Wilfred Bion

Bion drew a distinction between the basic assumption group and the work group. Within Bion’s perspective, there were always two groups present in every group setting — the overt or work group and the covert or basic assumption group.

This passage establishes Bion’s foundational group-psychology typology and explains how primitive covert dynamics in the basic assumption group systematically undermine the declared task of the work group.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis

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It is Bion’s concept of O that bears resemblance to several of Jung’s usages of the self. O can be defined as: Ultimate reality, absolute truth, or unknowable psychic reality in the Kantian sense, which can only be known through its transformations.

Samuels argues that Bion’s concept of O — unknowable ultimate reality known only through its transformations — constitutes the most structurally significant parallel between Bion’s metapsychology and Jung’s concept of the Self.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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Bion describes this Truth simply as ‘O.’ He distinguishes O from what he notes as ‘K’ (knowledge). For Bion, O is the reality of life prior to definition, prior to the intrusion of K. That is why he asserts that O can be intuited, but not known.

Cooper expounds Bion’s O/K distinction as the axial epistemological polarity of his thought, positioning O as pre-conceptual reality that resists definition and can only be approached through intuition.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019thesis

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Bion’s technical mandate to relinquish memory, desire, and understanding serves as a tool to allow for the emergence of awareness of ‘O’ through ‘O’ to ‘K’ evolution and is based on the underlying principle that ‘O’ cannot be known.

Cooper presents Bion’s clinical technique — freedom from memory, desire, and understanding — as the practical corollary of his metaphysics of O, drawing an explicit structural parallel with Dogen’s shikantaza.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019thesis

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Bion is interested in an infinite expansion of meaning, which any specific definition would, from his point of view, foreclose. As the variable, ‘O’ activates a state of becoming unrelated to any claim to therapeutic progress or cure.

This passage argues that Bion’s concept of O is deliberately anti-definitional, activating an open-ended process of becoming that deliberately resists therapeutic teleology.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019thesis

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Both Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion are significant to our discussion because of their emphasis upon the death instinct and its personification as a terrifying ‘object’ in unconscious fantasy-systems of very Jung children and/or psychotic processes.

Kalsched positions Bion alongside Klein as a theorist who extends Freud’s death instinct into a theory of psychotic-level internal persecution operative in early traumatic experience.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting

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Bion is advocating that the psychoanalyst resists the forcing of memories. His stance is intended to clear the psychic space for spontaneously emerging memories. He distinguishes between the two by describing the latter as ‘evolutions.’

Cooper clarifies that Bion’s call for freedom from memory is not a rejection of memory per se but a disciplined attentional stance that allows genuine mnemonic evolution rather than forced recollection.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting

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For both Bion and Dogen, this reality is not objectifiable, not conceptualizable, and not realized through thinking or through other sensory modalities, although ‘O’ is always present, evolving and functioning in all experience.

Cooper establishes a sustained philosophical homology between Bion’s O and Dogen’s non-dualistic suchness, emphasising the shared claim that ultimate reality pervades all experience while remaining irreducible to conceptualisation.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting

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Both Bion and Dogen are after: bare awareness of mental, emotional and somatic states as the path to see into, unhitch and de-condition from desires and attachments, and liberate oneself from the delusive self-structures and suffering they engender.

This passage argues that Bion and Dogen share a common soteriological orientation toward bare, unconditioned awareness as the operative agent of psychological and spiritual liberation.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting

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Bion views these assumptions as a form of group resistance that needs to be interpreted and ultimately addressed. The individual cannot be treated in group, and the only appropriate target for treatment, from Bion’s perspective, is the commonly shared anxiety of the group.

Flores explains Bion’s clinical implication that basic assumptions constitute group-level resistance requiring interpretation directed at collective anxiety rather than individual psychopathology.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting

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From Bion’s perspective, ‘undefiled’ would mean ‘free from memory, desire, and understanding,’ or, as noted above, free from contrivances.

Cooper aligns Bion’s technical formula of freedom from memory, desire, and understanding with the Ch’an concept of practice uncontaminated by contrivance or goal-orientation.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting

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This is the experientially intuited space of Bion’s ‘O’ that I discuss in more detail in Chapter 7. This is the realizational space of no—

Cooper identifies the spacious, object-free awareness cultivated in shikantaza with the experiential register of Bion’s O, linking meditative and psychoanalytic conceptions of undetermined presence.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019supporting

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Bell, David. ‘Bion: The Phenomenologist of Loss.’ In Bion Today. New Library of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, in press. Bion, Wilfred R. Attention and Interpretation. 1970. Repr., London: Karnac, 1993.

This bibliographic entry signals the reception of Bion’s thought within the Jungian therapeutic relationship literature, characterising him as a phenomenologist of loss and citing his major technical work.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009aside

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Bion, W. (1963), ‘Elements of psychoanalysis,’ in Bion, 1977. Bion, W. (1965), ‘Transformations,’ in Bion, 1977. Bion, W. (1977), Seven Servants, Jason Aronson, New York.

Samuels’ bibliography lists Bion’s core theoretical texts, confirming their status as reference points within the post-Jungian comparative literature.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside

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