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Yet Bion’s theoretical contributions, especially his early ones, were quite clearly and openly based on and related to Freud’s thought. This is particularly striking, for example, in his early papers, such as “Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities” (1957), in which his thinking is in close dialogue with Freud’s notions about relating to reality in terms of ego functions (Freud, 1911). Precisely on this paper, Freud’s “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning,” Lawrence Brown based his paper “The ego psychology of Wilfred Bion: implications for an intersubjective view of psychic structure” (Brown, 2009), the first paper known to be dealing with this topic. Later aspects of Bion’s original oeuvre also reflect his perhaps unacknowledged debt to notions of ego functions. It is, for example, implicit in Bion’s theory of group dynamics (1961), in which the ‘Work Group’ is analogous to the adaptive reality-ego of the individual, while ‘Basic Assumption’ groups are somewhat analogous to the Id (Rioch, 1975). Over and above this, Bion’s consistent concern with transformations, with the psychic working over and processing of crude beta elements into alpha elements, with the psychic processes that create dreams and reverie out of pre-psychic sensory-near elements, with thinking and language – all of these can be seen as his recasting ego functions in his own conceptual terms . The culmination of this effort at re-conceptualization finds expression in the well-known Grid, which may be regarded as a novel way of deconstructing ego functions and how they help or fail to reach more advanced psychic levels of abstraction, realization and authenticity in a way that combines and integrates ego and self . It is, of course, totally unlikely that Bion would have regarded himself as an Ego Psychologist (certainly in the sense of narrow definition of the American Ego Psychology above), nor should he be categorized as one. But it is instructive and informative to follow his line of thought as a European counterpart that represents an attempt to reframe what American Ego Psychology tried to achieve, albeit along very different conceptual lines. III. Cg. Ego Psychology and Experience A major attribute of the normal functioning of the ego is the creation, formation and integration of what constitutes our subjective, conscious and unconscious, experience. The question of subjective experience is an age-old philosophical issue. Psychoanalysis, however, aims at elucidating the inner forces, dynamics and mechanisms that shape and produce our experience. In a sense, “experience” as such, while it plays a central role in clinical discourse, is either “explained” as the ‘end result’ and emergent outcome of such forces, or the narrated signifier of these inner dynamics. Yet patients describe experiences, and psychoanalysts and psychotherapists speak to them in experiential terms. This may be one of the factors that influenced what happened to Hartman era Ego Psychology, which was often criticized as being “experience-distant” (Kohut, 1971). The language of ‘self’ and of ‘relationship’ seems better suited to capture such experiential aspects , yet at the same time it disregards the fact that such communicable observables are ultimately dependent on underlying ego functions that produce and sustain them (Grossman, 1982). Notably, Erikson was confronted with this issue when he tried to introduce the concept of identity into psychoanalysis. He tried to resolve the difficulty
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