W. R. Bion and T. S. Eliot by Anna Dartington

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

 

Through the Looking-glass: Lewis Carroll.

I heard of Bion’s death at a time when I was re-reading "Four Quartets", enjoying its familiar beauty and depth and logic, skipping an obscurity here and there, and once again being startled by some discomforting subtlety that had previously been beyond my grasp (I have heard people say that they have read and re-read "Attention and Interpretation" in the same way). In the last part of "East Coker", the second of the Quartets, I found what seemed to be a fitting epitaph for Bion. (See end of paper). I also realised that these two men, Eliot and Bion, although having undertaken different tasks in life, actually shared a similar approach to these tasks, and to the world in which they lived and worked.

When an analyst describes an interpretation like this, “I was listening to the silence; I was listening to the interference; I was listening to what came between him and me; I can now draw you a picture in words...a representation of what I intuited during so many minutes, or weeks, or years”, (Bion 1975), it reminds us of a poem.   When a poet describes poetry like this, “...the abstract conception of private experience at its greatest intensity, becoming universal”, it reminds us of an interpretation.

This is Bion and Eliot attempting to communicate something of the nature of the complex tasks they have set themselves. In this paper I would like to make some comparisons between them, without, I hope, blurring the boundaries between literature and psychoanalysis or denying the uniqueness of these two individual and very special people.

Eliot, the American (1888-1965) and Bion, the Englishman (1896-1979) were contemporaries, both having lived through the experience of two world wars, both having, at different times, lived and worked in another (incidentally each other’s) country, both having the benefit of a classical education, and sharing a life-long interest in philosophy. It really goes without saying that Eliot loved language: its precision, its ambiguity, nuances and idiosyncrasies were his joy. Its myths and songs and stories were his trade.  Bion too took a particular interest in language which, according to Meltzer (1978), was in part attributable to his work with psychotic patients in the 1950's, involving as it did an increased concern with problems of observation, comprehension and semantic transformation.

Eliot left instructions that his biography should not be written, feeling as many people do that his relationship with the public should be through his work. However, he was not puritanical about it and often revealed personal details about himself, especially when he thought it would throw some light on his poetry. The following quote from a letter he wrote to Herbert Read in 1928, as well as being probably the longest sentence in the English language, evokes an impression of a somewhat lost and lonely childhood.

Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn't an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England, as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn't a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more of a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the USA up to two hundred years ago was a family extension  (quoted in Spender, 1975, pp 22-3).

Eliot came to England in 1914, at the age of 26. Three years later he was writing poems almost exclusively in French. Seven years after that he seemed to have decided that he would be an Englishman, and he settled, somewhat uneasily, into membership of the English literary scene. To quote Stephen Spender:

 

Although Eliot by all accounts put up an extremely good show among the English literati, underneath he was too shy, too little cynical, too serious, too dedicated, too devout for them.  
(1975, p. 52)

 

After a brief period of working as a schoolmaster, Eliot moved to Lloyds Bank, where he worked for ten years. His rather conservative lifestyle, his genuine modesty, and his appearance and attitude of what Spender calls “ironic correctness”, must have contrasted sharply, and almost comically with the deliberately flamboyant eccentricities of some of his poetic contemporaries such as Ezra Pound, Joyce etc. Characteristically, Eliot turned the joke into a poem:

How delightful to meet Mr Hodgson!
(Everyone wants to know him)
He has 999 canaries
And round his head finches and fairies
In jubilant rapture skim.
How delightful to meet Mr Hodgson!
(Everyone wants to know him)

How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot!

                                (Five Finger Exercises, sections 1V and V)

Eliot was not only a poet and playwright, but a literary critic and essayist, a lecturer and something of a social commentator. He was always concerned with the relationship between traditional spiritual values and contemporary culture. He lacked faith in modern civilisation, perceiving it as tawdry, materialistic, dehumanising and ultimately self-destructive. As a deeply religious man - he became a member of the Anglican Church in 1927 - he struggled with a tendency simply to dismiss what he regarded as a ‘pagan’ world of corrupt values. He had found ‘an answer’ which could have made him blind and deaf to further questioning and self-criticism. Like the character called “Priest” in Bion’s  Dawn of Oblivion (1979) he would sometimes be condescending and irritable:

 

Priest. Really this is hopeless. I wanted to have a serious talk about right and wrong and we are interrupted by these rowdy street urchins.

Bion. I remember those terrible, never-ending half hours called 'Search the Scriptures'.

But there was compassion and profound concern underlying Eliot's pessimism and authoritative attitude. One feels that he would have been in agreement with the character called Psycho-Analyst in these final sentences from Bion's book:

 

P.A. Seductive possibilities, concealed in the wide range of options available, will ultimately compel the growth of a capacity for discrimination - or catastrophe.

Robin. Why catastrophe?

P.A. Because until the human animal learns to become expert in discrimination he will be in imminent danger of the wrong choice.

Alice. Nuclear war, for example.

P.A. There are no labels attached to most options; there is no substitute for the growth of wisdom. Wisdom or oblivion - take your choice. From that warfare there is no release. (Bion, 1979, pp 137-8)

In some of his later lectures and essays Eliot tried to explore the relevance of Christianity and organised religion to more general political and social issues, for example democracy, class structure and education ( Eliot, 1948). He enjoyed debate and controversy but was a formidable opponent in that he would pose complex questions and even express profound uncertainties in such an authoritative manner that he could bewilder, intimidate or irritate his audience. I am reminded of Bion's last lecture series at the Tavistock and the uneasy silence that followed his seemingly out-of-the-blue enquiry: “What do you think psychoanalysis has to offer to the strike at British Leyland?”

I think there is evidence to suggest that both Bion and Eliot shared a similar position in their respective fields of psychoanalysis and literature, and that their standing in relation to colleagues and students was comparable and characterised by the same mixed response of exasperation and profound respect.

Eliot was most comfortable situated on the edge of the literary scene. It suited his reserved temperament but perhaps, like Bion, he was prepared to pay the price of distinguished distance and a certain professional loneliness in order to preserve a highly valued mental space, free from the interferences of the gossip, the fashions and the prejudices of the literary world. Eliot's detached stance was in some ways an explicitly moral comment on some of his contemporaries and because of this it elicited accusations of superior aloofness, deliberate obscurity and the cultivation of mystery for its own sake. Such criticisms are perhaps an occupational hazard for the philosopher uncle, who may be quite uncomfortable in the hush that descends when he drops in for dinner, but who knows that the discipline of distance is required of him if he is to help the family struggle with its own mythology. As Bion continually asked, “What is psychoanalysis?”, so Eliot continually asked, “What is poetry?”

 

I have said that Eliot held strong and critical views of the world in which he lived. He was however continuously at pains to discriminate between poetry and propaganda. He regarded the creating of a poem as a mainly unconscious process which aimed to express and articulate the emotional intensity aroused by thinking about, and experiencing the world.    The thoughts or views themselves were the subject matter of debate and discussion, but so far as the process of creating a poem (or reading one) was concerned, the activity of thought constituted an interference. In  Attention and Interpretation (1970) Bion himself made the link between a poet's description of the mental condition necessary for the analyst's work.

Bion quoted John Keats who had expressed these conditions as, “When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. (Keats, Letters, p. 43).

I have not read the complete letter of Keats from which this quote was taken and I am not sure how surprised he was by his own formulation. Perhaps one assumes that poets of the calibre of Keats and Eliot have some inherent capacity for this kind of receptivity.

Bion's exhortation to the psychoanalytic world to put down their ‘precocious comprehension’ of the patient, to follow Keats and ‘listen to the silence’, is obviously serious and heartfelt.     It can also be experienced as audacious in that the philosopher uncle - and who else could get away with it? -  seems to be issuing a moral injunction: be more humble, be more modest, have greater respect for your patients, and above all be prepared to be quiet and listen.

I am reminded of another Bion lecture at the Tavistock . During a silence and after a cursory glance around the room he announced, “The trouble with psychoanalysts [by which one assumed he meant the assembled company] is that they are not interested in mental pain, they are only interested in psychoanalysis”.

In the silence which followed his comment I must confess to having felt a certain childlike glee. It was my first year at the clinic and it was rather like someone coming into the school (the inspector?) and ticking off the teachers.

Eliot had a similar habit of telling the truth as he saw it, at the possible expense of personal popularity.  In his Harvard lectures, he was busy debunking pretensions about poetry with characteristic irony.   Interestingly enough he was also addressing himself to the way in which preconceptions about a poem interfere with one’s receptivity to it.

The difficulty of poetry (and modern poetry is supposed to be difficult) may be due to one of several reasons. First, there may be personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any way but an obscure way; while this may be regrettable, we should be glad, I think, that the man has been able to express himself at all. Or the difficulty may be due just to novelty; (we know the ridicule accorded in turn to Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Browning - but most remark that Browning was the first to be called difficult; 

hostile critics of the earlier poets found them difficult, but called them silly). Or difficulty may be caused by the reader's having been told, or having suggested to himself, that the poem is going to prove difficult.

The ordinary reader, when warned against the obscurity of a poem, is apt to be thrown into a state of consternation very unfavourable to poetic receptivity. Instead of beginning, as he should, in a state of sensitivity, he obfuscates his senses by the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something, he doesn't know what - or else by the desire not to be taken in. There is such a thing as stage fright but what such readers have is pit or gallery fright. The more seasoned reader, who has reached, in these matters, a state of greater purity, does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first. I know that some of the poetry to which I am most devoted is poetry which I did not understand at first reading; some is poetry which I am not sure I understand yet; for instance, Shakespeare's. And finally, there is the difficulty caused by the author's having left out something which the reader is used to finding; so that the reader, bewildered, gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles his head for a kind of 'meaning' which is not there, and is not meant to be there.

The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.  (Eliot, 1933, pp 150-151)

If one substituted the patient for the poet /poem and the analyst for the reader, then this could almost be Bion speaking about psychoanalysis, as for example in his response to this question:

“Question: How did you come to realise the advantages of suppressing memory and desire during the analytic session?"

Bion: "I found that I could experience a flash of the obvious. One is usually so busy looking for something out of the ordinary that one ignores the obvious as if it were of no importance. Indeed, one of the reasons for thinking it is time to give an interpretation is that nobody has seen something that is obvious" (Bion, Sao Paulo, 1973, reprinted 1990, p.67).

It seems that Bion and Eliot also thought about time in a similar way. Bion tells us that it is memory and desire, nostalgia and anticipation which so obscure the awareness of the present working in us. He also seems to imply that when we do experience the present in its intensity then the past and the future are powerfully brought together to produce a 'timeless' state. He says, “The immediate interpretation now, goes backward and it goes forward"; and, "A present experience is past, is present, and is future; it is timeless”. (Bion. Rio de Janeiro, 1974, reprinted 1990, p 88).

These thoughts of Bion's about time could be compared to the famous opening lines of  The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

 

Could the spring be like the 'immediate interpretation', the newly erupting truth that wakes us from our winter sleep? Is it our familiar and comfortable assumptions that keep us warm in winter?   Here is Eliot again talking about the misuse of knowledge.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all that we have been.
(East Coker)

One feels that he, like Bion, knows how painful it can be to attempt to maintain this state of present awareness. For me, one of the most impressive of Bion's qualities was his capacity to start anew, to go back to the beginning as it were in his response to every comment and question. Nothing seemed to be anticipated, assumed or prejudged, which left this disturbing and unfamiliar space for thought, or alternatively ‘space filling’ to avoid thought, as he would say. I do not know whether Eliot, say in a lecture or seminar situation, provided a similar experience, although it is said that he was often criticised for changing his view point and dismissing earlier views that he had held, as no longer relevant. An extreme example was his own retrospective comment on “The Waste Land”. He called it, “Just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”.

In relation to the time dimension, Eliot's artistic contribution was, among other things, his ability to bring the past (ancient myths and legends, Greek tragedy,  etc) alive in the present.   He cast the legendary characters in modern dress and made their dilemmas and their preoccupations relevant to the modern world and to contemporary consciousness.

In The Four Quartets, Eliot moved into a further abstraction in order to express his experience. The time dimension was extended beyond the temporal world of changing seasons, calendars and clocks. The photograph album still had its place, but Eliot was moving into external-world time,- the unchanging time of God and the sea.   In Attention and Interpretation  Bion used the vocabulary of religious experience, because he wished to place psychoanalysis in a wider historical and philosophical context:

What is to be sought is an activity that is both he restoration of god (the Mother) and the evolution of god (the formless, infinite, ineffable, non-existent) which can be found only in the state in which there is NO memory, desire, understanding.   (Bion,1970,  p.129)

Despite the fact that for Eliot it would have been God with a capital G, and the state which Bion describes he would have called spiritual transcendence, they meet for a moment in urging us towards a deeper experience which cannot yet be named.

I wonder if Bion would have identified with the following words. I think he might have.

So here I am,...............
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter,
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my
beginning.  (East Coker.)

 Anna Dartington (1945 - 2007)