The Aesthetic Development: Bion, Meltzer and the poetic spirit of psychoanalysis

by Meg Harris Williams. Karnac, 2008

CONTENTS

1. The vertices of science, art and religion

The epistemological context of the Bion-Meltzer model

2. Aesthetic Conflict and Catastrophic Change

A review of their genesis and implications

3. Inspiration and the Aesthetic Object

Symbolic expression. The Platonic-theological vertex.

4. Sleeping Beauty

Two odes by Keats

5. Psychoanalysis as an art form

The stuff of dreams. Aesthetic reading and “objects in common”.

6. Bion’s Dream

The Long Week-End. A Memoir of the Future.

7. Moving Beauty

Life-drawing as a model for symbol-formation without memory or desire. An enhanced vocabulary.

Introduction

Since Bion’s emphasis on the limitations of our scientific knowledge of the mind, and on the need to improve our observational tools to learn to perceive and ingest that tiny bit of knowledge that is accessible to our consciousness, the realm of the aesthetic in psychoanalysis has begun to come into its own. This book reflects my own lifelong preoccupation with developing the aesthetic affiliations of psychoanalysis, and with suggesting through literary analogy the kind of poetry that is innate or implicit in the psychoanalytic method.

There are three main senses in which psychoanalysis can be said to have acquired an aesthetic dimension. These are: the psychoanalytic model of the mind; the nature of the psychoanalytic encounter as an aesthetic process; and the evolution of psychoanalysis itself as an art-science. These things are of course interdependent, but it is also useful to note their distinctness. According to Meltzer, the model of the mind which is employed in the clinical setting serves as both holding-place for wellknown clinical phenomena and as jumping-off point for new phenomena that make their appearance. It is what makes observation – not just interpretation - possible. In my own previous writings, when trying to marry the epistemologies of poetry and psychoanalysis, I have focussed on the literary roots of the psychoanalytic model of the mind: in particular, the dramatisation of the struggle between developmental and anti-developmental forces in the search for self-knowledge. In the present book, however, I would like to consider in more detail the second aesthetic area – the psychoanalytic dream-encounter - and its relation to some traditional forms of aesthetic response. The examples I shall provide include two odes by Keats, some passages of art appreciation by Adrian Stokes, Bion’s own autobiographical narratives, and a discussion of the practice and philosophy of life-drawing. Bion and Meltzer both lamented the impoverished vocabulary available to psychoanalysis for describing psychic reality, and the potential for improving on this is one major benefit of the link with literary forms.

To Bion’s concern with the nature of psychoanalytic observation and the observer-observed, Meltzer has added the psychoanalytic method as aesthetic object – the fundamental object of observation. The principles of self-analysis, similarly, are those of an internal dialogue that takes place under the aegis of an aesthetic combined object or Muse, as I have suggested in previous books in the context of reading poetry. Aesthetic criticism is, like psychoanalysis, founded on the original, primordial knowledge attained by the infant’s first perception of the beauty of the world as seen in the mother or breast-as-combined object. As Meltzer describes it: “In the beginning was the breast and the breast was the world” (SED). As a result of the aesthetic development in the psychoanalytic model of the mind, it has gradually become clearer that “normal” psychic development is by no means automatic like physical development. The psyche needs to be built through ingesting thoughts; and this makes the picture of healthy “learning from experience” both more problematic and more interesting than that of psychopathology alone. It also makes psychoanalysis more open to analogies with artistic modes of knowing. So the goal of the psychoanalytic encounter is to restore or reshape any points of thwarted or stunted growth (Money-Kyrle’s “misconceptions”) not through direct action on the part of the analyst but by facilitating renewed contact with the mind-feeding roots of the psychoanalytic method as aesthetic object. Psychopathology is seen in a new light: that of emotional failure to maintain this contact. The focus switches from the subdivisions of psychopathology to the mysterious complexities of aesthetic reciprocity, which regulates the individual’s ethical development in a way analogous to what the poets have termed “inspiration”. This is the “psychoanalytic spirit” that Bion says he hopes will “endure for hundreds of years” (TWT--).

The third aspect of the aesthetic development – psychoanalysis as an evolving art-science - has been the subject of Meltzer’s The Kleinian Development and other works, and I shall not be attempting any historical overview here. It is worth remembering that both Meltzer and Bion considered the science of psychoanalysis to be very much in its infancy – so there will be a lot more to be said in the future than we can say now. Its birth-myth, in the Meltzer-Bion view, takes psychoanalysis to be “a thing-in-itself that existed in the world before the mystic genius of Freud came along to give it shape” (KD--). That was the aesthetic intersection of “O” with a thinker. But subsequently Bion saw the “psychoanalytic spirit” as a “Sleeping Beauty” often overlooked by those circling in the thickets and brambles around its perimeter (TWT--). Meanwhile Meltzer saw the embryonic science as progressing with a logical momentum, rather like the “natural history” of the psychoanalytic process itself (PP-). To describe its evolution he borrowed a metaphor from Freud of winding a garland of flowers about a wire (KD--). The wire is the poetic spirit of “becoming” and it leads, in the Bion-Meltzer model of development, to the domain of aesthetics, which Meltzer saw as constituting the ultimate category of Bion’s Grid for categorising the development of thoughts.

To suggest therefore that psychoanalysis is entering an “aesthetic” phase of development, or rather of conceptualising its own ontology, is to be concerned with such things as how containers for meaning (symbols) become shaped; with the subtleties of “conversations between internal objects” as a form of aesthetic response; and with the spiritual problems of relating to the aesthetic object in mediating our contact with the Platonic realm of ideas. Such considerations are becoming increasingly formulable, so more widely discussed - as a matter of interest to psychoanalytic epistemology in general, not only the post-Kleinian. My scope in this book, however, is limited to a review of my own personal researches over the past 30 years into various ways of approaching a potential marriage of psychoanalysis and poetry. Rather than reprint a collection of essays (my original intention) I have preferred to select passages from previous writings and weave them into what I hope makes a more coherent narrative. In this my aim has always been – following Milton – to “seek for the idea of the beautiful…throughout all the shapes and forms of things (‘for many are the shapes of things divine’)” or as Keats put it, the “principle of beauty in all things” (MHW 1982, 76, 196). So, guided by the idea of the psychoanalytic method as aesthetic object – in its self-analytic capacity - I hope not to lose sight of the Sleeping Beauty whilst tracking in the undergrowth some of the many openings into the complex nature of psychoanalysis as an art form.