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V. Ab. Wilfred R. Bion Most notable psychoanalytical influences, as acknowledged throughout Bion’s oeuvre, were Freud and Klein. Bion shared with Freud an interest in building a model of the psychic apparatus and an apparatus thinking in development and in psychoanalytic situation. Specifically, according to P.C. Sandler (2005), Bion draws and further extends Freud’s illusory/hallucinatory character of transference (Freud 1912), draws on and further extends many other Freuds contributions, such as resistance, free association (1912), interplay between manifest and latent contents and in day dreaming activities, the unconscious domain and unconscious communication (1915c), free associations, countertransference and ‘personal factor’ (Freud (1933, 1940) and their extensions in Sándor Ferenczi (1909,1928) and Theodor Reik (1948), construction (Freud 1940), representation, interpretation, observation of the genesis and vicissitudes of thought processes (Freud 1911), among others. Klein’s influence is mainly felt in employing projective identification (Klein 1930) including his extension of its function as a communication, internal objects and part objects, and primitive symbolization, akin to psychotic actions and thought. With the clinical objective of trying to understand and treat psychotic patients, Bion constructed a model of what he called the ‘thinking’ of sensorial perceptions, emotional experiences and thoughts (Bion, 1962a, 1962b). In further exploring this ‘thinking’ process, he came to delineate the ‘elements’ of psychoanalysis like Euclid did in studying the elements of geometry and Newton in physics (Bion, 1963). The elements compiled in “Elements of Psychoanalysis” include concepts such as PS↔D, L(Love), H (Hate), K(Knowledge), etc. First published in “Elements of Psychoanalysis” and much elaborated and explicated in “Transformations”, Bion’s Grid categories denote the genetic development of thought on the Y axis, and the function or use of the thought on the X axis. Inspired by neopositivists’ search for ‘truth-value’ of scientific statements, Bion attempted for psychoanalysis to become a predictive science not unlike so-called hard sciences. Bion’s “Transformations” (1965) shows these efforts in using abstract formulae. At the end of the book, it can be seen how Bion realized that the transformations that he described so far are at a representational level while the fundamental transformations in psychoanalysis are beyond this representational level. This implies that the abstract mathematical method may not be applicable when approaching these fundamental changes. At realizing this, Bion resorted to other traditions of apprehension of reality as it is, in order to keep the analytic view, those of the so-called mystics, whose formulations also attempt to transmit something that is beyond verbal representation. At this juncture, Bion states that the numinous realm which he calls ‘O’ must be the compass of the analyst. Bion elaborated this approach further in ‘Attention and Interpretation’ (Bion, 1970).
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