Why Bion? Why Jung? For That Matter,Why Freud?

Bion’s Writing Style

The first of Bion’s radical changes from Freudian thought that I will discuss is that his writings create a profound disjunction from reflecting on personal experience. At first glance this may sound like a strange thing to say about someone who is rightly acclaimed for describing extremely close, moment-to-moment observation of patients, and arriving at original, clinically useful formulations. Nevertheless, Bion undermines reflection, and contextualizes it as part of a nonrational project, with his writing style.

Bion’s writing style is notorious, among his appreciative students and detractors alike, for its difficulty. Consider this comment by Meltzer (1978)—who was enormously appreciative of Bion—about Transformations: “In the present work no such hope sustains us in the face of the proliferation of mathematics-like notations, pseudo-equations, followed by dots, lines, arrows over (or should it be under?) words, and not just Greek letters but Greek words. How are we to bear such an assault on our mentality?” (p. 341). Bion’s style is sometimes treated as a mere annoyance that a reader must get past in order to understand him. But a style that so dominates the message is better taken seriously in itself, not as incidental but as an integral part of Bion’s message.

Bion’s writing is not only difficult—it is difficult in a particular way. It is replete with psychotic mechanisms that Bion has identified: attacks on linking (Bion 1959) and denudation of meaning (Bion 1965). To recognize these psychotic mechanisms in Bion’s writing does not imply that his writing lacks value—as he noted, “psychotic mechanisms require a genius to manipulate them in a manner adequate to promote growth or life . . .” (1970, p. 63)—but it clarifies the romantic nature of his writing’s value.

As a first illustration—chosen not because of its conceptual importance, but because it shows the psychotic mechanisms in Bion’s writing very simply—consider this excerpt, as Bion tries to elucidate the differences between a lower-functioning patient, characterized by beta elements, and a higher-functioning patient, capable of alpha functioning. Listen as Bion (1970) gives us a name to identify each patient: “Patient A, for I shall now call the intolerant patient so, has then at his disposal beta-elements or bizarre objects and his case differs in this respect from patient B, as I now designate the second patient, who can tolerate and therefore name . . . a constant conjunction and so investigate its meaning” (p. 10).

In this passage, Bion identifies a patient who uses beta elements as patient A, and a patient capable of alpha functioning as patient B. This is doubly an attack on linking. It is generally known, and Bion would have assumed that his readers knew, that alpha is the Greek equivalent of the letter “a,” and beta of “b.” Yet Bion associates alpha with “b” and beta with “a.” And it is a convention in writing, so taken-for-granted that ordinarily it is not even noticed, that a writer who gives a particular name to something he is writing about does so to increase clarity and ease of understanding. Yet Bion has done the opposite: by disassociating the patient names from the Greek letters they signify, he has attacked this assumption about increasing clarity and instead made it more difficult for us to know who he is talking about.

Now consider Bion’s famous use of capital letters (1962) to symbolize central concepts (e.g., K for knowing, L for loving, H for hating). Bion’s avowed purpose is to create in this way “unsaturated symbols”—symbols free of preexisting associations and assumed meanings, so that the true meaning of the symbol can be worked out by its use as we go along. K, for example, is meant to indicate something like knowing, but with none of the associations we have already built up to that word. Directly, and consciously, Bion is using the psychotic mechanisms of attacks on linking and denudation of meaning.

And the effect is to create an oscillation between psychotic and nonpsychotic mechanisms in the reader—in Bionian terms, a PS↔D process. K simultaneously points toward knowing, because it iconically represents the word by using its first letter, and away from knowing, because it pointedly omits the rest of the word. What is a reader to do? Bion himself often enough has to remind us and himself of the conventional words being hidden by his symbols: “In the K activity on which I am engaged, namely in knowing . . .” (1962, p. 50). But then it is also necessary to remind oneself that Bion is telling us to attack and denude these meanings that have just been found.

Bion does something similar with the way he employs the word vertices. The conventional associations and meanings relevant to understanding this word as used by Bion are our understandings of the term point of view. Bion states that he is using vertex rather than point of view because he wants to have a term that avoids the visual metaphor when talking about orientations for which such a metaphor is not apt, such as the orientation of the digestive system (1965, p. 91). Yet Bion sometimes reminds us that vertices are points of view (see, e.g., 1965, pp. 66, 67, 145). The message is something like “forget but remember.”

Bion’s grid (1963, p. 25) is a massive attack on linking, a massive denudation of meaning. Its horizontal axis (the columns) represents the uses to which a type of ideation may be put. The vertical axis (the rows) represents genetically successively more complex forms of ideation. Bion puts forth his grid as a way of classifying the fundamental elements of psychoanalysis; and indeed the generally assumed purpose of a grid is to organize and simplify a complex set of ideas, data, etc.

But right away, as one looks at the grid, one is thrown from familiar moorings in the usual Bionian way. First we see another version of the confusion between A/B and alpha/beta that I described above, but now prominently ensconced in the grid: row A represents beta elements; row B represents alpha functioning. We then see that whereas columns 1, and 3 through 6, are named with common English words (derived mostly from Freud 1911)—Definitory Hypotheses, Notation, Attention, and so on—column 2 is named with the Greek letter psi. Column 2 represents ideation used to deny anxiety—for instance, an analyst making an interpretation to make it seem to himself and the patient that he understands what is going on when he doesn’t (Bion 1963, p. 18). This is an important and sophisticated concept, but surely an English word could be found for it, such as Defense, Disavowal, or Denial. Why should this column alone not receive an English word? “Psi” is often used iconically to represent “psychology” or “mind”; does Bion mean that disavowal is more psychological than any other form of thought? I do not expect my line of inquiry here to reach an end; I merely put it forth to show that the grid, supposedly a way of organizing and synthesizing thoughts, subverts that usual expectation.

Bion’s use of the grid is even more subversive. As soon as he has described the grid, he makes the following statement: “It is necessary to note that in the genetic scheme [the vertical axis] rows B–H inclusive may all be said to contain unsaturated elements that await a realization before they can be ‘satisfied’ and become available for further employment as preconceptions” (1963, p. 25). A preconception for Bion “corresponds to a state of expectation. It is a state of mind adapted to receive a restricted range of phenomena” (p. 23) and therefore is not completely empty of meaning (“unsaturated”); Bion is saying here that rows B–H, if and only if imbued with a connection to reality, become ready to serve as preconceptions. Whether or not this is a psychologically and clinically accurate idea (I think that if we took the time to fully unpack the statement, we would see that it is), it is completely subversive of the grid, amounting to a self-undoing, because row D is in fact Pre-conception. So the quote with which I began the paragraph is saying both that preconceptions are not preconceptions unless they are saturated with a realization, and that thoughts both simpler and more advanced than preconceptions on a developmental axis are similarly less developed than preconceptions. What kind of grid is this?

Bion’s use of the grid in other places is similarly rife with piling complication upon complication. To reiterate: he may or may not be describing psychologically and clinically useful ideas, but displaying these ideas in a grid is an attack on the usually linked ideas that a grid will simplify and help with understanding.

The quote from Meltzer, above, despairing about the way Bion’s style assaults the mind, is in reaction to Bion’s use of mathematics. Bion highly esteems mathematics—the most developed form of thought in his grid, row H, is algebraic calculus—and tries to use it to provide elemental descriptions of psychological events that can be universally understood. But the result, as Meltzer stated, is “mathematics-like notations, pseudo-equations.” The pithiest example I can find is when Bion states that “the term ‘variable’ may describe something which, in a particular universe of discourse, is given a constant value . . .” (1965, p. 45). Well, no, it can’t—a variable is a variable because it is not constant, and a constant is a constant because it is not variable. A variable can be a constant only if, like Humpty-Dumpty, we decide that words mean what we want them to mean. But in fact, Bion himself says that “if it is not already clear . . . the domain of mathematics with which I am concerned is the ‘Dodgsonian’ or ‘Alice Through the Looking-Glass variety’” (1965, p. 153).

Bion’s writing, which on first glance appears to be about psychosis, is on a more fundamental level an inducement to psychosis. Without providing the grounding that would come from alerting the reader that this is about to happen, Bion immerses the reader in the experience he is ostensibly describing: to read Bion is to be psychotic. This is the essence of the romantic as opposed to the classical approach to life: the important thing is to feel, to experience, to be mad, rather than to understand madness. To repeat: to recognize that Bion’s writing is mad does not mean that it is without value or meaning, but clarifies that its value and meaning are romantic.

The peculiar importance of Bion’s style can be seen in microcosm in his citing of Keats’s concept of “negative capability” (1970, p. 125). As Bion states, Keats defined the idea in a letter to his brother on December 21, 1817: “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

In content, negative capability seems identical to the mainstream psychological concept of tolerance for ambiguity. Tolerance for ambiguity is the ability to accept, or even enjoy, problems or situations where there is no clear, definite, structured solution or understanding available. The concept goes back at least to Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), where its opposite, intolerance of ambiguity, was described as a feature of authoritarianism. The concept has been found especially useful in management psychology, and has been correlated with creativity and managerial effectiveness.

So why does Bion use Keats’s term rather than the term from psychology? The difference between “negative capability” and “tolerance for ambiguity” is stylistic. “Tolerance for ambiguity” is a straightforwardly descriptive name. “Negative capability” poetically evokes a mood or emotion in addition to naming the phenomenon. “Negative capability” is almost an oxymoron, since “capability” typically connotes a positive capacity, but this connotation is undone by the preceding “negative”—it is easy to see why this appeals to Bion, since this is stylistically so similar to his common trope of using symbols (L, H, K, etc.) that are intended to undo their own meaning. And Keats’s definition is beautiful, with its “mysteries” and “irritable reaching.” Bion, following Keats, is trying to create an experience of negative capability at the same time that he names it.

I close this section on Bion’s style with a look at Brown’s lucid article (2009), which is specifically intended to render Bion in a manner consistent with intersubjective developments in American ego psychology. In describing aspects of Bion’s work clearly, Brown inadvertently highlights the peculiar importance of Bion’s style for increasing Bion’s significance. What Brown gives us is an interesting article that is easy to understand because in content it is not so very different from many other themes in contemporary Freudian thought. In the content that Brown discusses, Bion is easily integrated with Freud; only in style is Bion fundamentally different.

The Concept of O

Bion’s second radical change from Freud is his concept of O (1970). O is a content that conveys the same stance as Bion’s writing style. Just as Bion’s style valorizes experience over reflection, O can only properly be experienced, never known (or loved, or hated)—so with O, the message duplicates the medium. Furthermore, with the concept of O Bion reaches the apogee of a search for invariants that took earlier form in the grid, his mathematics, and his search for elements: O, he will say in his late writings, is the One truth, ultimate truth. Thus, the concept of O is fundamentally opposed to the Freudian concept of psychic reality that takes many changing forms in each person and that is different from one person to another. Bion formulates the concept of O in a way to put it beyond a Freudian question like “What is it in a person’s history and current life that leads him to find a particular way of experiencing O to be of importance right now?” With O, Bion has created a category that cannot be investigated in terms of psychic reality.

In Bion’s first descriptions of O (1965, p. 12), it does not have the full features of mystical oneness that he later describes, but it is already idealized, in the Platonic sense, as existing as an unknowable thing-in-itself. O can be learned about through transformations performed by a person’s mind, and O is different for different people—for instance, for patient and for analyst. To this extent Bion is consistent with Freudian ideas of psychic reality, but his interest is starting to shift to the unknowable reality itself that is beyond psychic reality. For example, Bion’s ideas that thoughts exist prior to thinking (1962, p. 83) and that truth does not require a thinker, but exists without being thought (1970, p. 103), show Bion leaning toward the truth, rather than toward the psyche or the process of engaging with truth.

Bion (1965, p. 138) begins presenting a shift in the meaning of O that is not predictable from what he has said about it previously, and yet is completely consistent with the import of his writing style: Bion now tells us that O is the mystical One, god, the godhead that has been talked about through the ages. Bion does not present this as a metaphor or a way that things may be experienced—he presents it as definite truth. Bion cites Meister Eckhardt, Kant, and St. John of the Cross as having described the kind of reality he is adumbrating. And only a rare and special person can attain this kind of mystical experience of O. Bion builds on his earlier interests in groups by discussing the relationship between the group of ordinary people and the mystic (by whom he also means the analyst), who both threatens the group and potentially helps the group by seeing the truth that they cannot see.

This O cannot appropriately be known (K), loved (L), or hated (H); it can only be experienced. This parallels the way Bion’s writing style compels the reader to experience more than know his material. Similarly, after introducing Attention and Interpretation with a statement of general distrust of language because language has sensuous origins (it is connected with the body ego, PS↔D cycles, and the maternal breast), Bion states (1970, p. 26) that O, ultimate reality, cannot be known (K) sensuously; the analyst can only be it. Thus, O exists disembodied and outside language.

This is the context for Bion’s famous admonition for the analyst to work with “the elimination of memory and desire” (1970, p. 68; see also pp. 30–34). Perhaps because the phrase is catchy, perhaps because it seems impossible to achieve, this is one of the most quoted of Bion’s thoughts. It is also one of the most misunderstood. People often seem to think that Bion is admonishing us to have the good clinical sense not to have an agenda, not to be stuck in what has gone before, but to retain an open mind about whatever material is presented. But Bion is saying something much stronger: the analyst should not try to know anything or wish anything about what the patient presents; the analyst should eliminate the state of knowing or desiring; the analyst should only Be.

And indeed, Bion believes that the experience of O is the proper goal of analysis. Sensuous desire (which, together with the conflicts it engenders, is one of the central interests of Freudian thought) is irrelevant to analysis (1970, p. 120). Analysis seeks god (p. 129). Even if a reader takes these as hyperbolic comments that do not represent Bion’s usual thought, or as vivid metaphors, or as another form of disjunctive phrasing not to be taken literally, they remain statements that reach for and create romantic experience.

O, unlike Bion’s other letter symbols, was not chosen because it is the first letter of some meaningfully related word. We have discussed above how Bion typically selects as a symbol a word’s first letter—e.g., K for Knowing—and by doing so simultaneously points toward and away from the usual meanings associated with the word. With O, Bion is no longer pointing toward or away from any usual meaning. One result of this is an open (Open?) horizon of meaning, where the reader can plug in any content that makes sense. Bleandonu (1994), for example, speculates that O symbolizes both zero and the female genitalia. Such speculations, plausible or not, could be spun out endlessly. More to the point, by coming up with a symbol that is completely divorced from any word, Bion has again paralleled content with style—he is stylistically representing that O is divorced from the sensuous and from language. Consistent with Bion’s admonishments to be without memory and desire, and that O cannot be known, loved, or hated, and also consistent with some strands of mysticism, his symbol for it means nothing.

Jung: Nonsexual Libido

Studies of the relationship between Jungian and Freudian thought have been muddied by the myth, standard in followers of both groups, that Jung began as a Freudian and then, for good or ill, changed into something else. But Ellenberger (1970) and Shamdasani (2004) have argued persuasively that Jung’s project began on a footing quite different from Freud’s, and was only temporarily conjoined with Freud until Jung more firmly established his own thought. Many modern Jungian clinicians are closer to Freud than was Jung himself (Shamdasani 2004). Jung’s basic orientation was more romantic (Ellenberger 1970) and religious than Freud’s, and relative to Freud he was more oriented toward immersion in experience, and less toward reflection on experience.

In Jung’s very first letter to Freud (McGuire 1974) he expressed reservations about Freud’s sexual theory. Freud’s response was to tolerate this difference in hopes that time would change it, but time never did change it. Jung and Freud temporarily let this disagreement go underground to make their relationship possible, but it flared up in Jung’s Symbols of Transformation (1911), the book generally thought of as marking Jung’s declaration of independence from Freud. Jung now openly took the position that Freud was wrong in thinking of libido as sexual energy; rather, libido should be considered a general, nonsexual psychic energy.

Of course, many psychoanalysts today deemphasize or disregard completely sexuality as a drive, considering it only as an avenue for expressing relational issues. Bion, as I have indicated, moved away from the concept of the psyche as embodied. Fairbairn (1963) famously stated that humans are object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking, and interpersonalists and relationalists have proudly moved away from the concept of a sexual drive. So was Jung closer in some ways to modern psychoanalysts than Freud was? Was the argument about sexuality much ado about nothing, so that Jung can easily be integrated with a Freud divorced from drive theory? This way of formulating things fits with an eclectic approach. It also fits with the idea that Freud’s split with Jung was a result of their personality issues, an unfortunate misunderstanding but not something intrinsic to their thinking.

But this formulation does an injustice to both Freud and Jung. They certainly had their share of personal issues, and their relationship was built fragilely on the sands of idealization, Freud seeking an heir, and Jung seeking a father. But they were also geniuses, both of whom understood what each of them was trying to do, and had a clear comprehension that their ideas were radically different. To fully recognize their difference, it is necessary to remember that Freud’s concept of libido meant much more than simply sex. What was most radical about Freud’s concept of libido was infantile sexuality. And for Freud, every instinct had an object. In replacing sexual libido with general psychic libido, Jung was minimizing the importance of object relations in both childhood and adulthood.

Jung, of course, could logically have retained the importance of childhood object relations without its specifically sexual aspect, but he did not. He stated explicitly not only that infantile sexuality was a misconception, but also that childhood experiences uncovered in psychoanalysis derive their seeming importance from the extent to which they are current adult issues projected into the past (Jung 1916). And Jung thought that memories and fantasies of childhood manifest not object relations but relationships with archetypes of the collective unconscious. For example, painful memories of early mothering were referred to fantasies linked with the mother archetype rather than actual experiences with the mother (Jung 1938a). Motifs about childhood were referred to the child archetype rather than actual childhood experiences (Jung 1940).

And even if he rejected childhood object relations, Jung could logically have retained the importance of adult object relations without their specifically sexual aspect, but he did not. This is clearly manifested in Jung’s treatment of fantasies and dreams. Jung’s personally transformative series of fantasies (reported in Jung 1961, and more fully in the recently published Red Book [Jung 2009]) include characters who from a Freudian or object relations standpoint beg for understanding as in part representing Freud, with whom Jung had recently had his extremely painful parting, and Sabina Spielrein, with whom Jung was in love (see, e.g., Bergmann 1997; Gedo 1981; Kerr 1993; Slochower 1981). Jung’s concept of the anima can itself be considered in part as representative and derivative of his feelings for Spielrein (Kerr 1993). Jung describes himself at the time he experienced these visions as at the height of success and comfort in the world (2009, p. 232), which from a personal psychological perspective could be seen as a total disavowal of his loss of the relationship with Freud. But Jung pays no attention whatever to these personal, object-relational meanings. His interest is totally in the archetypal meanings of the fantasies.

It is a similar story with dreams. Although Jung does consider it important to recognize current conscious object relations when interpreting dreams—because dreams are a way that the unconscious compensates for exaggerated conscious attitudes (Jung 1934c)—unconscious object relations are not considered, and the unconscious compensation is not a wish fulfillment but an actual fact (Jung 1934c). As an example, consider Jung’s analysis (1934c) of this dream of a seventeen-year-old girl:

I was coming home at night. Everything was as quiet as death. The door into the living-room is half open, and I see my mother hanging from the chandelier, swinging to and fro in the cold wind that blows in through the open windows.

The analysis goes as follows: “‘Mother’ is an archetype and refers to the place of origin, to nature . . . the womb, the vegetative functions. It also means the unconscious, our natural and instinctive life . . . the body . . . and it thus stands psychologically for the foundations of consciousness. . . . This is no individual acquisition of a 17 y.o. girl; it is a collective inheritance. . . . If we apply our findings to the dream, its interpretation will be: The unconscious life is destroying itself” (pp. 186–187).

In Jung’s analysis, the mother symbol is considered exclusively as representing an aspect of the collective psyche and what is happening to the psyche, with no consideration of this symbol as representing an object—the actual mother—either external or internalized. To be clearer, in thinking of dreams as representing aspects of the psyche, Jung is not considering them to represent internalized objects or object relations. His analysis of the dream pays no attention whatever to any personal relationships, present or past.

Archetypes

Both Freud and Jung were interested in the universality of myths, and their shared interest competitively stimulated their writing, Freud of Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), Jung of Symbols of Transformation (1911). The universality of mythological motifs, together with observations that people had dreams with similar motifs, led Jung to his concept of archetypes. Some aspects of this concept are similar enough to Freudian ideas to obscure how radically different they are in their essence. Similarities include Jung’s description of archetypes as aspects of instincts, and as inherited memories of ancestral experiences—like Freud’s Lamarckian idea that the oedipus complex descended from memories of the primal horde. And the fundamental idea that myths can be universal and can show up in individual dreams is already present in Freud’s formulation of the oedipus complex.

But these similarities obscure the fact that the implications of Jung’s concept of archetypes run counter to the Freudian project of personal understanding. Archetypes are the contents of the collective unconscious, and the collective unconscious is defined as originating and existing independent of personal experience. The collective unconscious can interact with the rest of the psyche according to a principle of compensation—if the person’s life emphasizes certain ways of being too much, the collective unconscious will intervene with a push toward opposite ways of being—but this compensation comes not from the person, in the form of adaptive strivings, wishes, or defenses, but from a separate source of energy.

Jung places unconscious memories and fantasies, what he considers to be the Freudian unconscious, into what he calls the personal unconscious. He does not ignore this, but considers it less important than the deeper collective unconscious. In fact, he often describes the personal unconscious with a good deal of distaste, as being inferior (1938b, 1951), unpleasant (1934b), or monstrous (1934c).

And it was very important for Jung to establish that the collective unconscious was not a product of mere fantasizing, or even of artistic trends, but instead was in some sense objective. He describes (Jung 1961, 2009) how he was frightened by his vivid visions of world destruction after the break with Freud, fearing that he was “menaced with a psychosis.” He was calmed by the outbreak of World War I, because he concluded that his visions had been the product of the same spirit or energy that caused the events in the world—what he would later call the collective unconscious—and were therefore objective. Note that Jung did not conclude anything along the lines of perhaps having noticed, in subtle ways outside his awareness, signs of impending war, and then having expressed them in fantasy. Instead he concluded that the visions were the direct product of the same collective unconscious unrest that had led to war.

Similarly, Jung was troubled by intimations, from himself and others, that the products of his exercises in active imagination were art, because if they were art it would mean that he had created them. With pride and relief he insisted that they had objective existence instead. The collective unconscious is spontaneous and natural, not an arbitrary product of fantasy (Jung 1961, 2009).

The ultimate development of these ways of understanding archetypes—that they are independent sources of energy, originating and existing outside personal experience and fantasy, that they are spontaneous and objective—is that the archetypes are indistinguishable from gods. Freud and Jung both saw gods as being created by projections from the psyche, but whereas Freud thought gods were projections of wishes and fears developed during life, Jung thought gods were projections of suprapersonal forces, outside of personal experience, residing in the psyche. The projection resulting in an external god in Jungian thought merely changes the location in which the god dwells, but does not change the quality of the god. And indeed, Jung (1917, 1934a, 1938b, 1944) describes archetypes and the collective unconscious as indistinguishable from gods, and as numinous and sacred.

The implications for understanding human experience are of course profound. The basic Freudian psychological approach is to try to understand thoughts and feelings in terms of personal experience, wishes, fears, defenses, and object relations. The basic Jungian approach directs understanding of the most important thoughts and feelings in a completely different direction. To the extent that one tries to understand an archetypal dream, for instance, in terms of personal experience, wishes, and defenses, one has missed the point. The archetype may be appearing in order to compensate for aspects of personal experience, but the archetypal image itself cannot be understood in terms of personal experience. We saw this in the Jungian dream interpretation described above, in which the symbol of the mother was understood entirely in terms of an archetype and the status of the unconscious, with no connection to external or internal objects.

Unlike a Freudian approach to universal mythological/fantasy material, which would involve observing, reflecting on, and associating to these images in order to learn about the personal meanings and forces that had led to their creation at that time in that individual, the Jungian approach is to try to engage with archetypal material in a process of “individuation.” Individuation refers to a process of reaching the Self, which is described in terms such as integration of the personal with the universal, integration of the ego with the collective unconscious, a union of opposites, wholeness (Jung 1938b, 1944, 1955, 1961, 2009). Archetypes are engaged by means of active imagination, which differs from free association in that instead of seeing what related personal thoughts/feelings occur, the effort is to stay focused on the archetypal image itself, in order to recognize it and how it may develop. Painting or writing about the image may be encouraged. Jung conceptualized this as engaging with and understanding a message from the other, rather than understanding the image as part of oneself.

Individuation as the goal of analysis is in two ways a valorization of the communal and a devaluing of the agentic. First, individuation devalues agentic separateness by having as its goal wholeness, union, the center of the mandala, rather than the goal of recognizing and tolerating multiple meanings and conflicts, a goal embedded in the fundamental Freudian concepts of overdetermination and multiple function. Second, Jung leaves agency unconsidered by granting asylum from personal examination to those aspects of the psyche that he considers most important. I use “asylum” to associate to Freud’s statement (1916–1917) that “analytic treatment does not, of course, recognize any such right of asylum” from personal examination. And note that the level of asylum provided by Jung is very different from that advocated by Kohut (1984), who believed that it may be clinically most effective to leave certain material unanalyzed. (Indeed, every analysis leaves much material unanalyzed, and we are lucky if this is done for reasons of considered clinical relevance.) It is one thing to make a clinical choice not to explore the personal meanings of certain material, and it is quite another to say that certain material has no personal meanings.

Jung’s Writing Style

Jung’s writing style is very different from Bion’s, and more often than Bion’s serves the traditional role of conveying a message rather than being the message. Nevertheless, there is a prominent aspect of some of Jung’s writing that, like Bion’s, serves to evoke experience more than to examine or elucidate: especially when Jung is describing universal fantasy materials, he tends to pile example upon example upon example. (Jung [1911] is a good example of this style.) The breadth of Jung’s erudition in these passages is astonishing, but the point being made is often lost, or at least is hard to find, through paragraph upon paragraph of examples.

Michael Fordham (quoted in Hillman 1977), a Jungian and one of Jung’s editors, wrote about this with good-humored pique that sounds a little like Meltzer commenting on Bion’s style. He stated that he sometimes got the impression that Jung thought any idea he associated to while writing was worth including; when he confronted Jung about a footnote that seemed irrelevant to him, Jung confirmed the impression by saying, “Oh, I just thought of it,” and that it should be left in. Hillman (1977) thought Jung might have been pulling Fordham’s leg, and that whatever the reason Jung articulated for his style, perhaps the real reason was found in T. S. Eliot’s idea that poetic imagery could be created only through the suppression of logical links. Shamdasani (Casement 2010) describes Jung’s style similarly: “He often starts with a train of thought and elaborates it in a way that has an imagistic logic but doesn’t have the structure of a logical argument” (p. 44).

Bion and Jung

There are important commonalities in how the Bionian and Jungian projects contrast with the Freudian project. They are not identical in how they contrast; as I have indicated, Jung turned away from the importance of object relations, infantile as well as adult, whereas Bion was always deeply concerned with object relations, and in particular with the infantile. But both Bion and Jung radically undermined the importance of observing and reflecting on personal experience, and they both did this in the style as well as the content of their writings.

Bion’s writing absorbs the reader in nearly constant denudation of meaning and attacks on linking, serving to induce a temporary psychotic state. Jung’s writing at times piles example upon example until any organizing point has been obscured, so that the reader is swept up in images. It is no accident that these styles are linked to poets, Bion directly citing Keats on negative capability, Hillman elucidating Jung’s style by citing Eliot on poetic imagination. Bion’s and Jung’s writing styles valorize romantic immersion in experience and devalue classical strivings to stand outside experience and reflect on it.

In content, both Bion and Jung advocate analysis with the central goal of experiencing and joining with a nonpersonal, transcendent reality. Bion equates the analyst with the mystic, both of whom seek to be O, which cannot properly be known, or loved, or hated; beyond memory or desire, the analyst simply experiences, simply is. Jung advocates reaching the Self, a psychic unity where the personal ego and the numinous, godlike archetypes are integrated; this can be achieved not by looking at the archetypes from the outside, but only by experientially engaging with them. (It is striking that Bion symbolizes transcendent reality with O, and Jung symbolizes the Self with circular mandalas.) Here again, the Bionian and Jungian projects valorize romantic immersion in experience and devalue classical strivings to stand outside experience and reflect on it. And, more specifically, they valorize communion—connection, joining, merging—while devaluing personal agency and the multiplicity of meanings that agency creates.

Freud and the Classical/romantic Dimension

Die Stimme des Intellects ist leise (The voice of the intellect is quiet).

But he would have us remember most of all To be enthusiastic over the night,

Not only for the sense of wonder It alone has to offer, but also

Because it needs our love.With large sad eyes Its delectable creatures look up and beg

Us dumbly to ask them to follow: They are exiles who long for the future

Compared to the projects of Bion and Jung, the Freudian project certainly valorizes classical agency. Freud’s thinking is so saturated with the conviction that it is of primary importance to reflect on personal experience that I will illustrate it only briefly: think of the Freudian dictum “Where id was, there ego shall be,” as opposed to Bionian mystical merging of the ego with O, or Jungian subordinating the ego to the Self; the Freudian concept of psychic determinism, that every mental act can be explained in terms of personal meaning; or the Freudian concept of instincts as biological urges and demands for satisfaction, as opposed to transcendent beings communicating to the ego.

And yet one does not have to look far to find the romantic and the communal in Freud. Consider how Freud directs us not to turn away from madness, but to pay attention to it. Consider how Freud chose to listen at great length to women troubled by bizarre symptoms, rather than treating them as meaninglessly afflicted and subjecting them to hydrotherapy. And consider how Freud says that madness and femininity are part of all of us, in his explorations of dreams, slips, and bisexuality. Psychoanalysis works by reawakening passions (Freud 1907). All of us experience oceanic ego states in infancy, and some of us retain the capacity to experience them throughout life (Freud 1927). And Freud loved myth, poetry, and literature, insisting that all his insights had been expressed first by the poets.

So who is Freud? The classical, calm voice of the intellect? Or the romantic champion of the little creatures of the night?

The Freudian project not only draws our attention to both ways of being; it also fundamentally engages us in a process of integrating both ways of being—to recognize and honor our madness without being mad (Bergmann 1993). Insight, transference, and free association all require a blending of objective and subjective self-awareness.

When Freud is accused of being too classically removed from experience, it is often with the claim that insight is cold objective understanding from the outside. But this sort of pure cognitive understanding is not Freudian insight. Although early in his career Freud moved technically in a direction that at first glance seems like a move from romanticism to classicism—from hypnosis, through emotional catharsis, to insight via free association—this is more accurately seen as a move toward blending the romantic and the classical. The purpose of hypnosis was to remove symptoms; the purpose of catharsis was to get rid of distressing affects. With Freud’s more mature technique, he had realized that the complexes behind these symptoms and affects are not to be gotten rid of, but rather are to be understood and befriended. And insight requires emotional conviction as much as cognition; this is why it is useless to just describe a solution to a patient, without helping him or her make connections to the unconscious; this is why it is necessary for complexes to be confronted in vivo, in the transference, rather than confronted in absentia, by mere description (Freud 1912).

Freud expresses his most sophisticated ideas about transference in his technique papers (Ellman 1991). “Observations on Transference-Love” (Freud 1915) is a back-and-forth exploration of whether transference love is real love, to be experienced (the romantic view), or is unreal, something to be coolly observed (the classical view). Freud makes good arguments on both sides, but ends up unable to endorse either. Transference love is a kind of love to be both experienced and observed. In the back-and-forth of this paper, Freud has also shown that transference love is not clearly separable from any other kind of love, and this implies that real-world love is also to be observed as well as experienced. Overall, the paper is a marvelous example of tolerance for ambiguity—or negative capability—and thus demonstrates the Freudian blending of the romantic and the classical in the transference, in its style as well as its conclusions.

Jung (1934c) criticized free association as leading inevitably to the personal, whereas active imagination maintains its focus on the relevant image or symbol itself, and thus maintains connection with the collective unconscious. This again is a rejection of the agentic and classical in favor of the communal and romantic. I have argued elsewhere (Rosegrant 2005) that free association actually establishes an intricate interplay between states of objective (classical) and subjective (romantic) self-awareness: the patient is encouraged to let thoughts come to mind without any censorship or criticism (subjective self-awareness, romantic), but at the same time both participants know that what is said and done will be observed (objective self-awareness, classical), and the mere presence in the room of the analyst, even if he does not speak, relativizes the experience of the patient (objective self-awareness again). So free association is a kind of play, where objective self-awareness is present but the participants pretend it is not, to facilitate greater subjective self-awareness and allow both states to be experienced. All analysts have experienced how the “freeness” of free association changes frequently within and between sessions. This very process of shifting between and integrating these states of being is therapeutic, alongside any more traditional insight that is gained (Rosegrant 2005). I have argued also (Rosegrant 2001) that similar processes of integrating subjective and objective self-awareness underlie play in child analysis, accounting for why even uninterpreted play in the analyst’s office can be therapeutic though the child’s play outside the office is not.

Conclusion

Freud, then, does not settle on either the agentic and classical or the communal and romantic, but works toward an integration of these points of view. In this he is in accord with Bakan (1966), who argued for the importance of integrating agency and communion in human existence. Bakan stated that human existence is always a back-and-forth shifting between classicism/agency and romanticism/communion, both on the individual level and societally, and that both are necessary for the fullest life.

On the other hand, people who appreciate the aspects of Bion and Jung that I have emphasized in this paper could argue that a more purely romantic approach to therapy is more useful in dislodging people from stuck positions and creating openness to growth. Indeed, even from within a Freudian pespective, Summers (2011) has presented the view that only the romantic aspects of Freud’s thought are useful. Recognizing the romantic/classical dimension in the thought of various psychoanalysts does not demonstrate which approach is truer. But it does help us reflect on what we are doing when we see our patients and ourselves from whatever vertex or point of view, and analysts from most persuasions still believe such reflection is valuable.