Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Bion gained encouragement for his emerging psychodynamic ideas from Hadfield, 170 joined
the Tavistock Clinic as a psychiatrist in 1932, and began analysis with Rickman in 1938. 171
Psychoanalytic training was interrupted by the Second World War when Bion became an
army psychiatrist working with Rickman, 172 evolving new group analytic approaches at the
Northfield Military Hospital. 173 In 1945 he resumed his analytic training with Klein, going
on to become one of her protégés. 174
Bion began working with schizophrenic patients examining how the inner psychic world of
a baby becomes adult psychopathology through disturbances of symbolic thought. 175 The
baby communicates to the mother its primitive fears, anxieties and dreads that the mother
then contains, transforming what Bion called ‘beta-elements’ to ‘alpha-elements’. These
become accessible for the baby to use in later processes of symbolization, and form the
heart of the analytic work with psychotic patients that Bion applied to all. What is too awful
to be experienced is projected into another (usually the mother/care-giver) where it is
contained and transformed before being received back by the infant/patient for future
170
Hadfield was also Bion’s therapist though this did not constitute an analytic training. He was one of a
group of pioneering psychoanalysts whose work grew out of the First World War. A post at the Tavistock led
to Hadfield influencing a new generation of psychiatrists/psychoanalysts including Dicks and Suttie. In his
preface to Suttie’s work, Hadfield links psychoanalysis with a relational perspective, later evolving into object
relations, with a driving force of love that he advocates as the love of, and by, God.
171
Bion continued his analytic education through lectures at the Tavistock including some given by Jung in the
autumn of 1935 on literary creativity. Bion attended these with Samuel Beckett who had been his patient from
1934-1935. Bion’s literary and creative aspirations were at an embryonic stage at this point.
172
Bion had been in analysis with Rickman from 1938-1939. Rickman was a distinguished member of the
British Psycho-Analytical Society having seen Freud in Vienna, been in analysis with Ferenczi in Budapest
and later with Klein. Though an advocate of Kleinian ideas, if not always of Klein as a person, he bridged the
different strands that emerged in the British Psycho-Analytical Society (Rickman 1957).
173
Other pioneering developments included the leaderless group project that shaped the formation of group
analysis in GB (Harrison 2000).
174
There is dispute concerning the length of Bion’s analysis. Some writers have 1946-1950, others 1945-1952
or 1945-1953. The confusion might be that Bion qualified as an associate member of the British
Psychoanalytical Society in 1950 and a false assumption drawn that he finished his analysis with Klein at this
point. The latter dates are more likely.
175
Grotstein believes this phase of Bion’s work was very influential for his later ideas (Grotstein 1981).
71