Object Relations Theory- Psychoanalysis

Winfred Bion's theory of thinking in the field of psychodynamics has greatly informed the modern-day psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice (Mawson, 2011). He has also been regarded as an innovator in the post-Kleinian tradition through his ability to draw our attention to communicative elements of his container/contained distinction. He also developed the projective identification concept while at the same time also hypothesising the presence of an undifferentiated unconscious (O’Shaughnessy, 2005). The focus of this essay is to provide an in-depth account of the Theory of Thinking as advanced by Bion. Additionally, the essay seeks to explore how the ideas put forward by this theory have impacted on post-Kleinian thinking and clinical practice. This paper explored Bion's projective identification model courtesy of his theory of containment. In particular, Bion's model of containment has contributed greatly to our understanding of the interactive processes that characterised the mother-infant relationship. Bion develops the work of Klein, therefore Klein and her key concepts will be initially introduced.

• Projective-identification concept & Paranoid Schizoid Position
• The depressive position
• Bion's Theory of Thinking
• The container and contained model
• Reverie
• Alpha Function
• Thoughts and thinking
• Psychic pain
• Transference and countertransference
• Conclusion
• References

Projective-identification concept & Paranoid Schizoid Position

Klein, a devout Freudian, sought to introduce the projective identification concept thus: “Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed toward the mother. This leads to a particular form of identification which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object-relation. I suggest for these processes the term “projective identification” (Klein, 1946, p. 102).

The projective identification concept as advanced by Klein, is largely seen as the basic foundation for Bion's container/contained theory. Other scholars like O'Shaughnessy (1981) state that the projective identification concept provides clarification of the objectives of Freud's (1911) pleasure principle. However, Klein's theory is significantly different from Freud's elucidation in that she perceived the projective identification by an infant as an effort to project the unbearable fragments “into the mother” (Klein, 1946, p. 183). Nonetheless, Klein was convinced that projective identification occurred in infant/mother phantasies: “These excrements and bad parts of the self are meant not only to injure but also to control and to take possession of the object. Insofar as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self” (Klein, 1946, p. 183).

From the quote, Klein points at a discrepancy between object and self. In particular, she infers that the application of projective identification to get rid of bad parts tends to distort this discrepancy.

Projective Identification involves the splitting off of unwanted thoughts and emotions and projecting them into objects (initially the mother) which now embody or represent them.

In her paper titled On Identification, Klein (1955) has described in detail, the “paranoid-schizoid” position. For Klein, this position entails a collection of defences, anxieties as well as object relations. While projective identification may not have been the overarching theme of Klein's paper, she has, nonetheless, outlined it as a leading defence together with projection, denial, splitting, and introjection. These defences contradict the primitive paranoid anxiety that is espoused by the paranoid-schizoid position.

A key defining attribute of the paranoid-schizoid position is that it leads to the splitting of the object and self into two: bad or good. Klein opines that the infant's ego is split, projection and objections are split distinctively into hating and loving feelings. These are directed at various sections of the mother's breasts. As a result, they perceive the maternal object as both a good and bad breast. A ‘good' breast comes about due to the gratifying and loving nature of the mother, whereas the ‘bad' breast comes about due to the perceived persecutory and frustrating nature of the mother (Ogden, 2010). The ‘bad' and 'good' objects get introjected, thereby triggering a cycle of re-projection and in-turn, lead to re-introjection. Such 'binary splitting' is deemed suitable for the healthy development of an infant.

The depressive position

The Kleinian perceptive of the depressive position encompasses the main point of conflict that the young child is faced with (Rosenbluth, 1965). The depressive position involves integrating and accepting the 'good' and 'bad' aspects of the mother as belonging to one person. It is characterised by "ambivalence", which Klein sees as an achievement compared to the splitting involved in the paranoid-schizoid position. According to Klein, this awareness starts at approximately when the child is 6 months old. From that point onwards, it evolves gradually. Progressively, for the child, the a whole-child-mother relationship ensues, or what Klein describes as object constancy.

Bion's Theory of Thinking

The work of Bion has had a significant influence in the field of psychoanalysis and in particular, in informing our understanding of group experiences (Mitchell, 1984). Bion has proposed various condensed hypotheses anchored in the psychic apparatus, along with its fundamental conventions (Ferro, 2002). For Bion, thinking is the culmination of two basic developments. First, is thought development and second is the development of an apparatus that can accommodate the thought so developed. The thinking label gets attached to such a setup, albeit temporarily. This is central to Bion's idea of “thoughts-without-a-thinker”. This seems to contrast the widely held conception that thoughts are the outcome of our thinking. For Bion, thinking is therefore “dependent on the successful outcome of two main mental developments" (1962, p. 110).

The first form of development is the development of thoughts. In this case, thoughts "require an apparatus to cope with them.” (Bion, 1962, p. 111). The second development as identified by Bion, is thinking. From this perspective, thinking is perceived as constituting a development that allows the psyche to deal with the pressure exerted by thoughts.

The container and contained model

The container-contained model as used by Bion, plays a significant role in describing the formative phases of development of thoughts. It also assists with our understanding of external and internal reality (Pick, 1992), in addition to also describing our thinking ability. Bion likened the container-contained model with the infant-mother relationship. These include objects, affects, self and unprocessed sensory experiences of an infant. For Bion, a container is indicative of a benign function. It communicates a way through which diverse experiences can be processed to transform their destructive nature to life-promoting components.

Reverie

Bion put forward a theory that would aid in the realisation of desire through imaginary representation. For Bion, the term reverie entails the improvements of an individual's inner container to an extent that it gets to accommodate any content even as it remains unyielding in the face of desire. Bion used this term in reference to the maternal consciousness in which the mother is so calmly receptive. It means that the mother is in a position to process the confusion, fear or dysregulation they are exposed to.

Alpha Function

Melanie Klein's notion of projective identification was instrumental in the development of the Alpha Function by Bion. He improved the work of Melanie Klein by incorporating an additional dimension which perceives projective identification as an influential fantasy in the mind of an infant. The additional dimension also acts as the foremost means of communication by the infant. Bion first explored the alpha function in his 1958 article titled, “On Arrogance” in reference to a patient who was of the view that his analysts was not in a position to “tolerate it". Consequently, Bion interpreted this to mean that the patient engaged in preverbal communication. Moreover, such communication, according to Bion, took place via projective identification via the primitive id. Moreover, following the analyst's focus on verbalisation, the patient experiences this as constituting an attack on his mode of communication. The Alpha function involves the detoxing of emotions and returning them to the infant in the form of serviceable thoughts or alpha elements.

Thoughts and thinking

Bion conceptualised emotional experience as the foundation of all thought. Moreover, Bion was of the view that the definitions of emotional experiences could be confined to six 'links'. These links are: love (L); knowledge (K) and hate (H). The negatives of these three links are identified as -L, -K, and -H (Bion, 1962). Bion hypothesised that our experience with emotional states are as early as during infancy. At this early stage, we start to identify means of describing ourselves both unconsciously and consciously. This acts as a source of motivation for deductive reasoning and thought development. Bion hypothesises that in its initial manifestation, a thought function is a substitute for an absent thing. As we develop, there is a resultant accumulation of emotional experiences, along with their associated thoughts. In the event that things happen in patterns that we perceive as being 'constantly cojoined', our deductive reasoning is activated. According to Bion, “the individuals must be capable of abstracting from an emotional experience element that appear to be constantly cojoined" (p. 67).

Bion further hypothesised that thoughts could be categorised on the basis of their developmental history. Consequently, the first stage of thought categorised as identified by Bion, is preconception. The preconception bears resemblance with the ‘empty thoughts' theory as postulated by Kant. From a psychoanalytic perspective, “the theory that the infant has an inborn disposition corresponding to an expectation of a breast may be used to supply a model” (Bion, 1962, p. 179). The association between the preconception and a realisation is that it almost mirrors its yield of a conception. In other worlds, the preconception, coupled with a past knowledge of the breast, leads to the development of a conception. The expectation is that there will be an ongoing conjoining of conception with emotional experience.

Psychic pain

Projective identification has also found widespread application in describing psychic pain, Bion has described psychic pain thus: “People exist who are so intolerant of pain or frustration [or in whom pain or frustration is so intolerable] that they feel the pain but will not suffer it and so cannot be said to discover it “(Bion, 1970, p. 9).

From this quote, Bion infers that patients who do not experience pain also fail to obtain the encouragement they might have gotten form intrinsic or accidental relief. The pain so described by Bion constitutes what Joseph has described as a borderline situation. Such pain occurs when an individual experiences a shift in balance of their personality. The patient experiences this pain in the borderline between physical state and mental state. According to Joseph (1981), such pain is usually associated with an increased level of awareness of other people's realities and the self.

During the formative stages of analysis, such patients manifest in strong persecuting and anxiety feelings. Joseph (1981) reports that out of his clinical experience with psychic pain, this kind of pain may happen during analysis. In such a case, psychic pain encompasses the analytic process. On the other hand, psychic pain may be due to analysis and may in fact, contribute towards the patient's treatment process. This is likely to happen for example, where a patient has a specific form of relationship with a certain object and the relationship in question changes and destabilises a previously held balance.

Transference and countertransference

For Bion, psychoanalysis entails a mutual activity. He perceives the client-therapist relationship as being ‘relationally present.” The conflict, emotions, and neuroses that a client manifests in are intimately linked to the experiences of the analysts, which he/she also expresses (Joseph, 1985). The work of Bion on an analyst's countertransference is also instrumental in terms of informing developments in clinical psychoanalysis. Like Freud and Klein, Bion also found that countertransference is faced with a possible defensive misuse by the analysts, during clinical application. For this reason, Bion requests analysts to exercise caution in the application of countertransference in practice (1988). The projective identification as developed by Klein is fundamental to our understanding of the patient's unconscious. For Freud, transference occurs when a patient transfers his/her relationship with objects to the analysts via the analytic process. In this way, transference is crucial to the analytic process and should hence not be seen as an obstacle. This concept was further extended by Klein through her observation of introjection and projection as it forms and influences the inner objects of an individual.

Through transference, the analyst gets to experience the unconscious anxieties that is triggered by the transference situation. Transference enables an analyst to understand the patient's feelings and actions and their attempt to draw them their defensive systems and communicate elements of inner self formed at infancy (Joseph, 1988). In countertransference, the patient responds to all that an analyst says or is based on his/her psychic make-up, as opposed to the intentions of an analyst and the meaning intended in their interoperations. Klein perceives the depressive position as being consolidated with the paranoid schizoid position. This uncertainty is frustrating and nourishing in equal measure.

Conclusion

Bion has made an enormous contribution to the field of psychoanalysis. His conception of clinical practice was widely influenced by Melanie Klein, who in turn borrows form the work of Sigmund Freud. From this, Bion helped to shape the patient-analyst interactions post-Kleinian through his psychoanalytic experience with patients. Bion developed an abstracted model of mysticism that has over the years given us deeper insights into the container-contained model, the interplay between projection, interpretation and containment, and attacks on linking.

References

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