An Interview with Wilfred Bion John S. P e c k

"You ask whatever you like and I'll attempt to answer it" was Wilfred Bion's invitation to me, after I had explained the purpose of my visit, and answer he did for an hour of widely ranging discussion, all the way from experiences in World War I to the Family of Man and the Future of the Human Race. It became less an interview and more a rich intellectual feast as he freely shared with me some of his current ideas. Reading Bion one often feels involved with extremely abstract and difficult concepts. Talking with Bion one feels involved with a freefloating, creative, and stimulating intellect that is at the same time human and comprehensible. Tall, square, straight, conservatively dressed, Wilfred Bion, for me, was the very model of Britishness. While he seemed reticient and even shy, he had no hesitation in verbalizing his thoughts on many topics. I was stimulated by his ideas and found myself, to some extent, neglecting the central topic which had brought us together, his ideas about Groups. Man's relationships to parts of himself, as well as to his fellow man, were the broad concepts we pursued. We started with my asking about Bion's famous book, Experiences in Groups, which appeared in the 1950s. I was startled to hear him say, John S. Peck, MD, is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Supervising and Training Analyst with the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. Requests for reprints may be addressed to John S. Peck, MD, 16542 Ventura Boulevard, Encino, California 91436.

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GROUP Volume 2, Number 1, Sprin8 1978 0362-4021/78/1300-0054500.95

| 1978 by Human Sciences Press

John S. Peck

"I hadn't really thought of publishing the thing at all in any case. That was simply an idea which the Tavistock people pressed upon me and I finally agreed to do it. I wasn't interested in it." Coming in, I had noticed that his small waiting room contained only a single chair, and he made it clear that for some time now he has not worked with groups. Rather, he is involved in the concentrated psychoanalytic study of individuals, particularly in the psychoses. However, approaching human dynamics from the side of the individual, "the central preoccupation is still the same, which is the human characteristic further expressed through the individual or expressed through the group of individuals. I think that if you get a group of people, after all they do act in a kind of way which is possible to discern." My question about his ideas on other groups such as families led us into the area of the development of the human organism and the need to integrate intellect and instincts. The family is a group with a task, namely that of the production of people who are capable of independent existence. In a sense, the goal of the family group is to render itself no longer necessary. The people who join together to form the family group have the task of changing from bachelor and spinster into husband and wife and finally into father and mother. Thus they are under pressure to develop and change, and the resistances they encounter may be similar to the resistances felt in groups in which individuals are trying to change and develop. Bion then moved to a wider sphere, and we talked of the human family and the present state of affairs in which various factions are fighting one another. There is a conflict between the effort to form a human family in which the entire human race can exist, grow, and develop and the destructive urges and technology that have the potential for leading to the annihilation of humanity. "It's an urgent race between which impulse is going to get there first." When I asked about contributions that we, as human behavioral scientists, can make toward solving this dilemma, Bion's emphasis was on the capacity for speech. This is, after all, a relatively recent development, and though still primitive, this powerful and instrumental achievement is what we use. [We] apply ordinary discussion and conversation to what we call psychoanalysis . . . . assuming that one's capacity for articulate expression and logical thought is good enough to deal with our impulses. But of course, we cannot very well do without our impulses. Take the sexual impulse, if one tried to replace sexual impulses by becoming entirely cerebral, it's difficult to imagine how the human race would continue to exist. So you've got this peculiar situation where you have to develop this new-found 55

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capacity (speech) without, as it were, destroying the basic and very primitive feelings and impulses that exist. Here was the theme of our interview as it returned again and again. Individuals must integrate their instinctive, physical side with their cerebral, logical, reasonable side. For speech more accurately to reflect what goes on both within and between human beings, c o n t i n u i n g effort must be made to improve c o m m u n i c a t i o n . Symbolically this struggle is sometimes seen in a group where a "very civilized and cultivated individual" may wish to communicate with the rest of the group, which may not wish to listen. They may not want to be dictated to. In a sense, one can imagine that one's primitive impulses... [do n o t ] . . , want to be dictated to by one's cerebral spheres, to put it into anatomical language. So from this point of view, I think that the race is one between the impulse to be civilized.., a n d . . , at the same time to continue to exist and to continue to find an outlet for our primitive impulses. While a totally cerebral takeover would be bad for the human race, a totally instinctual takeover can unleash destructive forces, as seen in the behavior of mobs. Again speaking symbolically, the mob becomes subject to "rhapsodic expression" in which whatever is felt is "simply poured out." If the mob feels like murder, whatever is handy that is helpless will be murdered. "The intellectual person is very often helpless. He is not often an athlete." Getting back to groups, I asked if his theoretical base for understanding groups and his ideas about groups have undergone changes since the publication of his book. Bion's reply dealt with the dependence on its leader by the group: "In addition to everything else, you do have to try to produce people who are fit to be leaders." By looking at a single individual you really are dealing with the same problem, only the wider context still remains unaffected. Even analysis is something that has to be done in a society or an institution. That is the context of it, in which it's very easy for the group, for the bigger society, to say, "1 don't want any of that analytic nonsense. I don't want all this kind of sexual freedom and all the rest of it. Let's smash it1" So from that point of view, the attempt to grow or to develop . . . can be quite a risky or dangerous occupation. It depends on whether the rest of the community can see that there may be something to be said for it . . . . One hopes indeed that a little bit of space is produced in which every individual is able to grow and develop. Otherwise,

John $. Peck

you see, the society itself becomes a restraint, . . . something against which the person who wishes to develop cannot do so without exploding or without trying to wreck his society. The individual growing in a space in society, Bion seemed to be saying, runs into resistance and limitations. Just as society may resist the insights and the discoveries of psychoanalysis, the developing personality may be limited and restricted by the fact that it must develop and grow within a body which certainly early in life is of only limited capability. In another sense, then, speech is restrictive, and premature theoretical structuring of our understandings may not only not be supportive but may actually be restricting, like a "straight waistcoat." Bion made it clear that he, or anyone else, would be grossly in error to feel that his ideas about groups represent the final understanding of group dynamics and that there is nothing more to be said. In groups, in the field of ideas, in the structure of society, the need is to create an atmosphere in which ideas can grow and flourish, in which individuals have "space" in which to develop, and in which civilized and cultivated leaders can help integrate primitive instincts in ways in which they can find expression and yet not be destructive. Our speech, although restrictive and limiting, is all we have, and efforts to improve it must continue. I asked about the Tavistock model and its current use in group therapy, with its strict use of whole group interpretations. Again, I found Bion's emphasis to be on the need for openness and lack of rigid structure. He said, "1 thought that when I saw this seeming to be put into action, the thing had already become altogether too rigid." Interactions between people who have met as a group cannot be limited to a particular time, a particular theoretical structure, or a particular style of interpreting. Although obviously there must be some respect for the body and its need for sleep, food, etc., the psychological life is almost without limit. Interactions continue internally even when group members are no longer together and may continue in the form of dream work during sleep. "The body lay in bed, but what the mind was up to was another story, and what the mind saw and where the mind went to is a fact, just as much as any other fact, to me." Similarly, the mind can withdraw even when the body remains in contact: A group being addressed by a person that they don't want to hear can mentally drift away, or even sleep with their eyes wide open. Carried to exaggerated lengths, this may not just be daydreaming, but hallucinating. "But after all this is very often said about some of your greatest intelligences." In World War I, Wilfred Bion served first as a Captain and later as a 57

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Major in the Royal Tank Corps of the British Army, and he shared with me some early combat experiences that led to some of his insights about groups. It was after World War I at Oxford that he first became exposed to psychoanalysis and became a psychoanalyst by way of medical training. We discussed the importance of medical training for a psychoanalyst, and again the theme became that of intuition versus intellect. He feels that medical training is useful for the analyst but, on the other hand, so is philosophical knowledge. Psychoanalytic training is expensive and takes tremendous amounts of time and money, and, therefore, this limited capacity for training should be carefully used. The danger is in restricting your circle, from which you recruit, so much that you exclude a lot of people who are very important. . . . You can say about a person who's undergone medical training, at any rate that person understands the necessity for discipline. So they are not likely to think that you can let your mind go, drunk or sober, and you wake up and find you have written a masterpiece. Bion quoted the French poet, Paul Valery, who has said that a poet has to be very nearly like an algebraic mathematician because he has to be so exact in his use of words, thus clearly emphasizing the need for discipline. On the other hand, in our talk of communication and the limitations of language, Bion brought out that in the field of mathematics, with what one assumes is its precision and exactness, there is a very definite movement towards the use of intuitive models and concepts. For ten years Wilfred Bion has been in Los Angeles, where he was invited to come by local colleagues. He had not expected to remain so long, but he has found it very stimulating and now lives with his wife in a western suburb of the city. Bion's three children are grown and, along with his one grandchild, live in Europe. His oldest daughter is an analyst and lives in Rome. His son is "engaged in ordinary medicine" and practices in England where he is about to give a paper to the Royal Society. Bion's third child, a daughter, has graduated from Cambridge but is still undecided on a career. We talked of traveling and the limiting effect of one's accumulated books, which can be like anchors. In another nice piece of symbolism, Bion compared going back to a book one has read years before to the DNA Spiral. He talked of how approaching it from a different direction can result in seeing it from a different point of view, even though it is still the same book. In Los Angeles it has been said that Wilfred Bion was the model, perhaps because of his role in World War I, for the cartoon character 58

John S. Peck

"Colonel Blimp." I asked him about this, somewhat hesitantly, to find that there was never any contact between the cartoonist and Dr. Bion, and certainly he was not used as a model for Colonel Blimp. He commented with good humor, however, that he knows this appellation has been applied to him, although never directly. As he pointed out, "It's simply that Colonel Blimp is the example of the person who rigidly sticks to military discipline and a limited frame of mind--thus far and no further. I can well imagine that it is supposed that my attitude or outlook is extremely limited and restricted." I could not help but comment vigorously on Bion's extremely broad and almost unlimited outlook on things, hardly restricted or rigid. I asked Dr. Bion if he considered himself a "Kleinian" and received the answer, "Not specifically in a way excepting this; that I do feel extremely indebted to Melanie Klein, because I went to her for analysis . . . and I felt she opened up possibilities which seemed to me to be very much to the point." In addition to gratitude to Melanie Klein he feels a strong admiration for her. "The extraordinary thing is that an ordinary human being like that is able to have these intuitions and is able to maintain them in spite of a great deal of hostility. People don't like this further expansion of knowledge or experience." Again I saw the theme of expansion, growth, development, and the resistances, hostilities, and restrictions into which it runs. Certainly I could not see Wilfred Bion as a restricted or limited "Colonel Blimp." He remains one of the most intuitive, creative, and wide-ranging thinkers within the realm of psychodynamic theory. Ten years in Los Angeles have not changed the elegance of his English manner and the reticent courtesy of his receptiveness. When I left his panelled office with its inviting couch covered with a bright orange quilt, I felt warm, stimulated, and grateful for a noteworthy experience.

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