Talk for Bedford Counsellors' Network

Below is the text for the talk I will give this evening (December 6th. 2012)

Text of talk to be given on December 6^th 2012

W. R. Bion and Reverie

I propose to structure the talk in the following way:

a)    Start with a description of reverie and the experience of it;

b)    Give some biographical information about Bion to give a context;

c)    If we are feeling safe enough, share two minutes of not speaking as a group;

d)    Finish with a discussion about how reverie can be used in therapy.

There are two types of experience, according to Bion: that of the pre-conceptual and the conceptual. These experiences may be thought of roughly as pre-verbal and verbal and (largely) unconscious and conscious states. It is suggested that they need to be linked, and if this linking does not take place properly a sense of a fully integrated and contained self cannot develop. The linking happens in reverie and other dream states.

I think that Marilyn Mathew describes the experience of reverie very well when she talks about reverie being like the unlatching of an internal window. She describes the experience of looking outside through a window and meditatively allowing oneself to be drawn into the view. There is the experience of being absorbed into the distance and the sense of entering into a space deep inside oneself. One enters into a dream-like state though fully conscious.

Though it’s a dreamy state in wakefulness, it’s different to what we usually think of as day-dreams. Daydreams are more like Freud’s idea of wish-fulfilment: there is a wish or desire or conflict that needs to be resolved. This is done in fantasy, in consciousness, for an example with an erotic daydream; of a fantasy of romance, say, or a dream of a tropical island holiday on a grey winter’s day in England.

Reverie is more unbidden. There’s a sense of going beyond oneself, and at the same time being drawn deep within oneself.

In the context of therapy time, Ogden has described reverie as being like ruminations. They are reflective thoughts that are going on in the background that one keeps coming back to. Often as therapists I think we worry about these thoughts and can see them as distractions.

Ogden gives the example of feeling that he was distracted in a session with a patient. Where he works there is an office car park. Without permission a couple have set up a hand car wash business in the car park. They have a loud industrial vacuum cleaner which they use for cleaning the interiors of the cars. In the session Ogden is drawn into the disturbing noise of the vacuum. His patient does not appear to notice. He starts thinking about how abrasive and difficult the couple doing the car cleaning are to deal with. He is going to have to deal with the City Hall in making a complaint about noise nuisance and planning rules infringement along with legal procedures to get them off the car park. When he ‘comes round’ from his absorption in these thoughts and the noise of the vacuum, he feels bad about himself and is very anxious. His patient doesn’t appear to have noticed anything and has continued to talk. Though his patient has described symptoms that are uncomfortable for her, the way she presents herself is very ‘up.’ She is a successful lawyer, married and leads an active social life.

Over the next few weeks Ogden finds himself coming back to his reverie and his reflections and ruminations on it. He wonders about whether he was distracted and failed to be able to concentrate on what his client was saying because of his own concerns or whether there was something else. As the sessions go on his client slowly reveals in the sessions that she feels empty and meaningless as a person and is very frightened by the void she experiences herself as being. Ogden describes his work with his patient in some detail but essentially in terms of the reverie there’s an association that Ogden made between the void of the vacuum cleaner that he was drawn into and his client experiencing herself as a frightening void. In the moment of the therapy session Ogden was able to make the link between inside and outside states and pre-conceptual and conceptual experiences when it seems that his patient was unable to do that in that moment.

A reverie example from literature is set in a short story by the writer Haruki Murakami. The story is somewhat surreal though apparently based in ordinary reality. A young successful couple newly married find themselves hungry one evening with nothing to eat in the fridge. They live in Tokyo and could simply go to a 24 hour supermarket. However, that isn’t going to be enough: it won’t satisfy them. They decide that they have to hold up an all-night bakery and steal the bread.

While they are having this conversation, the male protagonist of the story falls into a reverie. He experiences himself as bobbing in a little boat on a vast ocean. The water is opaque. Then it clears to reveal a great depth and a large volcano in the sea bed. This revelation as Murakami calls it is over in a matter of seconds and his wife doesn’t appear to notice.

As an interpretation I might say that the protagonist thinks that he knows himself and his wife and that they are safe and secure in ordinary life. However the linking of his internal and external states reveals something else to him – the fragility of life and how he can know someone else or not and himself.

I would say that reveries can be experienced as everyday, as with Ogden’s distraction by the vacuum cleaner, or as a significant linking and structural change, what might be termed a ‘reverie moment’ such as with the revelation Murakami’s character experiences.

Biography and development of the idea of reverie

Bion was born in India in 1897. He came to England aged 8, to go to school here, and lived most of his life in England. For the last 10 years of his life he lived in California. In 1979 he returned and died within a couple of months of his return, aged 82.

He left school at 18 and went straight into the first world war as a tank commander. He was awarded a DSO for a particular action. He described the experience of war as highly traumatic and felt that there was a moment when he died existentially.

After the war he read history at Oxford University, then trained in medicine at University College London. He thought he might train as a surgeon, then turned to psychiatry and his interest in psychoanalysis. Between the wars he worked at the Tavistock Institute and started to train as a psychoanalyst with John Rickman. This training was interrupted by the second world war. He rejoined the army as a psychiatrist. Initially he was involved with recruitment boards and selection. Then later he worked with trauma. Initially this was about how to get traumatised service people back to the frontline, and later re-integrated with civilian life. He was in charge of what came to be known as the first Northfield experiment at the Birmingham hospital. This was a forerunner of the therapeutic communities movement. However, the first experiment was short-lived. The patients responded well but the staff found the ‘leaderless’ approach too difficult to handle and the project was abandoned. A year later Harold Bridger set up the second experiment, which did continue.

Bion wrote a book called ‘Experience in Groups.’ After the war, though, he turned to individual work and completed his psychoanalytic training with Melanie Klein.

In terms of developing theory, Bion developed one of Klein’s key concepts: projective identification. Projective identification was developed from Freud’s idea of projection and transference. The basic idea is that very young infants need someone to identify with as a way of dealing with their chaotic and split off mental states which predominate in the infant experience, as Klein saw it. The person identified with initially is usually the mother or the person doing the mothering function. The infant experiences herself as the mother without separation as a way of being able to split off the bad feelings that threaten to overwhelm.

Bion acknowledged this defensive position but said that this happens when projective identification is excessive. When it is not excessive and experienced in a state of reverie between mother and baby then this is a form of communication. It is a usual form of communication in pre-conceptual experience. Through this communication learning and development can take place. An inner psychological space is developed, which Bion called a container.

The container is both a structure and a containing process. Initially the containing space for a baby is not developed. An identification with the containing space of another is therefore needed for experience to be bearable. In this way a containing space within the infant can develop. The containing space of the other is needed less. The baby can learn to self-soothe, self-regulate emotion and develop more independently. There is more of a sense of a self being contained, a sense of being able to come home to oneself and to bring home needed resources.

There can also be the sense of a persecutory container if the containing process has not functioned properly in the early parenting experience. There needs to be a sense of being able to go beyond this initial experience of the container in order to be able to repair and heal. In reverie there is this sense of beyond. There’s a sense of looking out into a distance which draws one into a very inner space.

Group Experience

Use of reverie

Reverie

Reverie

Where do we start as therapists? That was an important question for Bion. He started with the therapeutic space at the beginning of each session. He urged that therapists should put aside ‘memory and desire.’ The word he used was eschew, memory and desire. Perhaps that starting place is with Bion’s notion of ‘reverie’.

Marilyn Mathew describes an experience of reverie as when we look out of a window at a quiet moment and gaze at the view outside. Slowly the vision changes. We are looking outside, yet suddenly we have the feeling of being absorbed in our own gaze. We drop into ourselves. An internal window opens from the external and we inhabit a place inside ourselves.

Wilfred R. Bion (1897-1979) was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. His initial work was with groups and early therapeutic communities during and after the Second World War. During the 1950’s, he completed his training as a psychoanalyst with Melanie Klein, and then focused on individual work. Theoretical work started with the ideas of Klein, particularly with development of her notion of ‘projective identification.’ This is the idea that young infants unconsciously phantasise about the mother’s person before psychological separation takes place.

Bion theorised that the relationship with the mother takes place in a state of being which he called ‘reverie.’ In this state, when the mother is seeking to know what her baby is ‘thinking’ or experiencing, then communication, relational development and learning is possible. Reverie can be defined as a dream-like state in consciousness which allows a link with unconsciousness. The mother can sense what the baby wants in a pre-verbal sense, in a type of knowing that is not knowing in the adult language way of understanding.

Reverie might be likened to current ideas around ‘mindfulness’ and mediation. There is also a link I think with Fonagy’s idea of ‘mentalisation’, the development of Bowlby’s idea that we develop working models of the mind so that we can guess what is in the (otherwise uncommunicated)  minds of others.

My aim for the talk is to take an experiential approach and use examples of reveries from my personal life as well as with working with clients.

References

Reverie: Between Thought and Prayer  Congresses - 2004 Barcelona

by Marilyn Mathew   Thursday, 13 August 2009 19:26 http://iaap.org/congresses/barcelona-2004/reverie-between-thought-and-prayer.html Where do we start as therapists? David Ward See: davidwardtravelling.blogspot.co.uk W.R.Bion  Learning from Experience, Heinemann Medical Books, London 1962

CPD article: A hunger that can't be met

I am writing this blog with therapists in mind and the process of continuing professional development. However, there may be others who will find my articles of interest, particularly those interested in the relationship between art and psychotherapy.

My first article for this blog considers a dimension of anger and violence.

A hunger that can’t be met:

Murakami’s story The Second Bakery Attack as dissociated anger uncontained

                              

In this essay I am assuming that the opposites of anger and violence and peace go together in human experience and human experience of the world. The question I am examining is this: where in the ‘peace’ of ordinary, everyday life and relationships does this anger lie and reveal itself in its origin?

Of course we can say readily enough that anger and violence express themselves in the aggression of war, and closer to home, in crime and anti-social behaviour every day of the week. In this, the second assumption I am making is that anger resides in all of us in a certain way. I am associating anger with violence. However, in the ordinary and everyday of existence, anger and violence can appear to be ‘out there,’ outside of a sense of self, and in other people: those with ‘anger management’ issues, such as clients, and others who are criminals. Such people can easily been seen as different to ‘us’. It may be said, as a possibility, that there was early emotional and perhaps physical damage to the brain in its hard wiring. That could be a possibility and could be one explanation of difference in a normative model of the mind. However, I have the bias of ‘sameness’. How can and do we come to know ourselves, and how does the nature of anger and violence reveal itself to us?

The ‘management of anger’ is an important approach in therapy and has obvious practical benefits. However I think that for those benefits to be sustainable over a period of time, then it is necessary to understand the well-springs of anger and how it originates and is found in ourselves. That origin is found in the very early infant experience, I believe. In that very early experience it is supposed (by W.R. Bion, for example) that there is not yet differentiation between physical and bodily experience and psychological experience. Feeding for an infant, for example, is a ‘total’ experience of a means of sustaining life, of being held and contained physically and psychologically against the fearful and terrifying possibility of not surviving. How the infant is helped or otherwise to contain that fear by the parents, and then helped to learn how to do that for her or himself, is key to how anger and violence will be experienced later in life.

Here, I am attempting to use Murakami’s story as an ‘aesthetic object’, as a ‘container:’ a work of art that allows us to understand and experience what is happening; an object that is itself containing, and in this sense, alive as experience.

Key concepts

Therapeutic container and the container-containing process; aesthetic container or object; dissociation.

The Container

W.R.Bion proposed the idea of a relationship state that he described as a container-containing process.¹ The state is conceived of as a basic or original state of relationship with infant and parents, and, particularly in Bion’s original idea, as between infant and mother. The baby is held and has needs met, such as feeding and cleaning, both in a physical and psychological way. Initially it is supposed that what we come to think of as the psychological and physiological are at this time largely undifferentiated.

If this relationship process is adequate (or to refer to Winnicott, ‘good enough’), then the baby learns how to tolerate ‘frustration’ as Bion puts it. The toxic sense of vulnerability and the overwhelming experience of the possibility of annihilation and not surviving is held and contained by the parents. In this way the baby comes to learn that such experiences can be survived with the containing function of the parents. In time the baby learns how to do this for her/himself. The baby can ‘wait’ and know that the immediate experience can be experienced even if uncomfortable and will not last forever. It does not have to be projected out and experienced as someone and something else, that is, it can be experienced as part of the emerging sense of self.

Bion supposed that the containing relationship happens in what he describes as a state of ‘reverie.’ This is a state of consciousness that is dreamlike and is experienced like dreams and metaphor. In a waking state this state of consciousness links with unconscious parts of a person and states that are normally thought of as sleep or states of unconsciousness. In this way there can be more of an integration with different parts of the mind and there is less of a mind-body split, as with the original less differentiated experiences that Bion supposes is the infant experience.

Anger and violence might be said to be related to a state of powerlessness that threatens to overwhelm when the containing process is not adequate. Not that it can be complete or some idealised state of perfection. There are always blemishes: as Donald Meltzer put it when referring to feeding ‘the breast always has blemishes.’²

Aesthetic object or container

An aesthetic object might be described as a work of art that ‘lives’ as a symbol or metaphor for the condition of human experience in relation to the world and universe. It lives because it can offer itself as a containing state. Such a state can go beyond individual relationships. Beyond, say, individual parents to the wider society of parents and parenting and to wider relationships with society. An aesthetic object may point further than that and be able to ‘speak’ of the nature of the world, say, for example the logos that Heraclitus³ conceptualises. Such a logos is both an account of the world and the poetic word, the work of art as word.

Dissociation

Freud demonstrated that part of what we think of as mind is unavailable to an ‘I’ that we usually conceive of as a sense of self, a sense of experiencing a centre as a person. The relationship between unconscious and conscious states is critical in my view to understanding how we are as persons.

Freud also demonstrated ways in which this relationship between states can occur that are both helpful and unhelpful to a healthy and whole way of being.  Aspects of a person that are revealed or potentially could be revealed to the conscious state or sense of ‘I’, may be repressed by that conscious state, a process that is itself outside of conscious awareness. There is a way of partitioning or splitting experience as a way of defending against it without consciously experiencing it. Freud’s method was therefore to bring these areas of experience into consciousness and thereby establish a more helpful balance between the states of mind.

Murakami’s story: The Second Bakery Attack⁴

I am not saying that my interpretation of the story as outlined below is definitive. As with any work of art, as indicated in my definition of an aesthetic object above, it is necessary to allow the work to ‘speak’ for itself to an individual in that particular moment of the individual’s existence.

Perhaps we don’t so much choose things in our lives, but experience how things (or the world) happen and reveal themselves. This is obviously a generalisation and a bias. Things in actuality are much more complex and of course as humans we can choose in many ways. However, maybe we choose at critical or pivotal moments when there is the possibility that our unconscious selves will reveal the potential for choice to us as a conscious person.

 Our response to the revelation is what brings meaning, importantly in terms of openness to what happens, or our shut-ness to it, as with denial, repression, splitting -  to name some ways of being closed.

There is the strong theme in Murakami’s story of how we come to know ourselves, and others. The main protagonists of the story are a young couple recently married. Inexplicably, apparently, they wake up in the early hours of the morning and experience intense hunger pangs. They get up and find that there is hardly anything in the fridge that might properly be called food. While they are considering what to do, the main protagonist of the story – the male partner – finds himself unintentionally telling his wife something of his past that he hasn’t revealed to her before. While he is doing this he experiences a revelation that operates on another level as the ‘ordinary’ conversation continues.

This revelation is another story, experienced in cinematic images, that could be considered as a reverie – a state conceived of by Bion that might be said to be a state of unconsciousness in consciousness: an experience that links the unrevealed and revealed aspects of the protagonist’s mind to a sense of ‘I’.

In the revelatory reverie the male protagonist experiences himself, whilst sitting in his kitchen, as bobbing in a little boat. Below him the waters of a sea clear, revealing a volcano deep below emerging from the seabed.

The protagonist says that he doesn’t know what this experience of the hunger in these images mean. He is not Sigmund Freud he says. However, he goes on to make associations. The hunger is associated with a fear, that of acrophobia. When he makes this connection he then remembers the first attack he made on a bakery. He then ‘just happens’ to share this memory with his wife.

His wife draws the story out of him. She has a theory that this hunger can’t just be satisfied by going to an all-night restaurant. That is not allowed. He tells her that when he was a student he attacked a bakery with a friend. He was lacking money but work was not an option. They attacked a local bakery at night. However the baker thwarted the attack (not robbery) by doing a deal with them. If they listened to Wagner’s Tannhäuser and The Flying Dutchman they could have all the bread that they could take away. The deal worked in that they got bread and the baker was able to make his Wagner ‘propaganda.’

There was a problem though afterwards. The deal caused the breakup of the friendship with the male friend. There’s an implication here that this problem or ‘curse’ is still in force and might cause a breakup of the marriage. Therefore the wife insists that they need to act on the situation immediately whilst the hunger is still with them and attack another bakery.

Something to note is that the characters are not named, but are referred to in terms of their relationships. This in a way might give the story quite a depersonalised feel. However, it is a way that Murakami builds his main character as a sense of ‘I’. This is an ‘I’ without a name that we can identify with more readily as ourselves.

So, the couple set out in the early hours of the morning to find a bakery open in Tokyo. The world appears to have changed since the first bakery attack. They have difficulty finding a bakery that is open. There has to be a compromise. Having stopped the car near to an open McDonald’s they decide to ‘compromise’ and attack the McDonald’s, but for the bread buns only. McDonald’s must stand in for a traditional night bakery.

The protagonist’s wife has put her shotgun on the back seat of the car. She gets out of the car and covers the number plates of the car in quite a professional way. She has the equipment for an attack. The protagonist wonders at this, not previously knowing about the shotgun. They are both ‘respectable’ members of society. Aged around thirty, they have established themselves in conventional jobs and lead an ordinary lifestyle.

They enter the burger place, and, threatening the staff with the shotgun, order them to prepare thirty Big Macs, informing the shocked and bemused staff that they only wish to rob them of the buns and will pay for the rest of the burgers and Cokes to drink.

The manager reluctantly agrees to close the shop and comply. He worries about McDonald’s procedures and closing early. It would be more straightforward if they took the cash as that would cause fewer administrative problems.

Having made their getaway with thirty Big Macs, they stop on a desolate car park and eat several of them each until they are stuffed and satisfied.

The story ends with the wife going to sleep on the male protagonist’s shoulder in the car. The hunger has vanished with dawn breaking.  He is now alone, bobbing in his boat. Looking down the volcano has gone. He stretches out in the bottom of the boat and closes his eyes ‘waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged.’

Summary Interpretation

As indicated above I am not proposing a definitive interpretation. The story needs to be read and experienced as a container and aesthetic object. Here, however, is a summary interpretation.

The hunger that the couple experience is associated with fear. The nature of the fear is to do with what it is to be a human person and experience the world. There has not been a process of containment to mediate the fear and therefore as a curse (or compulsion) the fear as anger at uncontainment must be acted out violently to expunge it, or to project it as an alienated world, where, in the context of the story, they are unable to find a traditional all-night bakery.

From the point of view of the male protagonist, the fear is expressed in a revelatory reverie as non-verbal images. The narrative of the story proceeds in two states, that of the revelation which is more dream-like and metaphorical, and that of the action which is more in the realm of consciousness.

At the level and state of understanding that the characters find themselves in, both in terms of self-understanding and the world and society as they find it, the fear as compulsive curse can only be dealt with by violent acting-out.

At the end of the story the female protagonist sleeps and the male is now alone and enters the state of reverie. Although day has come – which might be said to traditionally indicate consciousness – they enter a state of dream. The woman is asleep but he is experiencing a waking dream, a reverie. He can now wait to be taken by the sea to where he belongs. Presumably this waiting is not what he has been able to do before. In Bion’s terms, he is now able to ‘tolerate frustration.’

Application to therapy.

In the development of a sense of being a person, the ability to tolerate frustration is a key in the management of fear and associated anger and violence. This happens as the containing-container process.

I would suggest that with many clients, what clients want to understand in the first moment of meeting in therapy, is if they can be borne and tolerated by the therapist as a person experiencing fear. In the sudden intimacy of the one to one relationship will the therapist turn away immediately from this fear in the deflection and dissociation of their own defences?

Having in mind an aesthetic object such as Murakami’s story can help the therapist to meet and hold that fear. At some point in the therapy, the object might with caution and if appropriate be directly interpreted to the client. In my experience though, the use of such objects is largely for the therapist.

Such an idea of course – of using metaphor as containing object – is as old as Freud. This was one of the ways Freud established therapy as it is known today. The use of Oedipus as a story to understand theory and as an experience in itself is well known and has entered the group consciousness of society. Of course different people have different understandings of what that means depending on how they have come to understand the group meaning.

What I would suggest is that therapists have a stock of containing objects at hand to have in mind in support of the client. These objects may be a mixture of a therapist’s own containing moments and aesthetic objects. We have to have our narratives written first. Then, if we are to follow Bion’s paradoxical approach, at the moment of meeting the client we need to ‘eschew memory and desire’. In other words, be open to meeting the client in their own terms.

References

1. Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann Medical Books.

2. Meltzer, Donald. See foreword to The Vale of Soulmaking Meg Harris Williams 2005, Karnac

3. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus Charles H. Kahn, Cambridge University Press, 1979

4. Murakami, Haruki The Second Bakery Attack, in The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage Books, 2003, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin