Table Of ContentON MINDING AND BEING MINDED
ON MINDING AND BEING
MINDED
Experiencing Bion and Beckett
Ian Miller
First published 2015 byKarnac Books Ltd.
Published 2018 by Routledge
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
ABOUT THE AUTHOR xi
CHAPTER ONE
Introducing the present formulation 1
CHAPTER TWO
Beginning How It Is: an energetic reading 11
CHAPTER THREE
How It Is again 21
CHAPTER FOUR
Learning how it is from experience 31
CHAPTER FIVE
How it is across time—the road from Connolly’s Store 45
v
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER SIX
The present formulation claimed by the bog 59
CHAPTER SEVEN
The present formulation as bricolage 69
CHAPTER EIGHT
Psychotherapy and the present formulation 81
CHAPTER NINE
The present formulation: plod along as one 91
CHAPTER TEN
A second opinion 99
REFERENCES 107
INDEX 113
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Reading clinical psychoanalysis in the company of Samuel Beckett
and Wilfred Bion is a roller coaster ride, bringing to mind in its scope a
range of experience from thrill to regression. With Beckett and Bion as
co-participants, themselves active as a Beckettian pseudo-couple like
Mercier and Camier or Vladimir and Estragon, the topography of per-
sonal experience links the banal, as in Dan Rooney’s sonorous listing
of nineteen gerunds, each ending in “ing”, verbalising the “horrors
of home life”, the imperatives of the quotidian (Beckett, 2006c), with
Bion’s own sublime gift to the psychoanalytic future, in Learning From
Experience, of an induced journey into the non-verbal, the inchoate, as
the practical substrate of clinical practice, in a register paralleling and
differing from what is said. The Bion-Beckett pseudo-couple provides
a prospect of psychoanalytic topography in the twenty-first century in
addressing: catastrophe and hope; the tensions between talking and
the unformulated; between the bitter endurance of being and the alive-
ness of surviving within the minding of the other, across the compass of
directions with, against, toward, and together.
My appreciation in arrival at this manner of reading is to the
psychoanalysts I carry around in continuous conversation, as I shift
back and forth in my own thinking from immersion to reflection. This
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
is the experiential matrix from which I recognise what Beckett does
with Bion in The Unnamable, or in Molloy. It is not reducible simply to a
transferential working-through, but to the trying out and establishing
of new levels of object relational experience, the sensuous feel of expe-
rience, engaged with the internalised presence of the other. Certainly,
we seek out the stimuli to which we wish to respond, both immersed
in our lives and shaping our environments. My own primary object of
contemplation is in mentalising a thinking couple, partners in mutually
generative emotional conceptualisation. It is a view that accords with
contemporary understandings of the psychoanalytic object, informed
by the work of Wilfred Bion.
Lingering at the edges of this construction is my gratitude for the
endurance and courage I have witnessed through psychoanalytic expe-
rience; and my conviction that these are affirmations of psychic living
over dying. With this is an understanding, also born of experience, that
the extension of caring and love, an “I” to a “Thou”, is essential to the
analytic task: often maintained in “good enough” stoicism by the thera-
pist, if disputed from a resistant position by the patient. Notable among
others for whom I am grateful within my own contentious and exacting
internal crowd are Gilead Nachmani, Benjamin Wolstein, Roy Schafer,
William Grossman, and James Grotstein. And standing behind them are
the superstars of psychoanalytic tradition both in the rivalries and argu-
ments of its formal schools and of its personalities: Bion, Thompson,
Sullivan, Klein, Freud, Suttie, Rickman, and Ferenczi. They are present
in what was transmitted directly, through action and anecdote to my
teachers, analysts, and supervisors; and concretely present through the
texts they have left behind.
One of the most extraordinary and gratifying dimensions of practis-
ing psychoanalysis is how, over days and years, one interiorises learn-
ing from another, also hard at work in this singular craft. Bion nails it
properly when he tells us that he is no philosopher, and that his explan-
atory warrant derives from his own analytic experience, as patient and
analyst.
My patients have also been generous teachers, suffering with me in
the ambitious undertaking of clinical practice. Lacking omniscience and
girded against our individual and shared anxieties, we continue to seek
realisation of Bion’s O in K.
I am thankful to my colleagues and friends who have generously
read and commented on my thinking: Toni O’Brien Johnson in Dublin,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
Judy Lovett in Paris, Kay Souter in Melbourne, and James Grotstein in
Los Angeles. Their gifts are many and well appreciated. And also to
libraries where stores of information, preconceptions for the fevers of
thinking, remain available: to Trinity College Dublin, which continued
to supply me with necessary books when my own office bookshelves
were groaning for mercy; and in its virtual presence, to the Psychoana-
lytic Electronic Publishing archive, for bountiful worldwide provenance
of psychoanalytic arrivals and departures, wherever one has an internet
connection. Finally, much gratitude to Annette Clancy, for her contin-
ued ongoings in faith and endurance during her husband’s preoccupa-
tions with the voices in his head, of Beckett and Bion.
I am mindful too, of my Irish colleagues in psychoanalytic psycho-
therapy who tell me that beyond the incomprehensibility of my lan-
guage (American) and writing (difficult), what I’ve said is simply “what
we all do”; it is good to know that we are all on the same road, headed
in the same direction, plodding as one.
This work is dedicated to the memory of Hettie Frank, PhD, dear
friend and colleague, who recognised that love should always be
present, like a bottle of ketchup, next to the salt and pepper on the table
of life’s diner. Freud was uncharacteristically optimistic in “Mourning
and Melancholia”. After grieving, we go on; but what was formerly
whole remains forever fragmented. Absence remains always present.
Though it might seem more Beckettian to blame the shoe for the
fault of the foot, this work’s flaws and failures are entirely my own, as I
stumble forward, attempting to fail better.
