Evolution of the concept and its clinical application1
[The analyst] should withhold all conscious influences to his capacity to attend and give himself over completely to his “unconscious memory.”
Freud, 1912, p. 112)
We have explored Bion's alpha function, "the engine of transformations," in Chapter 3 as well as the clinical implications of his theory of transformations in Chapter 4; however, there is another component that requires our further understanding - the receptivity of the analyst. In order for the clinician to submit a projection from the analysand to one's alpha function and then transform it, one must first allow it entry into the analyst's psyche; i.e., to be receptive to the patient's unconscious communication. This is easier said than done: witness Bion's (1970) caveat at the end of Chapter 4 that "the 'pressure' may be exerted by the contained so that the container disintegrates" (pp. 107-108).
My aim in this chapter is to trace the concept of the analyst’s receptivity from its origins in Freud’s theories, to its elaboration in the work of Theodor Reik and, finally, to Bion’s contributions on this subject. My central argument is that what we call the analyst’s receptivity is actually a misnomer because it does not exist in and of itself, but rather is part of a highly complex intersubjective network that is constantly operating unconsciously. I have chosen to focus on these three authors because of their seminal contributions regarding the unconscious aspects of the analyst’s receptivity and the work of each represented a significant advance that paved the way for future elaborations. Freud introduced to us the notion of the analyst’s receptive unconscious but did not elaborate it; Reik extensively described how he employed his unconscious “as an instrument of the analysis” (Freud, 1912) but did not suggest a metapsychology to account for it; and Bion’s explorations of what he called alpha function offered valuable insights into the origin and nature of the receptive mind, whether in the analyst or the patient. I will begin with a vignette from the analysis of a man, which I will then bring to three imagined “supervisions” with Freud, Reik and Bion in order to anchor their ideas in clinical experience.
Mr. R., a professional in his fifties, is in the third year of analysis to deal with a sense of drudgery and anger about his life that is tied to an abiding impression that he always gets the short end of the stick. He is troubled that his wife sees him as angry, joyless and often distant. Mr. R. appears involved in the analysis, gives much thought to my interpretations and feels he is making progress, yet vigorously denies any reliance on me. He invariably rejects my mention of our relationship and that such talk feels “gay” to him, i.e., suggesting weakness and dependency. He has twice announced at the end of a session that he was leaving the treatment and was not open to returning the next day to discuss his decision. Nevertheless, he called back a few weeks later in each case to say he needed to return because his anger and depression had spiked once more. The following session occurred after I was away for one week.
Mr. R. began by saying the last three weeks had been difficult: he had been feeling tired and anxious, was sleeping poorly and that he had decided to lower his antidepressant medication. He then reported a dream: “Guys were breaking into my car, were stealing something; that’s all.” He initially felt anxious, and then depressed, after this dream. His thoughts turned to the graduation party for his daughter over the weekend and how “I felt like crying about her” and all her friends going off to college; feelings he quickly explained away as “sounds like it’s chemical.” I commented about the situations of loss he was conveying (his daughter’s going away, that we hadn’t met for a week, the dream of something being stolen from him) that seem to have triggered his anxious and depressed feelings. He went on to despair that he hadn’t been productive last week (when I was away), worried he was not properly preparing himself for an important business meeting and that he had felt “scattered.” I said, “I think coming here helps you feel grounded and perhaps your dream expressed some feelings about my not being here, like I had taken something valuable away from you.” He unenthusiastically replied, “Could’ve been” and drifted off into silence.
During this silence a song by Linda Ronstadt, “Poor Pitiful Me,” came unbidden into my mind, a tune in which she facetiously bemoans her “pitiful” state because so many men were interested in her: “bad luck” that was really an embarrassment of riches. I was brought out of my reverie when Mr. R. said he had just fallen asleep and had a brief dream of
Two Hillbilly women; I don’t know if they were actresses. They had bad teeth, were hugging, maybe kissing and laughing. I don’t know if I was watching it or if they knew me.
He said it brought to mind a movie he had seen over the weekend, “Girl from Monaco,” about a “Paris Hilton-type woman” who was well dressed and handsome in reality. She had perfect teeth and smile, just the opposite of the Hillbillies in his dream. I commented that it was interesting that the Hillbilly women were both laughing and happy like the rich girl and he replied that in actual life the Hillbillies are probably happier. He drifted off again and the song, “Poor Pitiful Me,” came back to me once more.
I interpreted:
I’m not sure how to say this, but I think when you’re depressed and anxious you’re feeling much like an impoverished Hillbilly from a poor background, but that feeling may cover over something else about you; something that may feel valuable and could be stolen from you.
Mr. R. wondered what he would have to steal and then mentioned his worries about his son getting kidnapped, email scammers who stole people’s identities, another man possibly stealing his wife away and his daughter attending a university located in an unsafe area of town. He thought some more and said “I left my associate to do a bunch of stuff and I wonder if he really can,” to which I offered “It’s good to have an associate around you can rely on.” He agreed and the session ended at this point.
Within the framework of classical psychoanalysis, the analyst, having settled comfortably into his chair, places himself into a receptive state of mind that is open to communications from the analysand, which, having been received by his (the analyst’s) unconscious, percolate up to the clinician’s conscious awareness at which point he decodes the message to extract its unconscious meaning. This receptive state of mind was enabled by the analyst engaging
in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining ... ‘evenly suspended attention’ ... in the face of all that one hears ... [and that he] should withhold all conscious influences to his capacity to attend and give himself over completely to his ‘ unconscious memory. ’
(Freud, 1912, pp. 111–112) [italics added]
This demand on the analyst was the analogue to the patient opening himself up to free associations and, furthermore, the therapist was told to view his unconscious as a “receptive organ” to the “transmitting unconscious” of the patient and to “use his unconscious ... as an instrument of the analysis” (p. 116), perspectives that I (Brown, 2011a) have called the “big bang statement from which the universe of intersubjectivity has emanated” (p. 20). Furthermore, Freud (1915a) observed that
the Ucs of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs. This deserves closer investigation ... but, descriptively speaking, the fact is incontestable.
(p. 194)
Thus, Freud was clearly viewing the analyst’s receptivity as primarily an unconscious process, rooted in the “incontestable” fact of communication between a transmitting and a receiving unconscious, the activity of which was brought under analytic scrutiny through the combined handiwork of free association and evenly suspended attention. He did not develop these assertions further nor did he explain what is meant by “unconscious memory” or how to use one’s unconscious “as an instrument of the analysis,” thereby leaving it to future generations to expand upon. Though it would be incorrect to say Freud was introducing a “two person” model of the psychoanalytic relationship, I do believe that it is shortsighted to dismiss the scaffolding he offers us to consider how two minds communicate unconsciously.
Though this receptive stance was intended to be an “island of contemplation” (Sterba, 1934) from which the analyst carefully observed the analysand, Freud and his colleagues were well aware that the analyst’s calm was often disturbed. Freud (1905a) early in his career realized that in the process of engaging with “those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast ... [the analyst cannot] expect to come through the struggle unscathed” (p. 109). This realization led him (Freud, 1910) to propose the concept of counter-transference, that is, the analyst’s neurotic reaction to the patient’s transference that was implicitly an intersubjective idea because of the linkage between an aspect of the analysand’ s psyche with an equivalent region in the analyst (Brown, 2011a, 2011b). Accordingly, since “no psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit” (Freud, 1910, p. 145), it became necessary that the analyst was receptive to, and aware of, his unconscious reactions to the transference. In this regard, the “material” of analysis was not simply the patient’s free associations but also included the analyst’s subjective experience. Freud has often been criticized for advocating a dispassionate stance similar to a surgeon, but in my view
Freud appears most concerned about the heat of the analyst’s unconscious affecting the analysis negatively; hence, his advocacy of ‘emotional coldness’ is meant to help the clinician keep his ‘cool’ rather than to promote an air of aloofness.
(Brown, 2011b, p. 81; Chapter 2)
I did not know what to expect in my “supervision” with Freud since virtually nothing has been written about it, though Eduardo Weiss (1970) reported an exchange of letters with him in which he sought out consultations on some of his patients. Freud’s responses were always very direct and his comments were not offered as opinions, but rather as the truth. Thus, I find Freud friendly and confident in his assessments, but also usually on target. He was quick to point out that I began the hour with an agenda of which I was unaware at first: to show my patient that he did rely on me and to “prove” this by evidence gleaned from his associations. I found Mr. R.’s resistance to his dependency frustrating and his dismissal of the genuine sadness he expressed about his daughter’s graduation by saying “it’s chemical” felt devaluing and provocative to me. When I made a general interpretation about the themes of loss, including reference to me, he went on to describe his unproductive week and how he felt scattered. Feeling that I had an opening to be more direct about the transference, I intervened and made a direct transference interpretation, a kind of Hail Mary pass, in an attempt to drive home his defense against relying on me and the analysis. His response was to drift off and to fall asleep. Freud observed that I should remember to follow his advice about “not directing one’s notice to anything in particular” and he said it appeared I had cherry picked through my patient’s associations to bolster my agenda of showing Mr. R. that he had trouble relying on me. In other words, explained Freud, I had neither given myself over to my receptivity nor allowed my “unconscious memory” to work on my behalf.
Freud reminded me that “no psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit” and that I ought to do some self-analysis or consult with my analyst about what unresolved childhood complexes in me were stirred by Mr. R.’s transference. Freud continued and pointed out that he thought I was unwittingly assisting my patient via my counter-transference to repeat his infantile conflicts rather than remember them (Freud, 1914). Resolution of the patient’s resistance, therefore, depended upon awareness of my forgotten infantile memories in order to help Mr. R. remember his repressed past so he could stop repeating it and instead work it through.
It is fascinating that in the silence following my direct transference interpretation both Mr. R. and I fell into a dreamy state: he literally dreamed of the two Hillbilly women and I was awash in Linda Ronstadt’s song, “Poor Pitiful Me.” I asked Freud what he thought of this and I find that he is of two minds about this phenomenon: first, that Mr. R. went to sleep to resist becoming awakened to a repressed memory that my interpretation aroused and that my distraction by the song was a countertransference-based resistance borne of my own conflicts. Freud also stated that he viewed the dream image of the two women frolicking together as a wish-fulfillment of Mr. R.’s transference desire for some homo-erotic encounter with me that was disguised by picturing the analytic couple as two Hillbilly women. Freud might also remind me of his statement from the Wolfman case that “dreaming is another kind of remembering” (1918, p. 51), which is to say that Mr. R.’s infantile neurosis was being expressed both through the transference and through the unconscious content of his dream, each of which were silently voicing repressed childhood conflicts.
But there was a second line of reasoning that Freud brought to explain the coincidence of Mr. R.’s dream and the appearance of “Poor Pitiful Me” in my mind, which has to do with the notion of the transmitting and receiving unconscious. Though he spoke with greater conviction about the resistance aspects of Mr. R.’s falling asleep, Freud was much more speculative about the unconscious communication occurring since this was a less well-developed part of his theory. Now, in a more tentative voice, Freud referenced an earlier statement that “everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people” (1913c, p. 320) and said that the nature of this “instrument” remains a mystery to him. Finally, with skepticism and some embarrassment, he quoted from his paper on telepathy in which he opined that, if it did occur, “that sleep creates favorable conditions for telepathy” (1922, p. 220) and perhaps the dreamy state that Mr. R. and I shared could account for this telepathic-like unconscious to unconscious communication.
It was clear to me that the forced hiatus in the session brought on by Mr. R.’s falling asleep in which each of us had our private experiences opened up a fresh line of associations that threaded back to his initial complaint of having been depressed and anxious. He talked about the “Girl from Monaco” who was carefree and fun-loving like the two Hillbillies who were probably even happier and for some reason the song, “Poor Pitiful Me,” returned to my mind. My association to the song was about an embarrassment of riches that was denied and hidden, which reminded me of his first dream of someone stealing something from his car, and so I offered the interpretation, more of a hunch actually, about his depression being linked to a sense that something valuable of his could be stolen. My conjecture appeared to pay off and he was able to speak with greater feeling about his anxieties of having what is valuable to him stolen. As I shared this “interpretation,” and my thoughts about it, with Freud he congratulated me for giving up my efforts to demonstrate Mr. R.’s reliance on me and instead to reinstitute my evenly suspended attention.
Before moving on, some important questions remain about Freud’s view of the analyst’s receptivity. First, how does the analyst use his unconscious as “an instrument of the analysis?” Second, Freud’s (1913) enigmatic remark that “everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people” (p. 320) raises the question about the nature of this receptive “instrument,” the answer to which we shall have to wait nearly 40 years to learn from Bion in his theory of alpha function. The third question about Freud’s views on the analyst’s receptivity is, “What does the analyst’s unconscious receive?” For Freud, the harvest of the clinician’s receptivity, whether emanating from the patient’s unconscious or from sources within himself, was always a repressed memory: either one from the patient that was encased in the transference or one of the analyst’s embedded in his countertransference. To assume a repressed memory that was unlocked from either the patient’s or analyst’s psyche is to say that the receptive unconscious has received a fully formed message, the meaning of which simply needs to be uncovered. The possibility that one’s unconscious might be the recipient of a cacophony of formless noise that communicated unarticulated affects and required formulation had not yet been considered by psychoanalysis. We will see as we move forward a gradual shift from regarding the analyst’s receptivity as central to decoding an organized repressed memory to considering it as a partner, with its counterpart in the patient, in giving meaning to undifferentiated emotional experience.
Theodor Reik and Freud met in 1910 at the suggestion of Freud after having received Reik’s doctoral dissertation, a psychoanalytic study of Flaubert, a meeting which for the 22-year-old Reik was “love at first sight” (Sherman, 1965). Freud dissuaded the young man from pursuing a medical education and instead encouraged him to continue with his interests in applied psychoanalysis. Seeing Reik’s innate gift for psychoanalysis, Freud sent him to Karl Abraham for a personal analysis and he went on to become a renowned clinical analyst as well as insightful critic of culture and society. However, I want to underscore Reik’s devotion to one of Freud’s therapeutic principles that most analysts left unexplored: the recommendation that the analyst use his unconscious as an instrument of the analysis. In following this suggestion, Reik came to learn this rule required that the analyst must be receptive to any and all subjective experiences he encountered since these were how his mind registered communications from the analysand’s transmitting unconscious. The chief payoff to this stance of openness was an experience of surprise, an affect that was a centerpiece of Reik’s thinking for much of his career.
As early as 1926, Reik began to identify in the patient a “peculiar series of shocks ... [that] is essentially a surprise” (Reik, 1933, p. 322) in response to the emergence of repressed memories. Though disarming to the analysand, the presence of these jolts determined “whether anyone merely passes through an analysis or whether it is a living experience to him” (p. 322). This necessity that analysis must be a “living experience” applies equally to the patient and to the analyst and Reik cautions the therapist to adopt an “openness of mind” (p. 327) that eschews seduction into the orderliness of theory and instead to find his “bearings again in the chaos of the living psychic processes” (p. 327). Thus, he moves us away from simply considering the analyst’s receptivity and instead views it as one half of an analytic pair who are equally open to unconscious experience. He repeatedly urges the analyst
to trust ourselves to the unconscious ... [and] allow ourselves to be surprised ... and to surrender ... without resistance to the guidance of the unconscious.
(p. 328)
The primary approach of the analyst, therefore, is the same as for the analysand: to be receptive to whatever comes to mind “even though their ideas seem futile, illogical, meaningless, irrelevant, or of no importance” (p. 330). Reik acknowledges that his technical suggestions may be difficult to follow and they require the analyst to be inwardly truthful, emotionally courageous and to use his intuition as a guide.
Reik’s (1937) book, Surprise and the Psycho-Analyst: On the Conjecture and Comprehension of Unconscious Processes, continued his investigation of the role of surprise and intuition in analysis but from the perspective of the analyst’s experience. Intuition (and hunches and conjectures) was the analyst’s primary tool because “intellect is a completely unsuitable instrument for the investigation of the unconscious mental processes” (1933, p. 331). He emphasizes that surprise appears as a reaction to the emergence from repression “of a part of the ego formerly known to us but lost to knowledge” (p. 51). This view mirrors Freud’s archeological model: that once defenses and resistances have been cleared the underlying fully formed memory, like a buried ancient artifact, is revealed. Just as Plato thought that all learning was a recollection of knowledge that was lost at birth, so Freud and Reik believed that beyond the repressive barrier lay forgotten knowledge, fully formed and awaiting entry into consciousness. Furthermore, although what arises from the analyst’s unconscious appears to materialize from the void, it feels that way because of the alien sense which accompanies contact with unconscious phenomena. In addition, the analyst’s experience of his own unconscious productions may also feel foreign because these are products of his unconscious reaction to encountering the analysand’s unconscious:
Where the analyst’s idea penetrates to the profoundest depths of the other’s [patient] inner life, it may be recognized as the offspring of what is repressed in the analyst and appears to him as something alien.
(p. 59)
Reik’s (1948) magnum opus, Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experiences of a Psychoanalyst, is “eminently an autobiography” (Grotjahn, 1950, p. 56) that delivers on its title and gives the reader a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the workings of the mind of an analyst who has a bond of ambivalent friendship with his own unconscious. This unconscious is sometimes a messenger of painful truths and, at other moments, an invaluable oracle bearing important news that must be deciphered. Borrowing the term “third ear” from Nietzsche (1886), Reik deploys it to mean using one’s intuition, which is the analyst’ s awareness that his unconscious has been affected by subliminal cues from the patient’s transmitting unconscious. Writing at a time when ego psychology claimed greater “scientific” status (Lothane, 2006) than plumbing the murky depths of unconscious processes aided only by one’s intuition, Reik instead embraced the more aesthetic dimensions of analytic work. Together, the patient and analyst, receptive to the unconscious transmissions from each other and/ or from within themselves, entered a dreamy ego state which the “analyst shares with the patient ... [a] realm between reality and fantasy” (p. 109) with the only tools for this exploration being their intuitions, hunches and conjectures.
Prior to meeting with Reik, I contacted some people who had been supervised by him and was told that “his style was free floating and loose” (Kahn, 2012) and that “he depended on his own associations” (Sherman, 2012) as an important source of his supervisory comments. In my “consultation” I find that much of what Reik has to say echoes Freud’s comments: that the analyst’s task is to help the patient recover repressed childhood conflicts and that an important dimension to the work is for the clinician to be aware of his own unconscious processes. I experience Reik as much more at ease than Freud in asking about my subjective reactions to Mr. R. and he is also genuinely interested in my need to “prove” my patient’s reliance on me. We talk some about my childhood conflicts around needing to feel important, which is made easier because the emphasis is not on my “resistance” but rather on using my unconscious “as an instrument of the analysis.” I find that I am learning something new about my repressed problems as they have surfaced in response to Mr. R.’s provocation, insights I share with Reik, to which he replies by informing me of his concept (1937) of the “reciprocal illumination of unconscious happenings” in the analyst and patient. The idea of “counter-transference” is beginning to feel less a burdensome mistake and more a vital, though mercurial, companion.
Reik told me that Freud’s idea of evenly suspended attention is the one rule to which he always rigorously adheres and he observed that I strayed from the prescription to “not directing one’s notice to anything in particular” (Freud, 1912) when I pushed my agenda to show Mr. R. he needed me. Instead of being receptive to surprise, Reik commented that I was guided by my intellect, which is “a completely unsuitable instrument for the investigation of the unconscious mental processes” (1933, p. 331). Consequently, the session initially failed to develop into a spontaneous, emotionally alive experience, which Mr. R., paradoxically, had to invigorate by falling asleep and dreaming. From one point of view, his somnolence might be viewed as resistance; however, Reik said he regards the sleep, and especially the dreaming, as an effort by the analysand’s transmitting unconscious to re-establish connection with my mine. Indeed, the fact that Mr. R. and I had slipped into a mutually dreamy position indicates to Reik that my patient and I had entered into the “chaos of the living psychic processes” from which true emotional growth may occur.
Although Reik did not have a metapsychological explanation for the shared oneiric state Mr. R. and I had entered, he nevertheless was delighted to hear about our emergence into this “realm between reality and fantasy.” The session had suddenly evolved into a fertile exchange between one unconscious and another; however, as the analyst only I was privy both to Mr. R.’s dream of the Hillbilly women and to Linda Ronstadt’s tune playing in my mind. Having been chastened by my earlier attempt to impose the theme of Mr. R. supposedly defending against needing me, I decided to give myself over to my unconscious and not pre-emptively assign meaning to our respective reveries – a strategy advocated by Freud and robustly endorsed by Reik. Reik added to Freud’s original recommendation by highlighting the analyst’s intuition as a beacon in this foreign, incomprehensible territory and Reik encouraged me to stay the course in facing this void, which is an indicator that Mr. R. and I each had achieved contact with repressed memories. My patience was repaid with an intuition of what our subjective experiences might mean, and I tentatively shared this conjecture with my patient: the hunch yielded his heartfelt string of associations about fears of having the important people in his life being taken away. Though my “interpretation” was helpful to him, he ended the session with some doubt about whether his “associate” (the analyst) could truly be relied on.
In summary, “it would seem that Freud was interested in the forces within the patient that prevented recall, whereas Reik is concerned with powers within the analyst which facilitate recall” (Sherman, 1965, p. 20, italics added). Reik was perhaps the greatest expositor of Freud’s notion of the transmitting and receptive aspects of unconscious communication and he elaborated these in creative and new ways. At first he set his sights on the patient’s receptivity and the surprise/shock that followed from the emergence of repressed memories, though he later realized that the analyst, through his evenly suspended attention, was also susceptible to the same experiences. Indeed, such shocks were necessary for a meaningful analysis that was a “living experience,” an aim that was advanced by the analyst abandoning “the idea of a preconceived goal” (1933, p. 331). He artfully demonstrated how one may use his unconscious as an instrument of the analysis at a time when most analysts avoided dealing with the subject at all and I believe he set the stage for later developments. Reik also described the intertwining of unconscious processes in the patient and analyst but lacked a theory to account for this phenomenon and also did not formulate a theory to explain how “everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people” (Freud, 1913, p. 320). In addition, he viewed the surprises that awaited the analyst and patient as fully formed repressed memories in each of them and thought that the experience of a void reflected the “foreignness” of unconscious experience rather than the possible existence of a formless inner territory devoid of meaning. But the time had not yet arrived for the kinds of insights he realized to be fully appreciated and the unanswered questions to be given further thought.
I do not see Bion’s contributions to our understanding of the analyst’s receptivity as merely an extension of Freud’s and Reik’s positions, but it is important to recognize continuity in their views that advance and deepen our comprehension of this territory. Interestingly, when Bion (1980) lectured in New York City in 1977 the only American work he cited, and spoke highly of, was Theodor Reik’s (1937) book, Surprise and the Psychoanalyst. Where Freud and Reik advocated that the analyst engage in evenly suspended attention without “directing one’s notice to anything in particular” (Freud, 1912, p. 111), Bion (1967b) takes this advice a step further by saying the analyst ought to begin each session without memory and desire and that “Every session attended by the psychoanalyst must have no history and no future” (p. 17). This statement echoes Freud’s (1912) recommendation that the analyst “should withhold all conscious influences to his capacity to attend” (p. 111), but also seems to critique both Freud and Reik’s strategy of seeking to unearth repressed memories by instead squarely directing the analyst’s attention to what is happening in the here-and-now in order to “cultivate a watchful avoidance of memory” (Bion, 1967b, p. 18). By reorienting the analyst to the present situation Bion radically reconceived the analyst’s receptive stance and he was aware that this advice will increase the clinician’s anxiety, which seems parallel to Reik’s appreciation that an analysis can only be an emotionally alive experience if the analyst is open to being shocked and surprised by what registers in his unconscious receptivity.
Bion (1959) extended Klein’s (1946) description of projective identification to include the unconscious communication of one psyche to another. In this connection, the analyst’s unconscious receptivity was the beneficiary not only of jettisoned unbearable experience from the patient but may also be registering a communication from the analysand whose aim was to inform the analyst, in the emotional immediacy of the moment, how the patient was feeling unconsciously. Thus, projective identification generally, and its communicative version more specifically, describes how one unconscious transmits to another; thereby accounting for unconscious transmission and reception that Freud and Reik could not explain.
Bion’s theory of the container and contained (Chapter 3) offers the clinician a veritable treasure chest of insights into the nature and function of the analyst’s receptivity. Owing to his traumatic World War I experiences, his work with schizophrenics in the 1950s and personal struggles with many losses (Brown, 2012; Chapter 3), Bion began to investigate the nature of some aspect of the personality responsible for processing and giving meaning to affect, what Bion (1962b) calls alpha function, which addresses how the receiving unconscious processes emotional messages from the transmitting unconscious. Bion’s further researches led him to propose the container/contained relationship as the central factor of alpha function (Brown, 2012). The notion of the “contained” was not new and it referred to that which was projected into the object, but the existence of the container and the operations it performed on the contained represented a significant advance. Simply put, by proposing the presence of a container, Bion shone a revealing light into an unexplored region of the mind to disclose the nature of that “receptive organ” (Freud, 1912) into which the analysand’s transmitting unconscious projects.
Bion (1962b) believes that the container is an internalization of the relationship between the infant and its mother who is able to take in her baby’s projective identifications and tolerate bearing these disowned experiences. This is accomplished through her capacity for reverie, which is
the receptor organ for the infant’s harvest of self-sensation gained by its conscious.
(1962b, p. 116) [italics in the original]
I think it is important that Bion has used Freud’ s term of a “receptive organ,” surely not by accident; thereby, in effect, linking Freud’s idea of the receiving unconscious to a structure established in earlier infancy (the container) that makes sense of the infant’s (or patient’s) projections (the contained). Through its reverie function, the container (receiving unconscious) transforms the unconscious communications into emotionally meaningful narratives, like an editorial writer who sifts through the “raw” data of the news to attribute significance to these events. Bion connects the reverie function to the capacity for dreaming by which the container transforms raw emotional experience into meaningful psychic events, a process that happens when we are awake and also asleep. Thus, when Freud counsels the analyst to give himself over to our “unconscious memory” and Reik urges us to “trust ourselves to the unconscious,” both have sensed the existence of some psychic entity which “everyone possesses in his own unconscious [as] an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people” (Freud, 1913, p. 320), what Bion (1962b) called alpha function.
Bion also widens the bandwidth of frequencies to which the analyst must attend because one’s receptive unconscious is inherently attuned to multiple channels of information: Freud was exquisitely attentive to the subliminal messages in the patient’s verbalizations; Reik, in addition, was gifted in analyzing his private reactions to the patient as these reflected “reciprocal illuminations of unconscious happenings” in the analytic pair; and Bion extended further the reach of possible new wavelengths carrying important unconscious transmissions. Thus, the analyst must be at the ready for psychic networks that convey “rhythmical communications” or come to us “in frames of mind with which we are not familiar whether we are awake or asleep” (Bion, 1997b, p. 34). Like Reik, Bion asserts we must use our intuition and “speculative imagination” (Bion, ibid, p. 40) to grab hold of unconscious communications that may, at first glance, seem ridiculous or incomprehensible; however, and this is where Bion moves into new territory: he considers these “wild” and “stray” thoughts as indicating that the analyst’s mind (alpha function) is in the process of transforming the unconscious communication. It is this process of giving meaning to what the receptive unconscious takes in that separates Bion’s views from Freud and Reik, who believed that the meaning was established a priori and required “unwrapping” whereas for Bion the analyst’s reveries were the procedure by which meaning was attributed in statu nascendi. Put another way, in Bion’s (1965) view the payload launched by the transmitting unconscious consisted of “thoughts without a thinker,” i.e., ideas that were too unsettling for the transmitting mind to fully realize and required another mind to finish that transformation.
Before moving on to my “consultation” with Bion, I want to mention two related concepts regarding one’s receptivity that are derived from Bion’s thinking. The first is Ferro’s (2009) idea of transformational receptivity, which refers to the specific function of the containing/receptive mind that aims at transforming the received “raw” material into a dream image, reverie or some other form that enables the capacity to think. The second is the notion of altruistic identification (Brown, 2011a) “that is initiated by a compassionate concern for the individual with whom one is identifying” (p. 227). Here the analyst accepts the patient’s “transfer of pain” (Meltzer, 1986) knowing that we may be burdened and suffer our own version of that pain (the analysand’s projected pain linked with analogous regions in the analyst). An altruistic identification is at variance with Grinberg’s (1990) concept of projective counteridentification in which the clinician is invaded by disowned parts of the patient. In contrast, altruistic identification grows out of a compassionate willingness to bear the pain of taking on the patient’s “illness” and through that identification to serve as a witness to vouchsafe the analysand’s experience.
In preparing for my “consultation” with Bion, I learned that he did not like the term “supervision” and preferred to think of offering a “second opinion” (Grotstein, 2007), believing that the analyst was much better acquainted with the patient than the supervisor or consultant. Indeed, Bion (1997b) encouraged his “supervisees” to trust their “speculative imaginations” and that the candidate “should dare to use his imagination and dare to try to articulate it in supervision” (p. 45). He was most curious about the “model” of the patient in the analyst’s mind and the mental model the analysand held of the analyst (Aguayo, 2012); thus, he was uninterested in so-called “process notes” and he dissuaded candidates from presenting these in consultations (Barrows, 2008). In other words, Bion placed a premium on the analyst’s receptivity to the analysand’s unconscious communications and how his receptive mind, through the work of his reverie/alpha function, transformed the received messages into a model of the patient’s psyche, a process that has been described as “dreaming the patient into existence” (Brown, 2007; Ogden, 2005).
Although I eschewed bringing notes into the consultation, by now I had the session memorized. Bion questioned why I introduced Mr. R. as a “professional man in his fifties” and what importance I attached to being in the third year of analysis. I quickly replied that I knew Bion was commenting on the possibility that I might foreclose other sides of my patient from emerging to which he said I was being too Bionian, what did I really think? What came to mind is that I wanted to present Mr. R. as an “established” man in an “established” analysis, which actually was not how I truly felt about him. In fact, I went on, I found him somewhat pathetic and that reminded me that later in the session the Linda Ronstadt song, “Poor Pitiful Me,” had come to my mind unbidden. Bion offered his opinion that that tune must have been my way of giving voice to some unnamed feeling. When I attempted to recall the moment in the clinical hour when the song came to me, Bion said he meant that it had come up just now as he and I were conversing and I immediately felt I was mocking my patient through the song as though he were a little boy with a minor injury about which he was overly alarmed. Bion said it may be that I “preferred” seeing this “established” professional man than allowing myself to be receptive to the injured and frightened boy who was with us. Bion reminded me that my patient needed me, like an infant needs its mother, to absorb and become this feeling – to know it through my own experience – so I could speak with an insider’s knowledge2 of Mr. R.’s pain. I then realized that Mr. R.’s falling asleep made me feel pathetic as an analyst, which Bion thought reflected my unconscious receptivity of my analysand’s projective identification that was a “gift” from Mr. R. aimed at helping me understand him better.
I said to Bion that his comment about identifying with Mr. R.’s pain brought to mind a sequence in the hour that I was trying to understand: that there was a sudden halt in the session following my interpretation that Mr. R. might have felt my vacation was taking something valuable away from him. It was in the midst of this break in the hour that the song came to my mind at the same time that Mr. R. had fallen asleep and had a dream, which I then related to Bion. He commented that there was a sudden stop, an impressive caesura, in the hour in which my patient and I had our respective, but simultaneous, dreams. When I asked what he meant by “caesura,” Bion explained that it was a seeming break from one way of relating to an apparently completely different mode as though no continuity existed between the two, like the supposed divide between intrauterine life and early infancy that Freud has described (Bion, 1977). Defensively, I said that my interpretation was too direct and pushed him into escaping through sleep, but Bion offered a different “model” of that exchange and instead reminded me that “the patient is our best ally.” Mr. R., he said, had “decided” to speak to me through the language of dreams since I was not receptive to what he was telling me when he spoke in English about how he experienced himself as an injured and pathetic boy.
He went on to suggest that Mr. R. and I had entered a shared reflective state demarcated by his dream and my reverie; that in those dreamy moments each of us were bringing meaning to an undefined, shared emotional state about which we were unable to consciously think and which required us to dream it together. I asked Bion what he made of the content: the two female Hillbillies in Mr. R.’s dream and the song in my head, “Poor Pitiful Me,” and he speculated that these were commentaries on what was happening in the here-and-now of the analysis though we were unsure of what was going on. Regarding the meaning of such content, Bion suggested consulting the theories of Freud and Klein, that the shared dreaming process in which Mr. R. and I were engaged interested him most, which seemed to reflect our mutual receptivity to a shared emotional experience of which each of us were equally unconscious. He went on to say that there was an emerging unknown in the session, what he calls “O,” the emotional unconscious truth permeating the hour that my patient and I were gradually coming to understand through the synchronous dreaming activity of our alpha functions transforming that emotional “truth.”
My “supervision” with Bion left me somewhat off balance: I had arrived with a fairly comfortable feeling from consultations with Freud and Reik that I knew what was transpiring in Mr. R.’s analysis. Like Freud and Reik, Bion placed great emphasis on the analyst’s evenly suspended attention, though Reik and Bion gave greater credence to one’s subjective experience and listening intuitively with the “third ear” (Reik, 1948) or through “speculative imagination” (Bion, 1997b). Both Bion and Reik investigated the yield of subjective experience that accumulated in the analyst’s receptivity when he turned himself over to his “unconscious memory” (Freud, 1912). Bion and Reik also believed that in order for analysis to be a “lived” experience, the therapist and analysand were obliged to feel “turbulence” (Bion, 1977b) and the “chaos of the living psychic processes” (Reik, 1933, p. 327). However, whereas Freud and Reik always considered that the harvest of this unconscious memory would lead back to repressed childhood conflicts in the patient or analyst, Bion was primarily concerned with how the analyst and patient together transformed the unrepresented emotions alive in the here-and-now of the session. All of these similarities and differences notwithstanding, Bion’s greatest advancement in our grasping the nature of the analyst’s receptivity was his discovery of alpha function (Brown, 2012; Chapters 3, 4) and its constituent factors of containment, reverie and dreaming upon which we rely when the analyst gives “himself over completely to his ‘unconscious memory’” (Freud, 1912, p. 112).
One evening a few years ago, the scientific community waited with baited breath to hear if the so-called “God particle,” the Higgs boson that holds all matter together, had finally been revealed. However, no sooner had the announcement of its discovery been made, than Laurence Krauss, the theoretical physicist, noted that even with this astounding breakthrough we must “allow room for even more exotic revelations that may be just around the corner” (Krauss, 2012). Knowledge, including psychoanalytic understanding, is always in the process of “becoming,” approximating some great mysterious truth that seductively beckons the explorer to press further on. Freud (1900) reminded us that even in the most thoroughly analyzed dream there is a part that remains unknown and Reik taught us that we, analyst and patient, must be receptive to, and tolerate immersion in, the void of the repressed unconscious in order for an analysis to be a living experience. Bion viewed analysis as an undertaking that aims at apprehending the unknown and evolving shared emotional truth, O, that emerges from the interacting psyches of patient and analyst in the immediacy of the analytic encounter. As I was leaving his office at the end of my “consultation,” I turned to Bion and said I was reminded of line from a Bob Dylan (1966) song, “Inside the Museum, Infinity Goes Up on Trial.” Bion looked up and said, “Yes, in the consulting room too.”