This clinically focused book explores W. R. Bion’s thinking on primitive and unrepresented mental states and shows how therapists can work effectively with traumatized patients who are difficult to reach. The author illuminates how trauma survivors suffer from direct access to primal undifferentiated positions of the psyche that lie outside the symbolic order of the mind and are resistant to treatment. This access, unmediated by symbolic representation but represented in the body, disrupts the normal trajectory of development and of relationship. Integrating theory and clinical application, the book addresses processes of symbolization, somatic receptivity, and the use of countertransference when working therapeutically with undeveloped areas of the mind. It also demonstrates how primitive body relations and object relations include the body of the analyst as part of the analytic frame and are essential in establishing a therapeutic alliance. Illustrated with detailed clinical vignettes, Bion and Primitive Mental States is important reading for psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, and educators who wish to understand primitive states of mind and body in patients who have previously been considered untreatable.
Trauma and Primitive Mental States: An Object Relations Perspective offers a clinically based framework through which adult survivors of early childhood trauma can re-engage with painful past events to create meaningful futures for themselves. The book highlights the use of the body and the mind in working with these early unmentalized and unrepresented states, illustrating the value of finding language that embodies emotions, and working in the here and now of transference and counter-transference. Including a range of examples of how early trauma can thus be re-presented and clinically understood, the book illustrates how patients can discover themselves and leave their repetitive patterns of suffering behind. Written by a clinician with over 30 years’ experience, this will be fascinating reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as any mental health professional working with childhood trauma.
Traditional psychoanalysis relies on the presence of certain meaning-making capacities in the patient for its effectiveness. Primitive Mental States examines how particular capacities including those for symbolising, fantasising, dreaming, experiencing and finding meanings in those experiences, can be taken for granted. Many of us lack these capacities in certain dimensions of our minds making traditional psychoanalysis ineffective. In this book, international contributors are brought together to consider a radical evolution in contemporary psychoanalytic theory developed from a combination of ultrasound studies, infant analysis, and observation of mothers and babies. These findings demonstrate how much mental life exists even before birth and considers unevolved, unborn and barely born aspects of the self such as the birth of emotion and the birth of alpha functioning. Topics covered include: prenatal imprints on the mind and body difficult to treat patients non-verbal, non-symbolic, disembodied states of being early relational and attachment trauma. Illustrated throughout with original data and extensive clinical discussions from some of the biggest names in the field, Primitive Mental States will be a useful resource for students and seasoned analysts alike.
This exciting and original collection explores Antonino Ferro’s post-Bionian Field Theory, expanding upon the analytic work of Wilfred Bion to focus on the intersubjective development of psychic regulatory processes. Written by members of the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies who have maintained a close and fruitful collaboration with Ferro and his colleagues, the book centers on understanding, engaging and treating primitive mental states. Ferro's Field Theory operationalizes Bion’s concept of an analyst who is not the repository of ‘the truth’, but is instead one who has the capacity to listen, to dwell in doubt, to utilize reverie, humor and play, and facilitate the transformation of previously unthinkable aspects of the patient’s experience into articulatable mental elements such as pictorial images, thoughts and dreams. Ferro’s contributions and their analysis are especially relevant to working with primitive character disorders, the difficulties of which lie beyond neurosis and the comfortable reach of the precepts of classical analytic technique. Each chapter features detailed clinical examples that explicate and apply post-Bionian Field Theory, making this book an interesting and useful read for analysts and analytic therapists of all orientations, who work with patients in all diagnostic categories.
The ring of fire stands for the life cycle of both the universe and each individual being: the circular dance of nature in the eternal process of creation and destruction. At the same time, the light radiated by the ring of flames symbolizes eternal wisdom and transcendental illumination. -J.E. Cirlot. A Dictionary of Symbols The circular form in which the group is seated symbolizes its unity, connectedness, and cohesion as well as its microcosmic relation to the larger world of human evolution, culture, and the life cycle. Foulkes, Bion, and others have identified primitive layers of affect and object relations where universal collective themes and early infantile object relations are re-experienced and repeated in the meeting place for healing called the therapy group. In this context, very profound emotions and energies are released which have deep implications for change and growth, provided the therapist can manage and respond to them effectively. This book brings together a collection of new and original contributions to an understanding of primitive object relations and intensely critical emotional states which present the maximum challenge to the group psychotherapist: the ring of fire. An international group of colleagues, based primarily in Great Britain and the United States, address areas of special interest to them and to which they have devoted considerable research and therapeutic effort. They provide insights into the dynamics of these issues and guide the therapist in the management and interpretation of the group events as they unfold. While much has been written on primitive group states, the information is scattered throughout many journals and books and all too often does not address the practical problems faced by the group therapist in Practical terms. Furthermore, there have been significant developments in affect theory and object relations theory which have yet to be assimilated sufficiently into the theory and technique of group psychotherapy. This book attempts to reduce that gap as it concentrates on the relevance of concepts to treatment in accordance with Kurt Lewin's maxim, There is nothing so practical as a good theory. Ring of Fire will be invaluable to group psychotherapy supervisors, beginning and experienced group therapists, students and supervisers of group psychotherapy and group dynamics, and organizational consultants who utilize group dynamics principles in their work. Victor L. Schermer is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Philadelphia. He is Executive Director of the Study Group for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Process and Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Conflict. Malcolm Pines was, until his recent retirement, Consultant Psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic, London and is a member of the Group-Analytic Practice.
Wilfred Bion described "O" as "the unknowable and the unreachable ultimate truth". In this fascinating collection, a range of authors offer their own theoretical, clinical and artistic approaches to exploring this enduring but mysterious idea. Drawn from contributions from the 8th International Bion Conference in 2014, the book examines how "O" can be experienced in all aspects of internal and external reality and within all relationships, from an individual relating to the mother to their emotional relationship with their self. It features insights into "O" drawn from the area of faith as well as its manifestations in clinical practice, while also included is a chapter exploring the links between Bion’s ideas and those of Winnicott, Lacan, Green and Freud. Featuring contributions from some of the world’s leading Bion scholars, this will be essential reading for any psychoanalyst interested in exploring the concept of "O", as well as scholars in philosophy and theology.
In The Violence of Emotions the author marries an ability to introduce the reader to the intimate climate of an analytic session with a passionate rereading of Bion. To emphasize both the empirical nature of psychoanalysis and its extraordinary capacity to engender illuminating hypotheses concerning the functioning of the mind, clinical examples alternate with theoretical argument. The psychoanalytic model espoused by Giuseppe Civitarese in his approach to both is analytic field theory. Developed by various authors, including Ferro, commencing with Bion and continued with contributions from the Barangers, Grotstein and Ogden, the theory of the analytic field reveals the social nature of subjectivity and, in clinical work, the intersubjective and dreamlike climate in which a psychoanalytic session unfolds. This leads to a new way of interpreting the facts of analysis. As such, topics of discussion include: transcending the caesura as Bion’s theoretical method hypochondria as de-subjectivation and narrative genre in analysis the aesthetic conflict and alfa function Bion’s search for ambiguity the casting of characters in the analytic dialogue metaphor of text and translation in Freud and Bion. Yet the book has an even more specific objective, focusing attention as it does on the central importance of emotions in mental life and of aesthetic experience as the model of what truly happens in analysis. This is an aspect which the author rediscovers and explores in the thought of Bion and his successors, and which he regards as a way of investigating the deepest and most primitive levels of mental life. This book will be of great interest to psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists.
The conflict and dissociation between the Body and the Mind have determinant implications in the context of our current clinical practice, and are an important source of internal and relational disturbances. Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis proposes the concept as a new hypothesis, different from traumatic dissociation or states of splitting. This approach opens the door to a clinical confrontation with extreme forms of mental disturbance, such as psychosis or borderline disorders, and strengthens the relational power of the analytic encounter, through a focus on the internal sensory/emotional axis in both analyst and analysand. The book details this importance of the analyst’s intrasubjective relationship with the analysand in constructing new developmental horizons, starting from the body-mind exchange of the two participants. Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis will be of use to students, beginners in psychotherapy, mental health practitioners and seasoned psychoanalysts.
'This is an extraordinary and exciting book, the work of a truly original and creative psychoanalytic theoretician and most astute clinician. Ogden continues to expand and to deepen his reformulations of the British object-relations theorists, M. Klein, W. R. Bion, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. D. Fairbairn, H. Guntrip, to illuminate further the world of internalized object relations. His concepts are evolutionary and at times revolutionary. Exploring the area of human experience that lies beyond the psychological territories addressed by the previous theorists, he introduces the concept of an autistic-contiguous mode as a way of conceiving of the most primitive psychological organization through which the sensory 'floor' of the experience of self is generated. He conceives of this mode as a sensory-dominated, presymbolic area of experience in which the most primitive form of meaning is generated on the basis of organization of sensory impressions, particularly at the skin surface. A major tenet in the book is a conceptualization of human experience throughout life as the product of a dialectical interplay among three modes of generating experience: the depressive, the paranoid-schizoid, and the autistic-contiguous. Each mode creates, preserves, and negates the other. No single mode of generating experience exists independently of the others. Psychopathology is conceptualized as a 'collapse' of the dialectic in the direction of one or another mode of generating experience. The outcome of such collapse may be entrapment in rigid, asymbolic patterns of sensation (collapse in the direction of the autistic-contiguous mode), or imprisonment in a world of omnipotent internal objects where thoughts and feelings are experienced as things and forces which occupy or bombard the self (collapse in the direction of paranoid-schizoid mode) or isolation of the self from lived experience and aliveness of bodily, sensations (collapse in the direction of the depressive mode). Ogden presents his unique development of the autistic-contiguous mode as the synthesis, interpretation, and extension of the works of D. Meltzer, E. Bick, and F. Tustin. He is careful to state that this psychological organization is a developing and ongoing) mode of generating experience and not a limited phase of development; an elaboration of this primitive organization is an integral part of normal development. All three modes are considered not 'positions' to be passed through, outgrown, or overcome, and relegated to the past, but as integral dimensions of present adult ego functioning. Sensory experience in an autistic-contiguous mode has rhythmicity that is becoming the continuity of being; it has boundedness that is the beginning of experience of the place where one feels things and lives; it has features such as shape, hardness, cold, warmth and texture, beginnings of the qualities of who one is. As his generous case examples aptly demonstrate, Ogden's theories are solidly grounded in his discerning work with a broad variety of patients. His brilliant pathfinding will enlighten and enrich the reader with invaluable insights. He will listen with new ears and with a fresh conceptual framework with which to comprehend the most primitive elements of human development and the complex interplay among the different modes of experience. This is a bold, important, instructive, and stimulating book of equally great clinical and theoretical applicability.' —The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association A Jason Aronson Book
The author surveys Bion's publications and elaborates on his key contributions in depth while also critiquing them. The scope of this work is to synopsize, synthesize, and extend Bion's works in a reader-friendly manner. The book presents his legacy - his most important ideas for psychoanalysis. These ideas need to be known by the mental health profession at large. This work highlights and defines the broader and deeper implications of his works.It presents his ideas faithfully and also uses his ideas as "launching pads" for the author's conjectures about where his ideas point.
