Gerard Bleandonu - Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works

R.D. Hinshelwood

Bions writing often intimidates; therefore we have a surprising hesitancy over interpreting his views. Only Leon Grinberg (with colleagues) and Donald Meltzer have gone into print in any prominent way. And that is in spite of Bions enigmatic and ambiguous way of writing; it calls for interpretative secondary sources to develop it. The many ideas which he deliberately leaves half-formulated, the evocative and limping style of his fiction-writing (if it is fiction), and the often humorous kind of gestural asides to clinical material would seem to invite being filled up with flesh and blood and passion. And indeed they do. It is what Bion intended; he wanted to work his readers so that they produced their own responses, their own hard learning, instead of his. But the task that he seems to require of his readers is so personal and idiosyncratic that there is a sense of being in the closet with him in a private contemplation. It feels unseemly to fill out the ideas in ones own way for public consumption.

What Grard Blandonu has created is a sense of the corpus of Bions work as a whole, and he has set it in an episodic sketch derived from Bions autobiographical experience of his own life. We can see here just how much Bions oeuvre transcends Freud and Klein before him, and the work of subsequent Kleinians after him. And this is because Bion was interested in the tangential task of the meaning of psychoanalysis itself in our culture, and especially within a philosophical tradition. Blandonu has done us an important service in steering a way through the philosophical interests that influenced Bion, and the sources that he drew on. Bion the philosopher comes through strongly; he was a theory-builder, and only on the way a therapeutic psychoanalyst. That estimation contrasts with the overview we have cultivated, as practising psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, in order to exploit Bions ideas in therapy. His work as a whole is balanced between the two, but leaves us bemused; too philosophical to draw together a clinical school of psychoanalysis, too clinical to make an impact on philosophers as he truly wished. Blandonu manages to sit astride the two.

The book is structured simply: an initial review of Bions childhood; a review of his work on groups, and during World War Two; the period of his work on psychotic patients; an epistemological phase; and a final and brief section on the late fictional trilogy. The first section is tantalizingly sketchy, though evocative, as in fact are Bions autobiographical texts. One day a fully researched biography will mould into a perceptible form those hesitant links we barely glimpse here: the one that peeps out occasionally from his Indian upbringing with his ayah; his psychoanalytic mysticism that involved abolishing memory and desire (surely inspired by his roots in the East); and his later entry into the 1970s culture of Los Angeles where he would once gain have encountered oriental religion and mysticism.

I suppose all biography linking formative influences and the later professional achievements is risky, especially when written for psychoanalysts; and especially, perhaps, about a psychoanalyst. Perhaps Blandonu is right to leave that mostly aside and to leave us to fill in our own surmises, just as Bion would have done. For this book stays with the achievement. The section on groups informs us of the relation between basic assumptions and the ideas of J.A. Hadfield, Bions first therapist. Bion as a Hadfieldian before he was a Kleinian is intriguing and important; but we are again left with all the questions open for us to fill in what was all this social psychology that was around at the time for the Army and its psychiatrists to use? What really is the status now of these early ideas on groups after the redrawing of group life in Bions return to groups in 1970, a much more psychoanalytic (and Bionian!) approach?

Blandonus discourse on Bions ideas about psychosis rivets us to the texts; that