Psyche

Bion and Thinking

Put a toad to the breasts of a woman, that she may feed it,
And the woman may die, and the toad grows big from the milk.

Rafal T. Prinke - Hunting the Blacke Toade
Adam McLean: Animal Symbolism in the Alchemical Tradition

Aleph | Bayt

"For Bion, the 'undigested facts' or beta elements are stored in the form of bodily sensory traces. They are raw elements of sensuous and affective impressions in which psychic and physical are yet indistinguishable. As such they can only be dealt with by projective identification as a form of primitive communication. It has been one of his main contributions to remind us, that much of our lives is lived without thinking outside significant emotional experiences. And that we often busily go about our daily activities without thinking about it's meaning, surrounded by a mass of undigested facts Bion insists: "It is important to distinguish between memories and 'undigested facts'" (1962, p. 7) Because they are not genuine memories, they are unavailable for thought and consciousness until they are transformed by alpha function that is by the interpretation of the selected fact in order to become recycled as genuine memories which can then acquire the possibility of retranscription and be forgotten or recalled. Learning from an emotional experience is indeed a retranscription so that "the mind builds itself, bit by bit, by digesting experiences" (Meltzer, 1984, p. 42) and the Grid will graphically describe the whole progressive process going from corporeity to levels of greater abstraction. But when the 'undigested facts' are not transformed (or metabolized), they remain in the words of Alvin Frank (1969) "The unrememberable and the unforgettable" and in the words of Edelman's the 'remembered present' (p. 120) characteristic of the 'primary order consciousness'." Guy Da Silva

Guy Da Silva: The Emergence of Thinking: Bion as the link between Freud and the Neurosciences

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion. Past and Future
Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School: by Nicola Glover: The Legacy of Wilfred Bion
Michael Rustin: Looking in the Right Place: Complexity Theory, Psychoanalysis and Infant Observation
Robert D. Hinshelwood: How Foulkesian was Bion?

Freud	Oral	Anal	Oedipal
Klein	Paranoid-Schizoid	Depressive	Oedipal
Bion	Fight/Flight	Dependency	Pairing

Laurence J Gould: Correspondences Between Bion's Basic Assumption Theory and Klein's Developmental Positions
David Armstrong: The Work Group Revisited: Reflections on the Practice of Group Relations
David Armstrong: The "Institution in the Mind"
Paramendra Bhagat: W. R. Bion on Group Dynamics
Wilfred Bion 1879 - 1979
W. Gordon Lawrence, Alastair Bain, and Laurence Gould: The fifth basic assumption

"Bion's best known immediate followers, Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies Lyth, are also very sober and stoical in their assessments of the barriers to change. Jaques begins his essay on 'Social Systems as a Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety' (1955) by reiterating that 'social phenomena show a striking correspondence with psychotic processes in individuals', that 'institutions are used by their individual members to reinforce individual mechanisms of defence against anxiety', and 'that the mechanisms of projective and introjective identification operate in linking individual and social behaviour'. He argues the thesis that 'the primary cohesive elements binding individuals into institutionalised human association is that of defence against psychotic anxiety' (Jaques, 1955, pp. 478-9). He points out that the projective and introjective processes he is investigating are basic to even the most complex social processes (p. 481, cf. 481n).

Jaques' conclusion is cautionary and points out the conservative - even reactionary - consequences of our psychotic anxieties and our group and institutional defences against them. He suggests that as a result of these reflections on human nature 'it may become more clear why social change is so difficult to achieve, and why many social problems are so intractable. From the point of view here elaborated, changes in social relationships and procedures call for a restructuring of relationships at the phantasy level, with a consequent demand upon individuals to accept and tolerate changes in their existing patterns of defences against psychotic anxiety. Effective social change is likely to require analysis of the common anxieties and unconscious collusions underlying the social defences determining phantasy social relationships' (p. 498)."   Robert M Young: Mental Space and Group Relations

Robert M Young: Mental Space and Group Relations
Selection from Chapter 7 of Mental Space by Robert M. Young

Marc G. Schramm: Basic Assumptions
Kathleen King: Group Dynamics for the Online Professor
Glossary of Group Relations Terms

Robert M Young: Postmodernism and the Subject; Pessimism of the Will
Leigh S. Estabrook: Weaning from the Breast: Facing Unconscious Processes in LIS Education
Lou Raye Nichol: Defense Mechanisms in Teams
Robert Oelsner: Review: Belief and Imagination
Group-Analysis Today: An interview with Diego Napolitani by Maria Luisa Tapparo
Emotion In Organisations: Narcissism V. Social-Ism: W. Gordon Lawrence

Olga Marlin: Group Psychology in the Totalitarian System: A Psychoanalytic View
David P. Levine: Know No Limits: The Destruction of Self-knowledge in Organizations
Myrna Little: Review: Arthur D. Colman. Up from Scapegoating: Awakening Consciousness in Groups

Posted by psyche at June 26, 2003 07:31 PM