K-links: Currently Important Processes of Group Analysis During the COVID-19 Pandemic from W.Bion’s Point of View

The article was written during the coronavirus pandemic (April 2020) and focuses on the special significance of psychotherapy, in particular group online psychotherapy, as an important factor in the service of the life instinct.

During the overall collective traumatization, with an external danger coming into fore, early psychic traumas are actualized, and processes corresponding to the functioning of the individual in the paranoid-schizoid position are triggered. In order to support adaptation, protective mechanisms switch in “excessively”, which can be destructive too (primarily projective identification and split). To preserve Ego and develop the Self when experiencing lockdown, the need of a group and formation of links, as well as the need of psychotherapy, becomes obvious.

Key Words: group analysis, K-links, on-line

Today, I suggest that we should remember what Bion called the “domain of K”, which is his term for getting to know, finding out, learning, in particular learning from experience. Bion described links between objects that exist in our mind (the term “object” refers to our inner need to interact with others”). He noted three types of links: the L-love links, the H-hate links and, equally significant, the K-knowledge links. Thinking in terms of object relations, we want our object to love us; we don’t want him/her to hate us; and finally, we want her/him to understand and know us, both our external everyday life and our internal, internalized one. As for us, we also want to love, hate and know others. This is what Klein called the epistemophilic instinct—the desire to discover and know.

Bion placed the drive to knowledge on the same level with love and hatred, thus defining three main types of links with internal and external objects. According to Ron Britton, Bion believed that we have the same attitude towards ourselves: sometimes we love ourselves, sometimes we feel disgusted with ourselves, but we also have a desire to know ourselves. So, I am going to focus on the K aspect, i.e. getting to know.

In the 1950s, Bion, like some other Klein followers, worked with psychotic patients. He understood psychosis mainly as a mental disorder, in the sense of inability to make an emotional experience mental and to process it further (to think about it). He noticed that when he intervened at the level of mental functioning, not at the level of content, the patient got better. That is why he believed that those who practice psychoanalysis need an “applied” theory of psychosis, and surely, this is also relevant for group analysis.

We are aware of Bion’s contribution to the study of the mechanism of projective identification in its pathological aspect (remember that this mechanism was originally described by Melanie Klein in 1946, who had discovered it in her work with children, and by Herbert Rosenfeld in his work with adults in 1946 and 1947). I suggest that we should focus now on how Bion described the normal operation of the projective identification mechanism, which he considered the basis of all communication and even thinking.

In 1959, in Attacks on Linking Bion described his work with the patient who seemed to feel attacked by Bion’s work and his interpretations. And Bion began to interpret those attacks, which, in his view, were part of the patient’s destructive mind-set against the reality which he would familiarize with through Bion’s interpretations. As a reminder, by attacks Bion meant fantasized attacks on the breast as a prototype of all attacks on objects that function as linking. Among other things, Bion considered the patient’s attacks, expressed in a very subtle manner: it could be an unexpected stutter; or the patient seemed to lack air and began to make some gurgling noises; or he complained that he could not sleep and see dreams. Giving interpretations, Bion was getting more and more disappointed in his way of thinking. However, he was more attracted by the way he remembered it, and that was more of evolution than memory. It was a special attitude to this patient, expressed in unusual memories of him that led Bion to believe that the patient had not really intended to attack his approach. In fact, he persistently tried to draw Bion’s attention to the fact that Bion himself hindered his own understanding of what the patient wanted to convey. In other words, at some point, Bion realized that it was unlikely that the patient had been projecting for the sake of an attack or discharge, but rather the patient had been trying to explain something important about his condition, as well as about his past experience and early relationship.

Bion explains in his work how he began to understand that the patient tried to use him to implement a special mechanism of interaction, which he had been deprived of as an infant, namely relationship with an empathetic person, the mother, ready to accommodate his strongest fears, contain them, transform and return them in a more acceptable form. Bion spoke about the importance of transformation “by the sojourn”, he meant the mind and feelings of the mother. It turned out that in his early childhood, the patient had failed to “communicate” his fears to the other, and now he felt that the analyst was again denying this to him. Bion seemed to reproduce the situation of trauma, and what looked like attacks by the patient turned out to be his helpless anger caused by the stressful experience. The patient desperately wanted the analyst to contain, what the patient failed to contain himself, and looked for a way to release that.

Speaking of today, during the lockdown and danger of infection, regression of many patients naturally intensifies, and their experience of pain is comparable to an unnamed horror, and the need in processing and release of burdensome thoughts speaks for itself. Bad, as if “infected”, latent and suppressed feelings and emotions need to be evacuated. In the absence of a working container for processing, this can endanger the group as a prototype for the family and even society as a whole. Nevertheless, it is clear that the early theme of addiction, expressed in terms of both the need for links and their destruction, escape from them, as well as the search for protection and shelter, are cornerstone.

Now, let us once again turn to Bion’s important theoretical discovery, which is known as the container/contained model – it is about a non-pathological use of the projective identification mechanism to convey a necessary message, namely, to communicate about those object relationships that were not properly worked through in infancy and early childhood, in no case accusing the patient of attacks.

I believe that today, when society as a large group undergoes a catastrophic change due to the lockdown and lack of habitual interaction, this creates a situation favorable for actualization of archaic fears related to patients’ early psychic traumas. Attacks on linking as a projection of relationships with the primitive breast or penis are also connected with the failure in a normal projective identification, fear of loss of the habitual working container, impossibility to resort to protective mechanisms in the way they are used at face-to-face sessions, and this promotes strange queer objects partially made of Super Ego elements of the paranoid-schizoid phase; they take frightening and, sometimes, even destructive form. Bion writes that when the instincts of death prevail, the tendency for excessive projective identification increases. To put it differently, when there is no possibility to meet in person, the danger is to trigger a projective identification mechanism of the form that can hardly be comprehended or modified. Then I wonder to what extent the group analyst is able to grasp, hear, gather and process all subtle aspects and fragments of a split or fragmented group, including nonverbal expressions. In this situation of attacks on linking, the group analyst’s thinking is attacked.

Analyzing his work with groups, Bion was able to identify three mechanisms that he called “basic assumptions” which support the group and its “work group function, W”. First, Bion comes to the idea that one of the meanings of its existence is to be in a certain kind of dependency, either on the psychotherapist or one of its members, who is sort of selected as a figure for transference and projection of feelings of child dependency. Or it gives him/her the role of a nursing mother (breast), which ensures the group’s survival and growth. The second “fight/flight” assumption is that the group acts as if there is always some external threat. The group is only capable of fighting or escaping.

It is necessary to identify that threat, namely the fear. It seems that in today’s situation of spreading infection from the outside, it is preeminently the enforced isolation that has become psychically unbearable as well as the need in processing rapidly generated thoughts and phobias that increase the fear of death. Bringing people into groups is a salvation that supports the instinct to live.

The third assumption that Bion discovered, is that the group may develop signs of a fantasy that the group’s overriding goal is to bring two persons or two ideas in a pair. This kind of “pairing” gives hope to the group, protecting it against meaninglessness and despair. At the same time, it also protects the group from fears connected with other assumptions, in particular, from anxiety in the face of the danger of destruction or “hunger”.

I think that in the online situation it is much harder to put together fragmented parts of a group. And if an interpretation turns out to be delayed or not meant for an individual member, this can suddenly generate a fear of annihilation. Therefore, the function of empathy, which involves facial expression, turns into an additional holding.

Bion defined that in order to maintain the working function of a group, it is necessary to allow for the work of the basic assumptions mechanisms to a degree that would not destroy the group container. The patient, like an infant who was not fed on time, experiences a sudden fear of disintegration, which is painfully felt by the other participants, including the group analyst.

So, the group container is an important working function of group analysis, and the “container/contained” model stems from the theory of projective identification suggested by Melanie Klein and is in close contact therewith. It is in it that we seek for a place for penetration and acceptance, a place for dreams and reveries. In this process the raw evacuated beta-element material must be processed into some form of alpha-elements that can be conceived. Ronald Britton says: The process of transformation from beta to alpha elements Bion sees as resulting initially from a crucial interaction between the infant and the mother, who initially uses her own alpha function to transform the beta elements projected by the child.

Using Bion’s terms, we can say that in containing, pain from O (i.e. the state of nameless dread) transforms into K (knowledge). Dr Sandler in his Language of Bion: a Dictionary of Concepts argues, that it is a form of relationship from the inception of the life, that allows emotional growth and growth of thinking processes. It is the process through which accrual of meaning is obtained; therefore container/contained is equated to thinking itself. It represents the most developed form of Bion’s theory of thinking, which took approximately nine years to achieve. The deepest and most secret mysteries of human life are explored within this theory.

We also know from Bion’s theory of thinking that the infant’s expectation of a nursing breast is the prototype for pre-conception. Pre-conception combined with negative realization produces a concept that can also be used as a pre-concept. When a pre-concept mates with realization, the unsatisfied element is replaced with a constant.

I believe that search for meanings and discovering them for each member of the group in group analysis, including the group analyst, is the basis for preserving the process of maintaining the instinct of life and development of thinking.

References:

1. Bion W. R. (1959) Attacks on linking, IJP, 40: 308-315
2. Bion W. R. (1959) Experience in groups and Other Papers, London, Tavistock, 1961
3. Bion W. R. (1962) Learning from experience, London, Karnac, 1984, 316-321, 355-365
4. Britton R. (2013) Commentary on three papers by W. Bion, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 82:2, 311-321 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2013.00031.x
5. Vermote R. (2016) A trial to apply late Bion’s ideas in a clinical way to our classic psychoanalytic concepts (a paper presented in the Moscow conference org. by MPS)
6. Sandler P. C. (2005) Language of Bion, A Dictionary of Concepts, NY, Routledge, 2018, 160-161
7. Klein M. (1946) Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms, 1946, IJP, 27: 99-110.
8. Rosenfeld H. (1947) Analysis of a Schizophrenic State with Depersonalization, IJP, 28:130-139
9. IPA Inter-regional encyclopedic dictionary of psychoanalysis, 68-72

I got a philological and then later a psychological education and at the Lomonosov M.V. Moscow State University, where I also studied several languages. I had a group-analytical training EGATIN with European analysts, who came to Moscow that time. And I was trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Individual Section of the SPP (Moscow) of EFPP. I work in private practice with individual patients and with groups. Last time I have many trips in Europe, and I live in Spain as well as in Russia.