No: 16 / THINKING ABOUT THINKING: A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO BIONIAN VIEW

  • THINKING ABOUT THINKING: A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO BIONIAN VIEW

    Pınar Padar
    Summary :

    One of the pioneering member of British Psychoanalytic School , Wilfren Bion, has a very original language which makes him difficult to understand even by psychoanalysts. After his first studies on how a group functions in itself, following Melanie Klein, he tried to understand the psychotic mental activities and functioning. The ideas he developed on thinking are still ground breaking from psychoanalytic point of view. Today, there is no comprimise on whether he is a Kleinian or an original theorist on his own. However his model on thinking introduces new premises. Differed from Freud and Klein, Bion accepts thinking/ not thinking as the central conflict of human psyche. That?s why Bion?s motherinfant dyad can exists upon the capacity of mental functions of containment and be contained. This sort of relationship also repeats itself between the analyst and the patient. For Bion, the containment capacity of the analyst turns the counter-transference into an analytic tool. He also says that to know is an linking form between both intra and inter-psychical elements. The attacks on these linkings that are building blocks of thinking have a crucial role. He discusses that the attacks of the patient to the thinking capacity of the analyst have to be considered as envy against the creative relationship that can happen between the two. So envy and greed of psychotic thinking can be traced in the counter transference.

    Keywords : Bion, English School, Model of Thinking, Alpha Function