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Post Kleinians Bion and Ogden 2017
Post Kleinians Bion and Ogden 2017
Post Kleinians Bion and Ogden 2017
• Like Freud, Klein emphasises the Oedipal complex and the Life
and Death instincts of Eros & Thanatos. However, she places
particular value upon aggressive impulses, in addition to
acknowledging the significance of libidinal drives.
Bion: A Brief History
• Bion was born in Mathura, North West Province, India
• Educated at Bishop’s Stortford College in England
• At the outbreak of World War I he served as a tank commander in France
where he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DS0)
• Later, he studied history Queen’s College Oxford (1922) and medicine at
UCL
• Bion was attracted to psychoanalysis and trained at the Tavistock Clinic in
London
• When war broke out again he entered the Royal Army Medical Corps
• He carried out group work in Northfield Hospital for those suffering with
‘shell shock’
• He developed Klein’s PS/D positions in association with Hannah Segal and
Herbert Rosenfield
• Bion spent his twilight years in California but returned to Oxford shortly
before his death
Bion reconfigured psychoanalytical work
through emotional functioning, philosophy,
science and mysticism. His understanding of the
human mind does not start from a classical
Freudian position, but from a theory of thinking
and a new conception of the unconscious as O
which = ‘A Deep and formless Infinity’.
Without
Memory or
Truth and
Desire Falsehood
That which
is knowable
The Grid
That which is
PsychoA
Knowledge not knowable
Mathematical? Mysticism?
W. R. Bion on Groups
Bion believed that there was little difference
between individual and group functioning –
processes such as PI continue to operate
The Basic
The Work Assumption
Group Group
SplittingExclusion Bullying
Psychotic Moments – Bion: ‘The mind grows through
exposure to the truth’
• Are there any socio-cultural variables that may explain the diagnosis or
misdiagnosis of psychosis?
• Power?
• Western Discourses?
• Authoritative Relations?
• Cultural Beliefs?
• Language?
• Difference?
• Marginalization?
• War & Brutalization?
The Psychotic in Despair
‘The Psychotic is in despair, imprisoned in his
bizarre universe. In analysis psychotic patients
discharge a barrage, out of contact with either
themselves or the analyst who is experienced as a
murderously punitive object . Their frail grasp of the
normally distinct states of being awake, dreaming,
hallucinating, perceiving, phantasy and reality
makes for a confused, confusing and sometimes
delusional transference’(O’Shaugnessy, 1981)
Scribblings of the "seemingly" Insane