorphic mode of adjustment which maintains the gap and the
difference between the internal groups and the real group. These two modes can co-exist or
substitute each other.

Linking and unconscious alliances

A second concept describes the specific operators of the process of adjustment: linking and
unconscious alliances. A bond (líen) is what binds several subjects together in an ensemble that
is irreducible to the subjects who constitute this ensemble. A bond has its own psychic consist-
ency. Its logic is a logic of the correlations of subjectivities. Its formula could be stated as fol-
lows: "Not one without the other, without the alliances which underpin the links between them,
without the whole that contains them and which they construct, which binds them mutually
and which identifies them in relation to each other". 8
 THE INFLUENCE OF BION ON MY RESEARCH 435

Unconscious alliances are a constitutive condition of linking. They are one of the principal
formations of the psychic reality of the ties or bonds that are formed between several subjects
in a couple orina group. I have distinguished several types of unconscious alliances: sorne are
structuring (such as the narcissistic contract, the alliance of Brothers, the symbolic alliance with
the Father, the contract of renunciation vis-a-vis the direct realisation of instinctual airns); others
are defensive (the negative pact), and among these we are faced with alienating and pathologi-
cal alliances (shared denial, the perverse pact, incestuous narcissistic alliances); and yet others
are offensive.
I would like to dwell for a moment on the defensive alliances: their airn is to keep repressed,
rejected, denied, or erased whatever, between each of the subjects of a bond, may endanger
the bond between them. But this airn is duplicated by other airns of an individual order: the
alliances support whatever each individual, for his own reasons, has to repress, deny, or reject.
The tuning that results from this is most often unconscious, and these unconscious tunings are
co-constitutive of the unconscious of each person. In this way, unconscious alliances participa te
in the structuring of the life of each subject in so far as he or she is a subject of the unconscious
and a subject of these alliances. By virtue of their structure and function, unconscious alliances
are thus destined to produce unconscious material and to remain unconscious.

Group psychoanalytic work

On the basis of this brief analysis and with these concepts, how can one describe what under-
lies the group experience? The group puts to work the identifications, the narcissism, and the
irnaginary dimension involved in the construction of a group, and in the processes which lead
each person to be a member of it, to be affiliated to it. Each person, according to his structure
and history, is mobilized, affected, and transformed in these processes of construction of the
group, inasmuch as it is these processes that have contributed to his formation as a subject of the
unconscious. That is why I have posited a partial but decisive equivalence between the subject
of the unconscious and the subject of the group.
Psychic work is required for participating in the group experience: this work confronts the
subject with the intersubjective and group conditions ofhis own formation as a subject. Psycho-
analytic work in the group situation is the invention of new forms of self and of new processes
of its accomplishment.
This work is a discovery: it is marked both by pleasure and suffering. Painful episodes occur
when, in the group process, we have to deal with the "loosening" of ideals, of alienating iden-
tifications, of the desire for mastery, and of the unconscious alliances which sustain them, with
regard to their airn of making oneself or the other "conform" to a norm. In the process of train-
ing, each person is challenged by the diverse modalities of illusion: individual, group, institu-
tional. Each one, alone and with the others, can then experience which major resistances have
opposed the appropriation of his process of becoming a subject, once it has been possible to
elabora te the confrontation with the unknown that is inherent to any change of form.
Group work is thus an opportunity for deploying and working on the identificatory collages
which are provoked in certain subjects through adhesion to group ideals or norms. Each person
can then have the experience that the group arouses the desire to take possession of something
436 THE W. R. BION TRADITION

that does not belong to oneself but to another, that this other is an object of envy but an object
constitutive of identification, with the risk of a false-self identification if the process of introjec-
tion of the transformations that it implies is insufficient.

My relations with Bion's thought

As I pointed out in the introduction to this article, my intention is to discern the areas of cor-
respondence between Bion's psychoanalytic approach and mine and to clarify the influence
that he has had on my own research, but also to identify what I see as differences between his
approach and my own.
I think that there were several phases in the evolution of my relations with Bion's thought.
There was the initial phase when I discovered and recognized correspondences and rapproche-
ments between what I was constructing and certain aspects of his thought. 9 I note a first rap-
prochement between the "ideological position" that I described in an article of 1971 and the
group "mentality". I had not yet read Bion at the time when I wrote this article, but in my book
on ideology (1980), I gave a large place to Bion's work.

Presence of Bion in my first model of the group psychic apparatus

A first contact with Bion's Experiences in Groups at the end of 1971 was an opportunity forme to
make occasional references to Bion in my thesis of 1974, and then in other texts which resulted
from it, notably in L'Appareil psychique groupal (1976a), published in 1976. But I was not really
in a position to put his concepts to use in my elaborations. I included citations from Bion, but
what I mentioned, like many of my colleagues,10 were the basic assumptions, but without doing
much with them other than establishing correspondences. My theoretical references were those
that I found in Freud and in my colleagues of the CEFFRAP: Anzieu, Béjarano, Missenard, and
Pontalis. In fact, I was trying instead to develop my own model.
I am aware, however, of a number of partial corespondences between certain concepts of
Bion and those that underpinned the model of the group psychic apparatus that I developed
at the end of the 1960s. My major hypothesis was that this apparatus produces a work of
binding between the psychic contributions of the participants and that it transforms them
into processes and formations that are typical of a group. Although it now seems evident to
me, and although I insist on the anonymous and impersonal structure of the primal phan-
tasy, as well as on the fact that the very notion of adjustment describes a similar process, I did
not notice the correspondence between this proposition and Bion's hypothesis in which he
postulates "a group mentality as the pool to which the anonymous contributions are made,
and through which the impulses and desires implicit in these contributions are gratified
(1961, p. 50).
I have discovered other correspondences, which I have explained on several occasions,
between the concept of basic assumptions and that of unconscious group organizers. I conceive
of these on the same clinical bases as Bion: I have observed their organizing function and their
alternating mode of emergence and latency, but I do not treat them as defensive systems. 11
A further example: when I describe the manifestations of group mentality in terms of three
 THE INFLUENCE OF BION ON MY RESEARCH 437

principal "positions" (ideological, utopian, and mythopoietic), I am not referring here to Bion's
thought on group mentality. But I cite the notion of empty thought to describe the dominating
anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid position, intensified by the lack of phantasy activity in large
groups. I have introduced the notion of alpha on several occasions.
There are indeed partial correspondences and convergences. We have both had-Bion befare
me-similar experiences which find expression in partially convergent ways of thinking. 12 The
model that I have developed is different from Bion's. As I have said, I distinguish three spaces of
unconscious psychic reality, and I try to articula te them by identifying, in particular, how group
formations are mobilized in the formation of intrapsychic space. Another important difference,
in my view, was that I introduced the notion of internal group and the concept of psychic grou-
pality: by qualifying the space of the subject in the group, they open up another perspective
which the concept of subject of the group would clarify later.
Later, in other articles and books, I returned to what interested me in Bion's thought. In
line with my work on the group psychic apparatus, I would certainly say today that there is a
preconception of the group and, more generally, of linking, on the model of the preconception
of the breast, according to Bion's hypothesis. This preconception resides in the fundamental
psychic groupality, that is to say, in the property of psychic matter to be associated in internal
groups. Here, I follow Bion's proposition to the effect that the preconception, once it comes into
contact with a realisation that has similar characteristics, is transformed into a conception. It
pairs up with the realisation. Today, I would say that what I described as the tuning or adjust-
ing of the psyches under the effect of internal groups that are homologous with the group that
is being formed is based on this transformation.

Bion's influence and its presence in severa! texts

A second phase in my relations with Bion began in 1976: his influence now underpins several of
my elaborations and goes beyond the research in to small groups.

Alpha function and transformation. Container-contained and function

The first paper in which Bion's influence was present more directly was "Analyse intertrans-
ferentielle, fonction alpha et groupe conteneur" (Kaes, 1976b ). The concept of intertransferential
analysis accounts for the particularity of the analysis of the transference/ countertransference
movements induced by the transferences of the members of a group in the common psychic
space of two or several psychoanalysts in charge of a group. To develop this clinical concept,
I drew on the conceptions of Bion concerning the presence (or absence) of the alpha function in
analysts, in so far as they are allied in their work and receive the transferences and their con-
tents in their own space and in their common space. I introduced into the relation container/
contained the capacity of the analysts to contain and to transform this relation, which I call the
container function.13
The basic assumptions are no longer simply mentioned; they are tested by the clinical analy-
sis of several group sequences. I established the correspondences between attacks on linking
and the use of fragmentation as a defense described by Springmann (1975). All these references
438 THE W. R. BION TRADITION

would lead me to conceptualize the group more explicitly as an apparatus of transformation

(1986).
The Bionian sources of my major references were supplemented by those from
D. W. Winnicott, in particular, his concept of transitional phenomena and objects. At the end of
1976 I had begun to write an introductory study of transitional analysis, 14 which I consideras
a mode of psychoanalytic work in analysis and in groups when experiences of early trauma tic
rupture by analysands have made differentiations and connections between internal space and
external space impossible or precarious, creating and maintaining psychotic nuclei. I estab-
lished bridges between this new approach, already nourished by earlier acquisitions concern-
ing alpha function and the container function, and the more general concept of transitionality
as a space of indetermination and creation.
It was also during this period that I took up and developed relations between Bion's con-
ception of group mentality and the notion of an ideological, utopian, and mythopoetic
position. 15 I refered to the work of Bion 16 on thinking, alpha function, the transformation or non-
transformation of contents. Following Bion, I considered certain configurations of ideology as a
system of thought against thinking, as an apparatus for manipulating thoughts and petrifying
them. These propositions led me to adopt the idea that ideology is constructed on the basis of
an impossibility of containing destructive and painful representations owing to a deficiency in
alpha function: a part of the beta elements is projected outside; another part remains encysted
in the ideological content, without transformation, for lack of a container.

Third phase: thinking with Bion

This third period had already begun with the work on alpha function and the containing func-
tion (1976b ), and with the resumption of my work on mentalisations and the ideological posi-
tion. What characterizes it, I think, is that issues related to transformation had begun to exert a
greater influence on me.

Transformations and transmission

This is apparent in a study of 1986 titled, "Le groupe comme appareil de transformation" (Kaes,
1986). According to my point of view concerning the three spaces of psychic reality, the work
of transformation involves each of these spaces in their interrelations, whether the privileged
vertex is that of the singular subject, intersubjective relations, or the group. In this study, my
attention is focused on the group, but the problem that interests me is to describe the processes
of transformation, while taking into account both the level of the group and that of the singular
subject: how is the status of the transformation of O, and in O, to be understood when we are
dealing with a set of subjects? We do not know much about how Bion applied his theory of
transformation to the group. I take an approach which takes into consideration the defensive
measures of the group when faced with a catastrophic change that brings each member of the
group into contact with the reality of an object ora situation associated with a trauma tic experi-
ence. The concept of defensive unconscious alliances was beginning to take shape here.
 THE INFLUENCE OF BION ON MY RESEARCH 439

Bion continued to accompany me when, at the beginning of the 1980's, I was working on
the processes of transmission of psychic life between generations. My research was published
later (1993). In this study, I introduced a distinction inspired by Bion between the transmission
of transformable objects and the transmission of non-transformable objects; I established cor-
respondences between the transformative functions of the apparatus for interpreting (Freud),
alpha function (Bion), and the function of word-bearer (Castoriadis-Aulagnier, 1975).

Thought, thinking, and the apparatus far thinking

The question of thought and of the process of thinking has permeated my research since my
studies on social representations, and then on group thinking asan object of drive investments
and unconscious representations. On this point, along with the consecutive contributions of
Anzieu and Gibello, the concepts of Bion were very useful for me. What was particularly
helpful was the notion of an apparatus for thinking thoughts, which I connected with Freud's
apparatus for interpreting in my studies on ideology (1980, pp. 109-115, 122-123, 141-142).
They were helpful again when I worked on associative processes and the formation of chains
of thought in groups and in analysis (1994). I undertook this study to explore the interweav-
ing of the thought processes of each subject in interference, anaclisis, and facilitation with the
thoughts that develop through the group process. By exploring the singularities of the asso-
ciative process in this way, I continued to qualify the importance of the psychic function of the
other, of "more than one other", in the access to language, the use of speech, and the forma-
tion of thought: this question was explored and structured by the research of Lacan, Bion, and
Castoriadis-Aulagnier. Bion sees the psychic apparatus of the mother as a locus of metabo-
lisation in the Other of psychic contents that are incapable of transforming themselves into
thoughts. With her concepts of word-bearer (porte-parole) and spoken shadow (ombre parlée)
(1975), Castoriadis-Aulagnier emphasizes the interpretative and containing function of the
accompanirnent of the experience of the infans by the mother's voice and words. Castoriadis-
Aulagnier clarifies her own position in relation to Bion by saying that, for her, the infans can
only metabolize an object that has first dwelled in the area of the maternal psyche into a rep-
resentation of its relation to the world. However, it is a fragment of the world, in conformity
with the interpretation that repression irnposes on the work of the maternal psyche, which
is remodelled by it so that it becomes homogenous with the organization of the originary
(or primal) and of the prirnary. The metabolisation concerns the representation of an object
shaped by the work of repression in the mother in to a representation over which repression
as yet has no hold.
These propositions were very helpful to me for analysing the associative process at both the
individual and group level. The group, one or several persons in the group, and particularly the
psychoanalyst or the group of psychoanalysts, accomplish this function of the fabrication and
transformation of thoughts, on condition that the apparatus borrowed from the other is avail-
able at the right moment for thinking thoughts. In the clinical analysis of a group, Bion's work
on hallucination (1958) was particularly useful to me. I returned to the essential points of his
research on transformations (1965, 1967).
440 THE W. R. BION TRADITION

On the polyphony of the dream and the common and shared dream space

The influence of D. Anzieu and J. -B. Pontalis was decisive forme in the interest that I took ata
very early stage in the forms, modalities, and functions of dreams in the group and of the group
dreams of my patients in analysis. I have given an account of my conception in La Polyphonie du
reve (2002), in which I put forward three main hypotheses: that the dream is a polyphonic organ-
isation; that it is the meeting point of several psychic spaces; and, that it has a double "navel",
one that plunges into the soma tic mycelium of the unconscious and another whose source and
elements lie in intersubjective knots. In this exploration, I agree with the ideas of Bion, who
considers the dream as a primary form of thought and also that the capacity for reverie of the
other, particularly of the mother, is a condition of her baby's capacity to dream. The capacity for
reverie, and alpha function, which, according to Bion, is one of the factors involved, are the con-
ditions and the materials of normal dreaming. These propositions anda few others accompany
my elaborations on the common and shared dream space in analysis and in groups.17

On linking and unconscious alliances. Their relations with catastrophic experiences

and alpha function

It is not surprising that the question of linking runs through my research as a whole: in the
processes of intrapsychic linking, intersubjective relations, and the pluri-subjective ensembles.
How these three spaces of psychic reality are articulated was the question that I wrestled with
for several decades. It was only in 2009 that I brought together my ideas on the relation between
internal links and linking between subjects, by taking what I have called unconscious alliances 18
as a guiding thread (Kaes, 2009a). In this book, there are numerous references to Bion. Those
that held my attention particularly concern the mechanisms of defense mobilized in linking
in relation to Verwerfung: the rejection of psychic reality, the involvement of alpha function in
the contract of renunciation of the direct satisfaction of instinctual aims, as Freud describes it
in 1929, for it seems to me that Bion's concept presupposes that this function exists befare the
contract can be established. Another reference has allowed me to shed light on the relations
between catastrophic experiences and the establishment of structuring or defensive alliances.

Other recent work: the group and culture put to the test of psychoanalysis

My more recent contributions bring together the main axes of my research and explores what I
have learnt from psychoanalytic work with groups about psychoanalysis and about new forms
of discontent in culture. The first (2007) puts the practice and theories of psychoanalysis to the
test of the group when it is a case of thinking about the psychic reality of the singular subject
and, in particular, what we know about his unconscious organisation: it draws on detailed
clinical material from a group in order to mobilize all the resources of the theory that I have
constructed in relation to these three spaces of psychic reality. In this book, in which the pres-
ence of Bion is still active, I found myself faced with the question he poses in "Evidence": "How
are we to introduce the intuitions to the concepts and the concepts to intuitions?" (1976, p. 243).
This question is central to psychoanalytic epistemology.
 THE INFLUENCE OF BION ON MY RESEARCH 441

The second book is titled Le Maletre (Kaes, 2012). Here again, Bion accompanies me in this
exploration of contemporary culture in the light of what psychoanalytic work with groups and
institutions has taught me, and also in the light of what Bion, but also Winnicott, Bleger, and
Anzieu have passed on to us.

What I owe Bion

In order to be able to make use of what I learnt from Bion, two experiences were necessary:
initially I was unaware of his work, but then went on to find certain correspondences between
his thought and my own ideas. It was these correspondences that led me to refer to him, to the
recognized power of his thought, which was close, strange, and encouraging for my own work,
different from my own preoccupations in sorne respects, and perhaps even with regard to the
choice I made of working on these three spaces that open up a debate about the central object
of psychoanalysis. Ido not consider myself as a disciple of Bion; rather, I regard him as a pre-
decessor with whom I share an affinity of thought on questions that we have each approached
differen tl y.
I have scarcely made any references to Bion in my research on institutions, but I found in his
concept of the "Establishment" a way of thinking that has helped me a lot in my own relations
with psychoanalytic institutions: the Establishment is a collective defense against new ideas in
order to control, master, or trivialize them. Bion says that he puts them to the service of what he
calls the lie, which I call a defensive alliance, a negative pact. But he also stresses, at the same
time, that the institution transmits the new idea, while distorting it. This optimistic way of
thinking appeals to me ...

Notes
l. Known today as the "Cercle d'études franc;aise pour la formation et la recherche: approche psy-
chanalytique du groupe, du psychodrame, de l'institution".
2. Exceptions may be found in O. Avron, J. -C. Ginoux, and J. -C. Ro u chy who refer to them in their
books and articles (see Avron, 1986, 2009; Ginoux, 1986; and Rouchy, 2009).
3. J. Lacan was one of the first psychoanalysts, if not the first, to recognize W. R. Bion's thought in
France. His article in L évolution psychiatrique (1947) relates what he learnt in London in September
1945, when he met several psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, including Bion and Rickman (1943)
who had published in 1943 an article which marked a milestone in the history of the psychiatry
and psychotherapy of groups. Lacan was impressed by the powers of creativity and of methodo-
logical demonstration of the two authors: "I have the impression", Lacan writes, "I am rediscov-
ering the miracle of the first Freudian initiatives: finding in the very impasse of a situation the
living force of intervention" (1947, p. 300; 2001, p. 101). He describes the institutional context,
supports the principle of group analysis, presents the setting and its modifications, relates the
therapeutic effects and the major conceptual inventions. Twenty-five years later, concerning the
impossibility of "psychoanalysts forming a group", he declared that "he measures the group
effect by what it adds in the way of imaginary obscenity to the effect of the discourse" and adds
that "nevertheless the psychoanalytic discourse (the path that I choose) is precisely that which
can found social ties freed of any need for a group" (Lacan, 1972, p. 31). This declaration has a
442 THE W. R. BION TRADITION

more general significance since it lent support to the denunciation by his pupils of the group as
a locus of jouissance and imaginary alienation.
Group psychoanalytic practice inspired by Bion's ideas was introduced into France notably by
O. Avron, J. -C. Rouchy, C. Pigott, and B. Gibello. An eminent place must be accorded to S. Resnik
who invited Bion to hold a seminar in Lyon, then in Paris (July 10, 1978). Resnik has recounted
certain moments of these seminars in no. 52 of the Revue de psychothérapie psychanalytique de
groupe (2009). Among the institutions of psychiatric care, I would like to mention the Clinique de
la Chavannerie, situated near Lyon and run by Drs. A. Appeau, P. Brunaud, and C. Legrand. Very
influenced by the ideas of Melanie Klein and Bion, their approach has been to treat patients suf-
fering from severe disorders in a group setting.
4. Conceived at the end of the 1960s, this model was presented in 1974 in my doctoral thesis, and
then published in 1976. There is a similarity there with certain propositions of Bion, whose work
was unknown to me at the time. I will come back to this point further on in this chapter.
5. In French "appareillage".
6. 1976a, 1993, 1994, and recently in 2007 under the title Linking, Alliances and Shared Spaces: Groups
and the Psychoanalyst (International Psychoanalytical Association International Psychoanalysis
Library).
7. Most of the participants of this group adjusted themselves to this organizer, then to another; and
the passage from one organizer to another constitutes a major aspect of the process of psychoana-
lytic work in the group.
8. Concerning the models of collective logics of the unconscious, of groups, and of intersubjectivity,
see Kaes, 2009b.
9. This is also what Avron (2009) recognizes.
10. In the manifesto publication of our "school", Le travail psychanalytique dans les groupes (1972),
in which Anzieu, Béjarano, Missenard, Pontalis and myself collaborated, only Béjarano makes
sorne rapprochements with the transference and resistances concerning basic assumptions and
the function of the co-leader in pairing. Like most of the authors who cited Bion at this period, he
remains very descriptive.
11. For example (ibid., p. 75): "I have formulated the hypothesis that a single primary fantasy is not
by itself an organizer of the representation of the group; several fantasies are involved, one of
which is sometimes predominant, either at the level of manifest expression or at the latent and
repressed level. This idea is very close to Bion's idea that the emergence of a basic hypothesis in
a group only represents the visible part of the iceberg: justas one basic hypothesis hides another,
a fantasy hides or blocks out another".
12. The same is true for the notion of internal groups for which distinct concepts have been elabo-
rated independently of each other in the work of Pichon-Riviere, Napolitani, and in my own
research.
13. I developed this problematic in 2012 by introducing the notion of metacontainer, for example, the
institution in relation to the group.
14. Published in a collective work that I edited under the title Crise, rupture et dépassement (Kaes,
1979).
15. First identified in my article of 1971, op. cit., and then in L'appareil psychique groupal (1976a): these
positions are the object of my book on L idéologie. Etudes psychanalytiques (1980).
16. Notably to his work on learning from experience (1962a) and on thinking (1962b), on
transformations (1965) and the texts of 1967 (Second Thoughts) and of 1970 (Attention and
Interpretation ).
 THE INFLUENCE OF BION ON MY RESEARCH 443

17. Although Bion introduced the notion of the capacity for reverie as early as 1962 in his theory of
thinking as a function of the maternal Other, his research into small groups is not concerned with
dream work in groups.
18. See above a very short exposition of the axis of my work on unconscious alliances.

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