Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

and paradox 412 that takes Bion into the realm of the mystical. This ‘later work of Bion …
took on a distinctly spiritual … leaning, … obscured by his dense language’ (PM 545-548).
Bion was not religious but drew on mystical concepts from Meister Eckhart, 413 St John of
the Cross 414 and the Kabbalah, 415 ‘so Bion would I think hyphenate the mystical with the
spiritual’ (JG 346-347) evolving ‘the spiritual vertex of psychoanalysis … with … the
mysterious area that is of O’ (JG 352-353). 416 ‘If you really read Bion, he’s a mystic …
he’s not a Buddhist mystic or a Hindu mystic or a Christian mystic, he’s just a mystic’ (JBR
250-253). Bion evolved a difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘becoming’ in connecting with
the divine, the spiritual and the transcendent within, termed O, a revelatory experience for
which words cannot be found, yet experienced in dreams and interpretations at an
unconscious level. Bobrow concluded Bion ‘is … the end all and be all. But if people really
get into the Bion, and the British … have this problem … Bion is a mystic at heart (JBR
249-250).
412
‘A beam of intense darkness’ as Bion describes it and the title of Grotstein’s book on the legacy of Bion to
psychoanalysis.
413
Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) was a German Dominican theologian, noted for his preaching and writing,
later regarded as heretical. ‘God as Trinity both remains within and flows out, at once, so that for us to speak
of God is to enter into this flow at the same time as remaining outside it … humans and all creation share the
same “ground” with God, yet they do so dialectically – the “ground” is both the intimate reality shared with
God within all things and beyond all things as their source’ (Howells 2005: 118). Bion quoted from Eckhart in
Transformations (Bion 1965) though these are omitted from the index (see pages 139, 162, 170). References
are also to be found in Attention and Interpretation (Bion 1970).
414
St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) was a Spanish Carmelite whose writings have profoundly shaped
Western mystical theology and practice through the metaphors of darkness and light, most notably ‘the dark
night of the soul’. Bion quotes St. John of the Cross in Transformations (Bion 1965) though these are also
omitted from the index (see pages 158-159).
415
The Kabbalah is a mystical expression of Judaism focused on the infinite and unknown Creator and his
relationship with finite and knowable creation. Every idea grows out of God through ten emanations – the
sefirot – God creates the Universe expressed diagrammatically as the Tree of Life. ‘It is potentially of special
interest to psychoanalysts, because more than any other spiritual tradition … this offers a clearly worked out
… highly elaborated, account of psychic structure’ (Parsons 2006: 124).
416
‘The English Kleinians don’t seem to understand, if it’s mystical in the religious sense rather than the
domain without objects’ (JG 353-355). ‘I think this is what the what the mystics were trying to do, to locate
God within as well as without, the immanent God and that … I think Bion is doing. He talks about O, he talks
about many different synonyms for it, one of which is Godhead which I think in middle English is God hood’
(JG 449-453).
250