The International Psychoanalytic Summer Institute: Encounters with the Deep – The Unknowable and Unthinkable in Bion’s and Winnicott’s Late Writings

With Annie Reiner and Ofra Eshel

Bion and Winnicott have exerted a profound influence on the theory and practice of clinical psychoanalysis over the last sixty years. Their groundbreaking ideas have been widely investigated by analysts and psychotherapists around the world, and have turned into a vibrant wave in psychoanalysis, which challenges traditional theory and practice. Yet, it seems to us that the revolutionary meaning of their most radical ideas has, in certain ways, been evaded, underestimated, or even criticized and rejected. This is especially true with regard to the radical departure of Bion’s and Winnicott’s late clinical ideas from conventional psychoanalytic work. The focus in the seminar will be on late Bion’s most revolutionary and challenging concept of O, the ultimately unknown and unknowable realm of experience, and on the unthinkable in Winnicott’s posthumous clinical ideas regarding early breakdown and madness. Both represent a profound change in core aspects of analytic work, and have become essential in understanding Bion’s and Winnicott’s thinking. It is a shift in emphasis from the unveiling of meaning and relationships within the patient’s already existing scripts to an ontological process of being and becoming, as a consequence of a radical ontological experience of patient-with-analyst.

Annie and Ofra will present and illustrate their own ways of understanding and grappling with the meaning and clinical implications of these radical ideas in psychoanalytic work.

“Transformation in O” – Ofra Eshel

Ofra emphasizes “Transformation in O”, when dealing with the most unknown, undifferentiated mode of psychic functioning in Bion and Winnicott (drawing on Vermote’s 2013 model).  Rather than epistemological exploration (Knowing), she underscores in late Bion’s thinking the unknown and unknowable ultimate emotional reality-O, the primacy of being at-one with the reality O of the patient, in a lived, new experience.  In this mode of analytic functioning, Bion’s enigmatic words acquire their full meaning: ”With this [O] the analyst cannot be identified: he must be it.…at-one-ment with it and evolution…that is common to analyst and analysand.…  In practice this means not that the analyst recalls some relevant memory but that a relevant constellation will be evoked during the process of at-one-ment with O, the process denoted by transformation OàK” (Bion, 1970).

Winnicott’s ideas about the unthinkable early breakdown are presented in his posthumous papers “Fear of breakdown” (thought to have been written around 1963, but published in 1974), and its continuation, “Psychology of madness”(1965). They describe the agonizing, unthinkable early breakdown or madness that has already happened but could not be experienced, and therefore is “unlived” (Ogden, 2014) and “undreamt” (Ogden, 2005). In Ofra’s view, the ultimately unknowable and unthinkable realm of experience is connected mainly with early breakdown or madness (Winnicott) and mental catastrophe (Bion). The unthinkable cannot be thought, but only relived and gone through with the analyst.  It is therefore essential to the practical work of psychoanalysis. For only the great intensity of reliving and experiencing the early agony – this time in treatment, with the analyst, can reach these innermost annihilated-annihilating states, and create a new experience within the depths of core catastrophe, unthinkable breakdown and madness.

Bion’s Concept of O – Annie Reiner

The concept of ‘O’ is seen by some as an anomaly in Bion’s work, but Annie views it as a natural evolution of his earlier ideas, which allow us further understanding and insight into them. O represents an infinite and unknowable realm of experience – ultimate reality and absolute truth – and so the challenges lie in discussing something which cannot be discussed or understood verbally. Bion makes it clear that this is nothing new to psychoanalysis, for in dealing with the mind and with dreams, both of which are also ephemeral, unknowable realities, the need to find ways to experience and represent these metaphysical truths was always inherent in psychoanalytic work. What Bion’s late work makes clear, however, is his view of ‘O’ as the essential and necessary focus of clinical work, without which clinical work is not possible.  Annie will also examine the aspect of ‘O’ which Bion described as the ‘Godhead,’ placing O firmly in the realm of theology, and yet carefully distinguishing it from traditional religious, institutionalized ideas of God. She will discuss in depth, the philosophical and theological underpinnings of these differences between the reified “God” of religion and the“godhead” as a metaphysical or spiritual perspective, in the hope of shedding some light on this often confounding concept of O.

Monday evening Poetry reading and discussion – Annie Reiner

Bion pointed out that the difficulty in dealing with psychic truths –  ‘O’ – often engenders hatred of psychoanalysis in both the analyst and the patient. He wrote, “The human animal has not ceased to be persecuted by his mind and the thoughts usually associated with it.”  In this presentation and poetry reading of her own poems and those of other poets, Annie Reiner will examine the similarities and differences in the languages of poetry and psychoanalysis in communicating these deep levels of mental existence. Like all creative arts, poetry is an expression of ‘O,’ and the poems presented aim to shed light on this in relation to the states of mind with which we are familiar in our work.  Because O cannot be directly expressed, creative works by writers and philosophers provide a different perspective to help us to penetrate that unknowable world.

Dreams are an important path to understanding the mind, and we will see the ways in which poetry provides us another “royal road to the unconscious.” Our dreams utilize many of the tools of poetry – symbols, metaphors, imagery, dreams – and so we might say that we are all poets, at least while we are asleep. We each create these scenarios in a language that even we ourselves do not understand, and psychoanalysis affords us the means to learn something of this mysterious language. Nietzsche said, “We have Art that we may not perish from Truth.” Bion’s ideas about O as absolute truth similarly provide a view of psychoanalytic work as another tool to help us stay alive to the reality of inner and outer life. Given the often painful nature of exploring the unknown, the fact that people nonetheless persist in their pursuits of these artistic and psychoanalytic truths, speaks to the fundamental need for such truths.

Annie Reiner – Bio

Annie Reiner, Ph.D., Psy.D., LCSW, is a senior faculty member and training analyst at The Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC) in Los Angeles.   She was profoundly influenced by  the ideas of Wilfred Bion, with whom she studied briefly in the 1970’s.  She has published extensively, including her book, The Quest For Conscience and The Birth Of The Mind (Karnac, 2009), and her most recent book is Bion & Being: Passion and the Creative Mind (Karnac, 2012).  In addition to writing and speaking about psychoanalysis throughout the world, Dr. Reiner is also an accomplished poet, playwright, and painter, with 4 books of poems, a book of short stories, and six children’s books which she also illustrated. Dr. Reiner maintains a private practice in Beverly Hills, California.

Ofra Eshel – Bio

Ofra Eshel, Psy.D., is faculty, training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA); co-founder, former coordinator and faculty of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Advanced Psychotherapists at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute; co-founder and coordinator of the Israel Winnicott Center, and on the Advisory Board of the International Winnicott Association (IWA);  lecturer at the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University. She is the Book Review Editor of Sihot-Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy.

Her papers were published in psychoanalytic journals and presented at national and international conferences. In recent years, she was the recipient of the Leonard J. Comess Fund grant at the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP), Los Angeles, in 2011; visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of North California (PINC), San Francisco, in 2013; awarded the Frances Tustin Memorial Prize for 2013. She was featured in 2012 in ‘Globes’ (Israel’s financial newspaper and magazine) as the 16th of the fifty most influential women in Israel, which is rather unusual for a psychoanalyst. She is in private practice in Tel-Aviv, Israel.