The One and the Many: Bion and the Science of At-One-Ment

with Thomas Helscher

Bion’s unique contributions to psychoanalysis are only now beginning to be fully appreciated, particularly his focus on analysis as an experience situated between the mind and the body, between the self and the world, between the individual and the group, between the analyst and analysand. His early work on groups, particularly his attention to the group mind, manifested in the basic assumption group, and its tension with the more mature and evolved aspects of the personality contained in the individual as individual, remains a vital source of understanding intersubjective and intrapsychic conflict. In this class, we will look first at his pre-Kleinian work on groups, and then trace the development of his thinking through his seminar in Los Angeles, and finally his last major work, Attention and Interpretation. Our focus will be on how his theory of the group mind represents an important development of Freud’s primary and secondary processes and how his technique for interpreting the group unconscious becomes the ground for his work on “the science of at-one-ment” as elaborated in his LA seminar and in Attention and Interpretation. In these latter works, Bion’s goes beyond dyadic conceptions of the psychoanalytic relationship, eschewing counter-transference and doer and done to dynamics in favor of what he calls transformations in O, which derive from shared enounters with the emotional experience of the session.

6 Session Series Online via Zoom

3/3, 3/17, 3/31, 4/14, 4/28, 5/12