The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (Maresfield Library)

Holding Environment as Home

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From fear to fortitude. Relational Perspectives Books Series. The Long Awaited Homecoming: The Effects of Our Parents Stories. Presented at the Division 39 Spring Meeting, Boston, The matrix of the mind: Object relations and the psychoanalytic dialogue. The clinical thinking of Wilfred Bion. C ourage to love: Selected papers by Edith Weigert. From Monad to Intersubjective Field. Add to my calendar. It is something we or I own, and therefore we or I can disown. But suppose it belongs neither to us nor to me. We or I do not know what it will do, what it will lead to, whether it will burgeon into a saviour or a monster, whether it will give us new life or kill us.

It is this possibility which gives such resonance and durability to the myths of Prometheus, Faust and Frankenstein, of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. Nothing is safe from thoughts. Only lies are safe—until thought comes along. What is a lie: Bion puts it like this: The source of the paradox that the group like the individual simultaneously provides the opportunity for and the forces of resistance to transformation is to be found in the uncertainty, the doubt, the un-knowing, which is the defining characteristic of becoming aware of a thought.

Or perhaps it would be better to say, of becoming aware of the emotional experience which, if we can tolerate the frustration of un-knowing, may provide the ground in which a thought can appear. At the heart of this un-knowing, this surrendering to a thought in the air, is the fear of catastrophic change. Some of the time and in some circumstances, perhaps not much.

I think we can often exaggerate the extent to which the work of the world, the work we all do, calls for sustained mental effort, an encounter with the unknown. We are busy and profitably busy. We are having to be clever, adaptable, shrewd. We are not necessarily having to think. But of course circumstances do change, inside and outside. An environment friendly to our activities and interests becomes un-friendly.

Salman Rushdie writes a book.

New leaders, new faces, new ideas are abroad. And we ourselves change. Old customs stale, the habits of intelligence seem threadbare.

In such a vital context, which may arise within a single group or organization but which can also infect a whole society, all the phenomena I have alluded to as the essential paradox of group life surface and resurface in a way which forces them on our attention. These phenomena may include the following:. First, there is an awareness of emotional experience in the group, on the part of its members separately and corporately, that is unfocused and inchoate: This experience may be compounded of feelings of excitement, expectancy, despair, loss of control or emptiness.

An institution, a society of human beings, may be unable to survive the birth pangs of an idea—it splits apart. We are undoubtedly careless with our psychological midwifery. We seem to feel that the thing to do with a newborn idea is to give it a good hard smack. So we are professionally concerned to work in just those situations where the kind of phenomena I am seeking to describe are likely to occur.

Sometimes a client approaches us from an organization, apparently knowing exactly what the problem is or exactly what they want to know, or exactly what they want you to do about it, which often involves doing something for, to or with somebody or somebodies else. It is as if all the client requires is that someone else takes on a particular job he does not feel he or his organization is competent enough to do on its own. His interest is in employing you as a technician, exploiting your expertise. There may be all sorts of other motivations or considerations also.

Thomas H. Ogden

Given our aim as an Institute, these situations may need to be sorted out before any decision to proceed is taken. He or she is more likely to be looking for confirmation of ideas they already know, or handy techniques or tricks to achieve what they want to achieve. What happens then will depend on the judgement the consultant makes about his or her capacity and that of the client to confront and work with this possibility. But a client may also come who seems quite uncertain what the real problem is; who tells a story which leaves you feeling just as confused and chaotic as he or she, who is experiencing a sense of frustration, of the loss of signposts, of turbulence within the organization and outside.

Second, the unfocused awareness of emotional experience in the group or a representative of the group is accompanied and may be concealed by other elements, which resist it. An example of this is the assertion or reassertion of boundaries as barriers, either around the individual or the group, through the use of naming as a defence. Such a defensive use of naming can surface in many other forms.

Recently as an Institute we had been involved in a great deal of work with schools, in particular with groups of senior staff. Schools are organizations currently facing great turbulence both within and without. This turbulence is not only to do with continuous government interference and legislation. There is also an awareness of something in society which challenges and raises questions about the meaning of schools, of education and training, teaching and learning, in our present environment.

In our experience, many teachers in many schools have the courage to face this turbulence—to experience the uncertainty inside themselves and their institutions and work with it. But there are also times where the countervailing tendency is very powerful.

References

This often emerges in a defensive preoccupation with and use of values, or in the assertion of a certain conception of the teaching profession which is designed to circumscribe what can and cannot be entertained as a thought. There is a link between this defensive use of names and the lie in the technical sense in which I have tried to deploy it.

Both will often share, overtly or covertly, a preoccupation with morality: My colleague John Bazalgette tells a lovely story of a little girl who was asked to write a short review of a book on penguins. What she wrote was: And behind this fear, Bion suggests, is persecutory guilt—the idea which fuels the concept of original sin.

The crime rational, logical and the feeling of guilt are natural partners. It is a matter to which justice, morals, intellectual ingenuity can be devoted for so long as anyone can spare the time and energy. As far as I know no one has explored this possibility in group relations contexts. It is worth considering. So far I have said nothing in detail about these assumptions. This is not because I do not think they are important, but because I think this territory is so well explored, so taken for granted, so pervasive—particularly in group relations work—that it can often obscure or draw attention away from other phenomena and foci of enquiry.

I do not think it is necessarily correct to say that the basic assumptions are group defences. In Experiences in Groups, Bion sees them as inherent in all group activity. They correspond to three of what he has described as the four basic situations to which the primary emotional drives correspond: They are attempts on the part of the group to put itself beyond the encounter with the un-known, beyond the realm of thought, of names and of lies: What I think those of us who work in group relations settings are not always very good at or attuned to is attending to and characterizing that dilemma.

Account Options

Because we believe basic assumptions to be ubiquitous, we are not always careful enough to note when, and to consider why, they obtrude on our experience. But there are also phenomena which represent ways of going to meet the unknown. And here we are in the territory of work group activity or functioning. I suspect that practitioners of group relations have not really begun to do more than scratch the surface of these phenomena conceptually, though practice may be in advance of theory. It is all too easy to shelter behind the crude, simple idea of the work group as the group that meets to perform an overt task.

The trouble is that in the contexts I am talking about—the meeting with the unknown—the overt task itself can be problematic. This is why I think it may be useful to think of work group functioning not only through the concept of overt task and all its various derivatives, l9 but also through the idea I referred to at the beginning, of the work group as an arena for transformations. I do not want to claim that this idea corresponds to a clear observable reality in group functioning.

Throughout his life Bion had a deep suspicion and distrust of institutional life. In a number of his later seminars he refers to institutions in this way:. What usually happens is that the institutions societies, nations, states and so forth make laws. The original laws constitute a shell, and then new laws expand that shell.

If it were a material prison, you could hope that the prison walls would be elastic in some sort of way. Organizations lock themselves in when they are unable to entertain the new idea: But we can easily lose sight of the fact that any new idea requires some host through which it is not only disseminated, but is also made available for use throughout the community or society or group.

The Matrix of the Mind

They may be the products of genius or of the flashes of genius which all of us are capable of some of the time. They need assimilation, digestion, translation and the sometimes painful, patient business of reflection, testing, corroboration. Through the emergence of the function of Establishment, and the consequent elaboration of rules, of training and criteria for qualification, the institutionalized work group enables a psychological and emotional accommodation to be made to the reality that a genius dies, a flash of genius fades.

This function provides some safeguard against omnipotence and the tendency to confuse the idea with oneself, as if one owned it rather than serviced it, strove to realize it day by day:. There are not enough mystics to go round and those that there are must not be wasted.

Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique (Maresfield Library)

If I could put this point in a more mundane way, it is out of the tension between the new idea and its container: Without that tension you would either produce nothing or formlessness, splurge. If transformations beget resistance, they also require it. It is the relations between the two that is productive or destructive: I had often talked about it to my colleagues at the Institute and felt I had experienced links between it and my own experience and practice in taking groups and in consultancy and research work.

Faced with a blank sheet of paper my mind took on that blankness, and I felt rather scared. Perhaps the emperor had no clothes. I was tempted and did not enough resist this to go back over and over again to the texts, the Bion bible, and pinch whatever clothes I found there. Two weeks beforehand a colleague asked me what the main theme of the lecture was to be.

I mumbled something incoherent and felt rather persecuted by being asked. If I could only allow myself to experience the blankness not as a persecution but as a space in which thought already was but not yet realized, then perhaps I would begin to discover what I could say. For most of us this state of mind, which Bion believed was at the heart of the practice of psychoanalytic insight in individuals and groups, is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

Each of these is also available in an edition printed by Karnac Books, London, for the Maresfield Library Earlier versions of some of the ideas and models developed in the above are reprinted, with a wry commentary by Bion in: The three volumes of A Memoir of the Future are: Imago Editora; ; Four Discussions with W.

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