Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

psychic health and development (Di Ceglie 2005). Bion offered a more empathic form of
projective identification than Klein, which was of significant clinical value, emphasizing a
greater relational dimension involving intra- and inter-psychic processes (Bateman and
Holmes 1995). While initially rooted in Kleinian concepts, Bion developed a language to
convey the terror and depth of psychic experiences and evolved a unique psychoanalytic
epistemology. The formless disturbing aspects of being are brought into psychoanalysis
where they can be known and contained through conscious and unconscious processes.
Bion believed a thing can be known through a mathematical/philosophically-based ‘Grid’
using symbols rather than phantasies. This enables greater comprehension of
analytic/psychic/psychotic encounters beyond the limitations of words (Bion 1963). Sayers
equates this transforming process to that found in religious and mystical forms of atonement
and at-one-ment, though Bion developed his own language of O or ultimate reality to
describe this (Sayers 2003).
Bion’s work is complex and technically demanding utilizing philosophical and
mathematical concepts. Hume’s constant conjunction, Plato’s Ideal Forms, and Kant’s
noumenal thing-in-itself are synthesized into a meta-psychology 176 that underpins all Bion’s
work (Marcus and Rosenberg 1998; Lopez-Corvo 2003). Bion believed that in reading his
work something is evoked in the reader, elucidating an internal response that utilizes
unconscious pre-existing forms. This directs us to the one theme that links all Bion’s work,
transformation (Bion 1965). Whether through his unique concepts of: projective
mechanisms of the container and contained; the alpha-elements/function and beta-
176 Hume’s concept where a pattern can be found where ‘two objects or thoughts become thought of as
belonging together’ (Grotstein 2007: 65f.). Bion also utilizes Hume’s theory of causation ‘that an idea owes
its genesis to a sense impression’ (Bion 1965: 66).
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