In 1962, the British psychoanalyst W. R. Bion began
to describe in detail what passes between mother and child
in their earliest communications, a world of two
where language has not yet found its place.
To Bion, an economy governs this world: a trade
in affects. The frightened, famished, or deliriously
content infant exchanges, in a transaction
slipping under our threshold for registering
such deals, the raw goods of its experience
for the commodity of the mother’s understanding.
This understanding is a matter not just of marking
the child’s inner states—Are you hungry?—but of holding
the baby in mind for as long as it takes to make some sense
of its way of being. In words or through facial expressions,
with touch or without external signs, the mother receives
her child’s mind. She gives back something that starts
to make sense. For Bion, this is the beginning of thought.
To think is to open up possibilities for being: to tolerate
discomfort, make room for difference, to link, to weave,
with curiosity and without fission or fusion.
•
As the infant begins to think, it must not require
the mother’s constant or perfect presence.
Just as important is her appropriate absence,
a distance where the imagination assumes its first forms.
To think means to survive the frustration when
the mother temporarily disappears, or disconsolate hunger
appears. Bion worked from the assumption, derived
from the work of his own analyst, Melanie Klein,
that for the primal mind, the absence of something good
equals the presence of the very bad. Later the absence
of the rose will be the occasion for the word rose,
as the poets tell us. Without language, or, later,
if language breaks down, the absence of the rose
is the presence of a rotten and sickly anti-rose,
as if there will never again be a sweet smell
or seductive thorn. When the mother goes away
for a time, the healthy child develops the capacity to think
of her: this picture is the first symbol.
Without symbols, the mind collapses into terrifying immanence.
•
It is possible, too, Bion implies, that thinking
is more a matter of space than of substance.
How often does thinking something through
lead to insight? What, anyway, is the through?
Insight, if it comes, is not a golden trinket.
It is a maneuver, a step in the dance
that opens another room beyond
the one where one has been living.
The thing customarily called a thought
might better be categorized under worry,
obsession, rumination, well-rehearsed fantasy,
tired interior decor…The thought that counts
is a vessel, and containment and reverie,
Bion’s words for true thinking,
is the function of this vessel as the dipper plunges
and pours, almost indifferent to its contents.
•
So much of what we call thought is not thinking.
Bion does not say this, but to have even one thought
is lucky. Often, a supernumerary winter
settles over the mind. Images parading
before the inner eye or the confidential tones
of self-address are not in themselves evidence
of a change in season. A thought is the squall
that leaves leaves shaking. Or:
the green of a tree’s growing. Perhaps.
It is far from clear that there is still green to give.