Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (Maresfield Library) by Bion Wilfred R

Author:Bion, Wilfred R. [Bion, Wilfred R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2012-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Note

1 Inttrnational Journal ofPsycho-Analysis, Vol. 39, Part 5, 1958.

7 On Arrogance1

83. In this paper I propose to deal with the appearance, in the material of a certain class of patient, of references to curiosity, arrogance and stupidity which are so dispersed and separated from each other that their relatedness may escape detection. I shall suggest that their appearance should be taken by the analyst as evidence that he is dealing with a psychological disaster. The meaning with which I wish to invest the term “arrogance” may be indicated by supposing that in the personality where life instincts predominate, pride becomes self-respect, where death instincts predominate, pride becomes arrogance.

Their separation from each other and the lack of evidence of any relatedness is evidence that a disaster has occurred. To make clear the connection between these references, I shall rehearse the Oedipus myth from a point of view which makes the sexual crime a peripheral element of a story in which the central crime is the arrogance of Oedipus in vowing to lay bare the truth at no matter what cost.

84. This shift of emphasis brings the following elements into the centre of the story: the sphinx, who asks a riddle and destroys herself when it is answered, the blind Teiresias, who possesses knowledge and deplores the resolve of the king to search for it, the oracle that provokes the search which the prophet deplores, and again the king who, his search concluded, suffers blindness and exile. This is the story of which the elements are discernible amongst the ruins of the psyche, to which the scattered references to curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity have pointed the way.

I said that these references are significant in a certain class of patient; the class to which I refer is one in which psychotic mechanisms are active and have to be analytically uncovered before a stable adjustment can be achieved. In practice, analysis of such a patient may seem to follow the patterns with which we are familiar in the treatment of the neuroses, but with the important difference that improvement in the patient’s condition docs not appear to be commensurate with the analytic work that is done. To recapitulate, the analyst who is treating an apparently neurotic patient must regard a negative therapeutic response together with the appearance of scattered, unrelated references to curiosity, arrogance and stupidity as evidence that he is in the presence of a psychological catastrophe with which he will have to deal.

85. It may be supposed that an approach to the problem is provided by the emergence in the analysis of one of these references, and this is in fact the case. It is important that reference to any of these three qualities should be treated by the analyst as a significant event demanding investigation and provoking more than usually stubborn resistances. Unfortunately the problem is complicated by a fact which must be already evident, and that is that the analytic procedure itself is precisely a manifestation of the curosity which is felt to be an intrinsic component of the disaster.

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