On a Quotation from Bion
towards a transformational model for future[1]
‘Le multiple, il faut le faire’.
(Deleuze & Guatarri, 1976)
Quotation:
“I could say that this
meeting itself can be regarded as an expression, as a revision of such
experience and knowledge as we have managed to pick up in the course of our
lifetime, but it can also be regarded as showing the shadow of a future we
don’t know any more than we know the past, a shadow which it projects or casts
before.”
Wilfred Bion spoke
these words in 1976, addressing a crowd of no less than 760 people. They had
gathered for his concluding talk (see appendix) at the International Conference
on Borderline Disorders in Topeka, Kansas. In one of his ‘letters to the children’ he wrote
about this event:
“I thought that most of them would have disappeared before my last
item on Sunday. They hadn’t (…) and the whole outfit stuck it out till I had
finished. We both started home weary, but glad to have come.” (Bion & Bion, 1985)
By
origin, ‘the shadow of the future’ is an econometrist term developed during the
seventies in game theory (Axelrod,
1981) and later used to assess the value of business
relationships under the condition of indefinite duration, when strategic
options are difficult to calculate merely on the basis of pay-offs (Johanson & Smith, 1992). After political science and investment studies
adopted this term, it was also used in other fields like meteorology (see also Dennett, 1986) and chaos theory (Jurik,
1993). What these disciplines have in common with
psychoanalysis is a deeply felt concern for the future state of extremely
sensitive and volatile systems, anticipating catastrophe. Furthermore, within
the conceptual domain of psychoanalysis the word ‘shadow’ adds distinct Jungian
overtones to the Platonist sound of phrase.
Keeping
in mind what Christopher Bollas
(1987) wrote, that
“although I’m working on
an idea without knowing exactly what it is that I think, I’m engaged in
thinking an idea struggling to have me think it,”
I report in this paper, in a rather prismatic way, about the tempest of
associations that precipitated all kinds of references in my mind while considering ‘future’ in connection
to ‘obscurity’ (a word etymologically related to the image of shadow). I like to think of my paper not so much as a testimony of well-focused scholarly research, but as a machine that helped me prepare to think out loud in
the presence of peers and role models. I’ll rotate the kaleidoscope and perhaps the
multicoloured fragments will fall into nice but irreversible patterns (possibly
resulting in a presentation somewhat obscure itself). Therefore, I can only be
grateful for the reader’s attention as long as you’re trying to listen to your
own thoughts while reading this report of mine.
‘Writing is a self-disturbed activity: it
knows itself to be, at once, trivial and apocalyptic, vain yet of the greatest
consciousness-altering potential.’
(Maurice
Blanchot)
Following Bion’s talk, I don’t know if I am
misinterpreting his quotation, but I think it is not inappropriate that he said
“the shadow of a future”, as if it were the shadow that governs which of all
possible futures will be obscured. Also, it is significant that Bion says “a
future”, not “the future” as I think he is erroneously quoted in the title (or
else at least in the Welcome message) of our symposium. Admittedly, there are
places in Bion’s works where he also writes about a shadow of “the” future.
Even so, regardless the literal use of article, the meaning of this phrase is
hard to locate behind its consistent opaqueness – but it seems that Bion
reserved it for future per se (not a specific turn of events).
I think it is worthwhile
to try and steer clear from a common sense interpretation of what ‘future’ is,
which I hope to illustrate by offering my thoughts on this quotation in a rhizomatous manner, going astray in the back streets of conjecture. Perhaps a
good point of departure is first explore the conventional meanings we are
required to suspend, as these can be recognised in well-known and some
lesser-known sources of literature.
One
of the people who quote Bion as having said “the shadow of the future cast
before” is David Armstrong. In a paper called ‘The Recovery of Meaning’,
presented to an earlier symposium of this society, he employs a rather
Shakespearian metaphor to explain that…
“… this could be taken to mean
that the seeds of the future exist now, as a kind of inner resonance or
presaging of things to come, something that can be captured and given provisional
expression.” (Armstrong, 1996)
Immediately adding that he does not think ‘this interpretation exactly
catches Bion’s meaning and its emotional undertow’, David Armstrong associates
the quotation to darkening rather than illuminating, to heralding the arrival
or return of the not-known, helping us understand the future in the sense of
understanding our not-understanding.
Yet,
in everyday language the first interpretation (“that the seeds of the future
exist now”) prevails and the present is said to be pregnant with the future.
This kind of idea, first formulated by Voltaire (Redman, 1977), suggests a spatial rather than temporal nature of
the future. The present is said to be a uterus, a place; the ‘now’ has become a
‘here’; and future is located somewhere beyond the horizon of time, which only
shifts because we observe it from a moving vehicle, the passing moment,
travelling toward it.
In
this problematic image of thought, everything in future is denied the reality
possessed by past and present. Certainly, what future lacks has been
beautifully described in literature, among others by South African author and
Nobel-prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee, where he writes:
“What is the future, after
all, but a structure of hopes and expectations? Its residence is in the mind; it
has no reality.
Of course, you might reply that
the past is likewise a fiction. The past is history, and what is history but a
story made of air that we tell ourselves? Nevertheless, there is something
miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is miraculous about the
past is that we have succeeded — God knows how — in making thousands and
millions of individual fictions, fictions created by individual human beings,
lock well enough into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared
story.
The future is different. We do
not possess a shared story of the future. The creation of the past seems to
exhaust our collective creative energies. Compared with our fiction of the
past, our fiction of the future is a sketchy, bloodless affair, as visions of
heaven tend to be.” (Coetzee, 1999)
As
much as we may admire Coetzee’s ability to cast into language a sheer universal
understanding of ‘future’, I cannot help hearing in his words a regretful and even
apologetic tenor concerning the inability to get a creative hold on it. So
what’s the trouble with future? A question that becomes the more relevant when
we take into account the numerous meetings in organisations to discuss the
prospect of business. In all its instability and unpredictability, future seems
to play a star role in the spooky theatre of free enterprise (Kay, 1993). In terms of open systems theory (Miller & Rice, 1967), the phantom threat is that in future there will come
a moment when the organisation runs out of raw material and/or resources to
sustain its existence. Psychoanalytically speaking, according to Christopher
Bollas again, this connects to the basic conviction of gamblers…
“that the mother (…) will not arrive
with supplies.” (Bollas,1987)
The practice
of business forecasting, similar to the practice of gambling,
“can be seen as an aesthetic
moment in which the nature of this person’s relation to the mother is
represented.” (Bollas, 1987)
Consultants work with
systems as a whole through interaction with representatives of an
organisation’s groups, while being at war with those aspects of the personality
that constitute ‘groupishness’ (Bion,
1951). In a way, people’s preservation of individual
identity is a defense against the risk that interpersonal conflict among
various expectations of future events will be solved in the group and the wider
system. More specifically: against the risk that ‘I’ may get lost in the
solution. Such a well-grounded anxiety of having to hand over one’s faculty of
critical thinking is customarily defended against by people when entering an
organisation (Rice, 1965). While some
Psychoanalytic Students of Organizations would have us believe that this
anxiety interferes with the ability to do the primary task (see Kets de Vries, 1980; also in Kernberg, 1998) and is responsible for most regression and schizoid
withdrawal into social role playing (Fairbairn,
1952) also at the workplace (Hirschhorn, 1988), others believe that it
can be utilised for the benefit of business. “For example,” James Krantz
wrote,
“the manager’s experience
of anxiety-in-role can usefully be understood (Bion, 1977)[2]
as the shadow of the future, if people can find a way to think about them and
put their experiences into an organizational perspective.” (Krantz, 1998)
Which raises the question what exactly could be
meant here by putting one’s experiences ‘into an organizational perspective’,
especially when required from people whose most acute anxiety is provoked by
precisely this. I suppose ‘find a way to think about them’ (rescue futures from
anxiety-in-role) is crucial, and therefore the main objective of any role
analysis.
‘Most people were familiar with a Kleinian
experience when they were infants; but they couldn’t tell anybody what that
experience was because they had not learnt the language necessary to make
interpretations, diagnoses, verbal communications. After many years they
acquire a considerable vocabulary but by that time they have forgotten what
they wanted to say.’ (Bion &
Bion (ed.), 1980)
A male client brought to a session of role analysis the following dream: the
dreamer is a fish and under the water surface, where he becomes apparently
caught. He then feels himself suddenly lifted from the water, while at the same
time observing himself disappear upward - like seen from another angle, a
camera position that remains under water. I mentioned to the client that it
seemed he never got to see the water surface from the other side, or anything
else above it for that matter, which he confirmed and accepted as a meaningful
element in the dream. After a while he disclosed being quite familiar with this
experience of seeing himself take off to a different environment while staying
behind at the same time. In addition to that he stated his belief that in this
respect he is unique and unlike other human beings, which prompted me to wonder
out loud whether he had ever challenged that belief. Listening to the client’s
account, I had in my mind connected the image of his dream with the act of
birth, the moment of being born, this experience which in our professional
literature has been described ever so elegantly as exchanging a fishy existence
surrounded with the amniotic fluid for life within a gaseous envelope. So when
he asked me for clarification of my last remark, I presented my assumption –
complementary to his experience of uniqueness – that all human beings have been
born, not just he (although admittedly: all of us in our unique time and
space).
Some time
later the client informed me that an older brother had been suffering from a
mental disorder and eventually killed himself. It remained unsaid whether the
client had yet to be born by the time of this misfortune, but he did tell how
as a little boy he was kept safe and away from traumatic experiences and been
put in the role of the happy one. Nonetheless, growing up he got in touch with
the family’s tragedy and found himself pursuing a career in an organisation
that works to the task of improving life conditions for people suffering from
mental disorder. At the time he told me the dream, a transformational change in
this organisation (part of the reason we got to speak to one another) had landed
a crisis on his career, as well as a blow to his personal connection with it.
In the session he told me that the members of his family had at some point traded their
former protective attitude for anxious warnings how he might just follow in his
brother’s steps. Upon hearing this, I found the double-entendre in their quoted
use of the verb ‘may’ so alarming, and so consistent with the client’s tendency
to flight, that I couldn’t help begging him to resist any implied degree of
obligation. Only later
did I discover the likelihood of having colluded with his family, but it opened the possibility of another
understanding of the dream, as one of two fishes, like the two brothers: one
gets caught and lifted from the dream, without the other being in a position
yet of knowing what went on beyond the water-air boundary; failing to
differentiate between birth and ending life. This idea struggled to have us
realise what role the client was expected to take up on behalf of his family as
well as the organisation – both systems having reason to perceive themselves
as discontinuous.
Writing this, I was thinking how Bion translated the
quotation from Freud in his talk to the crowd interested in borderline
disorders. According to the written record, he said:
“There is much more
continuity between intra-uterine life than the impressive caesura of the act of
birth would have us believe.”
What is
indicated by Bion’s revision of this sentence[3],
what’s the missing element: ‘…continuity between intra-uterine life’ and what? The
life of the mother, in her body? Or the future life of the foetus? Bion himself
continued:
“The caesura that would have us
believe; the future that would have us believe; or the past that would have us
believe – it depends on which direction you are travelling in, and what you
see.” (Bion, 1977)
As much as the foetus may experience feelings, there will indeed be little chance of
knowing whether it is able to develop a premature and precocious capacity to
think. The orthodoxy about this development is that for the foetus there will
come a moment in time, at the other end of the caesura, after birth, when it
becomes frustrated and as an infant devises a mental procedure to tolerate the
absence of what it needs. Yet, once it has passed that caesura, it won’t be
able to experience the same kind of feelings it had as a foetus – corresponding
to the impossibility of reversing past patterns by rotating a kaleidoscope
backwards.
This kind of caesura is not limited to
the act of birth; it keeps recurring at various stages in life, like between
the pre-oedipal and the oedipal phase on to latency, and re-emerging amidst adolescent turmoil when the child is aware of becoming
an adult, although unable to know what’s going to be involved in eventually
being one. Once past such transformational crises in our life, the previous
experience itself has become inaccessible, although it can be remembered.
In contrast to this kind of discontinuity, what Bion
seems to point at with his term ‘the shadow of a future’ is the continuity of
feelings; feelings that date back to intra-uterine life: the background noise
of foetal psychosis, concealed deep down in our unconscious, on the other side
of the caesura, inaccessible but through our dreams and associations – or more
directly, although only by those we’ve come to attribute a mental disorder.
Rather than putting the
client’s experience “into an organizational perspective”, the role analysis
described before demonstrated for me the shadow of a future like Bion must have
had in mind: how looking back from ‘a’ future perspective (one of many
possible), a complementary memory of the past becomes ‘the selected fact’ (Bion,
1962a) to create a fitting
present. In reality, there are no grounds to maintain we are destined to choose
‘the’ one from our infinite repository of futures over and over again. Yet,
such fatalism, by which we let fear of future rule our understanding of the
past and experiences of the present, lies deeply rooted in the lore of our
cultural history.
‘If you can look into the seeds of time, and say
which grain will grow and which will not,
speak then unto me.’ (William Shakespeare[4])
Let’s
turn to ‘Hamlet’: William Shakespeare's
(1623) dramatic story about the waking dreams of Denmark’s
sole heir to the throne, who gave up the role of future’s hero and opted for
vengeance from behind the mask of insanity. In the form of a serpent’s venom
poured into the ear of Hamlet’s father, Shakespeare ushers in the theme of
rumour. As a social phenomenon, rumour is closely connected to the concealment
of future, aptly illustrated by Argentine author Manuel Puig, when in an
interview he said:
“What really excited me
were stories, the tales and gossip adults told; I got even more excited and my
curiosity grew when I heard a suspicious whispering and adults did not want us
to hear what they said. I managed to hear them and sometimes I would even hide
myself in the most improbable or unexpected places, pricking up my ears with my
heart bursting inside my chest. Then, I used to put together incredible stories
with the fragments of dialogues, with the pieces of gossip. In other words, I
gave them continuity and concluded ‘putting together’ and ‘writing’ them in my
imagination.” (Almada Roche, 1992)
Puig’s recollections from childhood were quoted by Sergio Staude, who
then continues to explain rumour from an analyst’s perspective:
“Sexuality and child’s play,
the secret, curiosity, the course of a pleasure that is first constituted at
play and then moves to words, whether spoken or written, and that action of
going along the borderline between what is private and what is public…” (Staude, 1997)
Thus, ‘rumour’ may be observed as synonymous to
‘shadow’, albeit symbolically from an expression of sound rather than from an
image of light.
At the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet is informed by a ghost that
his uncle Claudius’ capture of the throne by marrying his mother (the recently
widowed queen, an upsetting event in itself), was supposedly paved by a secret
scheme in which Claudius had murdered his own brother, the former king. Acting
on this questionable source, a cantankerous Hamlet drives everybody mad and
eventually an entire kingdom into ruins.
Robert
Youngson (1999) has diagnosed the disguise of madness that Hamlet
himself develops over the course of this tragedy as an example of the Ganser
syndrome. This factitious disorder – first described in a study of inmates (Ganser, 1898) and therefore also known as ‘prison psychosis’ – may
be observed in the behaviour of individuals who have reason to avoid unpleasant
situations or the burden of responsibility, for which they malinger into the
role of an unsound person. Among general constituent symptoms of factitious
disorders like inattentiveness and drowsiness, typical for the Ganser syndrome
is the cheater’s production of an approximate answer, unintentionally revealing
that the question is in fact well understood.
‘Polonius: What do you read, my
lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.’
(William Shakespeare[5])
The incidence of the Ganser syndrome is thought to
be rare, but from the small number of cases that actually have been documented
as examples of this condition we do know that it seems to develop primarily in
males and especially during adolescence or early adulthood, during episodes
where accumulated psychosocial stress is prevalent.
Most
scholars agree that the first parts of Shakespeare’s play take place when
Hamlet was about to reach the age of adulthood (Barton, 1979) - which according to his hallucination would have
prompted Claudius to intervene in the first place. So he was still very much
impacted by the ill-fated death of his father, shocked by the sudden remarriage
of his beloved mother and the subsequent interference with his personal
succession perspective, all added to the threat of a foreign military force
invading the country and the passion of a budding love affair with Ophelia.
This is the context, when some frightened soldiers report an apparition
that resembles the late king, which does not speak to anyone but to his son
prince Hamlet only. As the latter starts acting uncritically, merely based on
his imagination, he unleashes an unstoppable chain of events that in due course
engulfs the whole system and ultimately sends it into total disaster.
I like to think that these
contextual conditions resemble much of the European war theatre during the
first half of the previous century, and that the behavioural displays look a
lot like the ones John Rickman, Wilfred Bion and their colleagues initially
encountered in some British Military Hospitals while urging adolescents and
young men to recuperate from ‘shell shock’ and return to the front (Harrison, 2000). By that time, based on the experience in WWI,
knowledge about factitious syndromes was widespread in psychiatric circles.
Enough reason to be surprised why most psychoanalytically informed critics –
including Lacan (see Fink, 1996) – fail to appreciate that Shakespeare’s text contains
no real evidence to support Hamlet’s bitter accusations. Apart from a distant allusion to bad conscience (in
III.1, 50-54), there is only one clause that may be understood as a declaration
of guilt (from III.3, 36 onward) when Claudius is in a rather disturbed state
after watching The Murder of Gonzago, unaware that Hamlet secretly
tampered with the script. But it’s irrelevant really, because these lines are
spoken inaudible for Hamlet and therefore could never perform as evidence for
his allegations.
Looking at this from the perspective of
psychodynamics, we are left with the ambiguity whether Claudius is finally
overcome with guilt over an actual crime (that – after being dispersed
throughout the system as madness – is now getting back to the initial
perpetrator), or that he has just internalised Hamlet’s flight of imagination
and is acting irrationally under the mediated influence of a ghost. In the end it remains
undecided, which is both the beauty and realism of classic tragedy.
Sigmund Freud (1900)
stipulated that Hamlet did not easily avenge his father because he could
identify with Claudius’ lust for his mother, though to the best of my knowledge
Freud never showed any suspicion about the reality of the murder itself (see
also Jones, 1910; and Eissler, 1971). Yet, when read as a figment of
imagination, the scheme behind Claudius’ murder of Hamlet’s father can become much more interesting. David Armstrong (2004)
pointed out how as a phantasm it may open our mind to an alternative
interpretation, not just as implementing a
pathway to the throne that a successor was to mount, or to the sexuality of a
vacant queen; the son’s introjection of his father’s ghost, shortly after the
king’s ill-timed death, could also be taken as the prelude to a faint-hearted displacement of Oedipal issues, when
these unsurprisingly re-emerged in adolescence as the shadow of Hamlet’s future
(if he ever was to materialize the duty of succession). The other reading is,
that instead of having to surpass his father by personally attacking him[6],
in Hamlet’s mind Claudius had to fulfil that task.
So
where does that bring us, relative to our symposium’s theme? Shakespeare seems
to understand ‘future’ as a conspiracy, as if plotters are conniving – or, if
you wish, colluding – with one another in an interpretative process that takes
place in the present, based on a suggestive version of the past. At the same
time – ‘depending on
which direction you are travelling in, and what you see’ – such reading of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet could provide a key to decode the determination by which
our systems are kept on a deadly course, a key to open up our psychic prisons
in order to liberate alternative futures from our imagination: instead of using
the reductive, singularising article ‘the’, we may try and open multiple
options by using ‘a’, an article that is creative and pluralizing, in theory
open for various possibilities, like in the actual quotation from Bion: “the
shadow of a future”, indefinite enough for there to be others.
‘The time is out of joint. O, cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!’’
(William Shakespeare[7])
Anticipating
an era of accumulating scientific progress, Bergson’s real breakthrough (in
1889)[8]
was his realisation that the time of physics is just a geometrical
representation of subsequent moments. According to this orthodox image of
thought, the time of physics is spatial, in a mathematical sense. It is a time in
which something happens, time itself serving as an irreflexive ruler, a
measure, from which the experience of duration has been effectively eliminated.
In other words: the time of physics, by which science explains reality, does
not pass or flow as experiential time[9]
does – on the contrary: it is fixed (see
also Høeg, 1993).
‘If nothing were to
change we could not say that times passes. Change is primary; time, if it
exists at all, is something we deduce from it.’ (Julian Barbour, 1999)
Just as well, through an
ever-increasing and mechanical interconnectedness of sub-systems in post-modern
society with its omnipresence of legal arrangements that require the
synchronisation of public life, the time of physics has almost completely
replaced experiential time and thereby erased ‘duration’ from the conscious
experience of modern man. What we report when we speak about the passing
of time, is in fact our perception of how we move from one moment in time
to a next, from a space in the past that is locked behind us, through the
present where we are, toward future’s infinity. Without any disinclination
we should acknowledge that this is equally true for psychoanalysis, whether in
the clinical practice of the fifty-minute hour or when the couch is at sea like
in Group Relations conferences (with their time-tabled programs) or during
organisational consulting (usually billed on the basis of a time-related
charge). More than a hundred years after Henri Bergson reinstated experiential
time (which he named ‘durée’), we are still managing our organisational
processes as if they are physical objects, spatial rather than temporal. We
find this mirrored in current business administration, for example in the
arrangement of management as a threefold system of operations, tactics and
strategy (copied from military organisation -
see Ogilvie, 1995). In such a structure the performance of operational
management stays focused on the fiscal year, tactical management concerns
itself with matters of competition (usually at another frequency than the
annual report), and ultimately strategic decisions regard the assurance of
resources and the articulation of the primary task. This typical method of
dealing with the organisation’s existence through time explains the numerous
meetings in organisations mentioned before, where executives from various sorts
and levels of authority are supposed to deliver specific contributions, each in
sync with the official divination of their business’ future. While ‘speed’ and
‘flexibility’ are buzzwords in business nowadays, such practices of
coordinating contributions often produce quite the opposite; despite more than
one intelligible invitation to the individual executive as to put his or her
experiences into an organisational perspective, no set of words better
describes the daily reality of people in business than ‘bureaucracy’ and
‘stagnation’.
Consider
the following example of a business meeting where members of the board,
advanced research staff and some of the organisation’s managers invited consultancy
to work with them around the question why each of their attempts to accelerate
the company’s pace of innovation not only failed, but even seemed to slow down
their decision making and implementing processes. The consultants proposed
starting in homogeneous groups to explore what made each subsystem feel good
and perhaps not so good about themselves, and also what feelings they were
aware of having about the others. When in a next series of exchanges each group
sent delegates around to discuss and compare their findings, a clear picture
started to emerge: research staff was expected to operate as the avant-garde,
based on their superior knowledge of the business and its technology; then top
executives – based on their power of ownership – were supposed to endorse the
new designs; while management was assumed to concentrate on implementing these
decisions in the best way possible, based on their day-to-day experience with
the company’s operations at every level.
From
superficial analysis alone, this picture allowed people to see how they had
built an intricate and time-consuming set of procedures, based on the different
qualities of their various roles. Yet it took a more thorough analysis to
unearth a very basic split, symbolically and practically institutionalised by
these roles. By working through many critical incidents that had evolved over
the course of their shared history, it became evident that – simultaneously
with a separation of functional roles – they had unconsciously contracted a
division of labour with regard to the management of time (Oirschot, 2003). As the present was
supposed to be the sole concern of management, members of the board let their
minds be controlled by official records of the past, while research staff kept
itself occupied by watching future.
Whenever one of these
positions would dare to become really influential, it would meet a coalition of
the other two, demanding a solution to their problems, like a sphinx blocking
the road. So when management would present a convincing case against
quick-and-dirty changes in the operation, research staff and top executives
would openly question management’s commitment to the business’ interests. But
when a while later research staff would come forward with radical proposals, it
would find – much to its astonishment – board and management rejoined in
sceptic counterpoise.
This example clearly shows
how future is split off from past and present in an institutional rather than
mental fashion, causing a bureaucracy that hampers the change and innovation it
was intended to promote. But what is more, there seemed to be real
triangulation at work, an Oedipal drama, though with a continuous shifting of
the infantile and parental positions. Except this shift, nothing moved; change
was arrested in gridlock.
In other, more
developmental approaches that are based on dynamic concepts like best practices
(mark the plural) and progressive learning, people are invited to explore and
where necessary cross the boundaries between the various organisational roles,
perhaps call these in question if that is thought to be helpful, in any case:
concentrate on the temporal and temporary nature of the task and actively
engage in finding futures on their own authority (Dongen & Maas, 1999). For example, in his introduction to best practices
and learning networks in Britain, the Parliamentary Undersecretary for Trade
& Industry wrote:
“For businesses to improve
their competitiveness, it is vital that they give individuals working within
them both the chance to learn for work and the opportunity to put that learning
into practice. These opportunities bring businesses valuable long term
benefits. Individuals also benefit: they are able to make a positive
contribution to their workplace and gain greater job satisfaction as a result.”
(Johnson, 1999)
It would be interesting to deconstruct these lines for the reification
of business organisation they reflect, as well as the image of
container-contained, but that’s not my issue right now. What I would like to
point at here is another aspect, further exemplified by what was written by
Mike Kinski, a leading figure when it comes to best practices and learning
networks in the UK:
“The most effective
examples of spreading learning through business networks are concentrated in a
few sectors, such as aerospace and automotive, where the supply chain
relationships – particularly between the manufacturer and the first-tier
supplier – have become increasingly interdependent.” (Kinski, 1999)
In my mind, this provides food for thought about a link between, on the
one hand, more developmental approaches towards future (based on the model of
transformation and the promotion of learning from experience), and, on the other
hand, those industries that in the development of their employees
(internally) and supply chains (externally) have successfully outgrown
dependencies of a phallic nature and matured past the oedipal stage. If this wild thought bears any truth, one could imagine how in
traditional approaches that set out to ‘implement’ change, perhaps the shadow
isn’t so much a characteristic of the future as it slows down transformation in
the present.
‘The only place I can live is always the present;
there is, therefore, no value in what I can remember about my past except that
I cannot forget what I cannot remember. Consequently, unless I know what the
past is that fills my mind, I cannot forget it; and I am not paying attention
to the present if I am obsessed with the future which I know nothing
about because it has not yet happened.’ (Bion,
1990 - italics added by GvR)
While we intuitively oppose saying that each of us leads ‘the’ life or
has ‘the’ unconscious, strangely enough it is not uncommon to say that we await
‘the’ future. It took an innovative mind like Bion’s to liberate psychoanalytic
thinking from this singularity, and guide it from structuralism into
post-structuralism, from a floating vessel into a flying machine; an astonishing
achievement, given his high-ranking position in the psychoanalytic
establishment of his time and the intellectual hostilities going on between
psychoanalytic theorists and their contemporaries in philosophy. Although –
therefore understandably – clear bibliographical proof is lacking, I simply
can’t believe (or accept, if you wish) that Bion had not acquainted himself
with the works of Bergson, Canguilhem, Foucault or perhaps even Deleuze and
Guatarri. At least André Green suggested him French authors to read, and we
know that he quoted Maurice Blanchot[10]
repeatedly.
Surely enough, I’m not the only one speculating about a connection
with French philosophy. For example, Lita Crociani Windland writes:
“Both Bion and Bergson are
able to go beyond the limitations of their respective traditions, by focussing
on process, on how, rather than what. (…) Bion’s ‘O’ was defined as the
‘ineffable’ which can be ‘become’. This chimes closely with Bergson’s concept
of pure duration. Faith in ‘O’ could now be seen in terms of faith in
duration.” (Crociani-Windland, 2003)
At a workshop in Mérida (see Horne, Sowa et al., 2000), Angela Sowa pointed at a parallel of Bion’s thinking
with “the post-modernists”, calling metaphysical concepts
like transcendence and causality into question:
“It was
Bion’s project not to define anything, least of all truth, but to set up
conditions for allowing what is true to break through. (…) His work implies
that one can go forward or backward or even be left behind. (…) The future may
not be predictable even in fantasized form; however an individual is at times
capable of a complex thought which evidences and embodies such possibility.
Bion’s thinking disturbs as he engages the reader rather than describes what he
has on his mind.”
In the summary of their paper, Michael Horne explores
how Wilfred Bion may have arrived at similar conclusions about humans as for
example Jacques Derrida, who sees humans as being limited by the fact that
they are beings in language rather than beings limited by categories of mind
such as time, space and causality (Derrida, 1973). Horne reminds us that in the thirties Samuel Beckett
had been Bion’s analysand (see Anzieu, 1989), not long after the playwright had published a
literary analysis of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust[11]
(Beckett, 1931). He concludes with a rhetorical question:
“Were
Proust, Beckett and perhaps even Bion part of a Zeitgeist?”
Also, Jane van Buren, in her paper for the Past and
Future Project, acknowledges the fact that Bion took an active part in the
revolutionising of twentieth century epistemology, when she wrote that:
“…
thoughts without a thinker arrive from the vastness of the boundless mythic
unconscious in which time, space and differentiation play no role in the birth
of significance.” (Buren, 1997)
Although psychoanalysis may be an exacting discipline, it is not an
exact science. Neither is it a technology, like pedagogy or medicine, where
practitioners observe a ‘reality out there’ as their object of study, a
physical substratum like the child or the brain, and whose only source of
change is their hope to gradually get to know more about it over time by
mirroring their hypotheses against it (Rorty,
1986).
In
contrast, at best, psychoanalysis is social theory, like sociology or
psychology, though for its object – a study of the mind’s praxis – it may be
thought of playing in the same league with philosophy: the formation, invention
and fabrication of concepts (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1991). Wilfred Bion himself had
it that psychoanalytic theory …
“…bears
the same relationship to similar statements of philosophy as the statements of
applied mathematics bear to pure mathematics.” (Bion,
1962b)
When
it comes to a study of the mind as such, ‘reality out there’ is an illusion.
The mind has this marvellous habit of escaping deductive investigation. So when
hit by epistemic doubt, psychoanalytic theorists find no refuge in the empiricism
of a ‘reality out there’, because their object of study is created and
recreated, time and again, in the mind, by that object itself, simultaneously
with the research that shuttles between conscious thought and the unconscious (Damasio, 1999).
‘We head for the horizon, on the plane of
immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the
mind.’
(Deleuze
& Guatarri, 1991)
Now
admittedly, like every human activity that creates knowledge and wisdom, the
value of psychoanalytic theory lies in the helpfulness of its application. Here
is where the issue of reality kicks in again, and where it becomes fused with
the subject of this paper: future per se. Because supposedly, according
to inductivism and its believers, the ultimate test for scientific validity of
a proposition is whether one would be able to demonstrate the reliability of
one’s predictions in a reproducible experiment. In other words: what would be
the value of psychoanalytic study, should we fail to produce reliable
predictions of future events in the mind (if not future behaviour of our
patients or organisations in the mind)?
Lest
I be misunderstood, I must add that this question is not my brainchild; it is
the kind of rhetorical scepticism one encounters while discussing
psychoanalysis with a critical mind that is uninformed about the failure of the
Vienna Circle to keep their promise of a ‘unified science’ (Hahn, Neurath et al., 1929). Really, if it’s true
here, it must be everywhere? If it happens now, it will again? Expanding
knowledge by testing hypotheses against reality? Are we willingly blinding
ourselves for Karl Popper's searchlight
(1935) and Otto Selz’ anticipation theory (Hark, 2004), and still trying to advance our science purely by
the procedures of logical positivism? That would be questionable in any field
of science, but ours in particular. Social theory as well as the contexts in
which its applications may be tested, are in a ‘state’ of continuous change –
not in the least caused by these applications.
‘There is no substitute whatever for experience.’
(Bion, 1990)
Like
Bion was, we are all keenly aware now that for social theory there is no
testing ground, no laboratory, outside one’s experience of social relations
itself. So, when putting social theory into practice we are constantly
surprised by unpredicted events, we have to cope with concepts that were
rendered obsolete by their very first application if not before, and we
constantly find ourselves in situations we could not make sense of by means of
the theories we had at our disposal then and there. While under fire, we’d better try thinking anew.
Checking
through the journals of social science printed during the productive years
immediately after World War II, the present-day reader is amazed by an
atmosphere of almost naive optimism emerging from those pages, presupposing a
future where the published insights and concepts were expected to have acquired
widespread practical value and application. How far from the present mood and
content that pervades the current issues of those same journals! Much in keeping with the fluctuation between
the schizoid and depressive positions (Klein,
1946), we now know that our prime – and possibly only –
technology is about how to assemble and destroy ad infinitum each small
pocket of belief that we could think rationally about ‘the’ future, in the
sense of predicting it. What we can do is reflect on the fruits or penalties of
how we’ve thought about it in the past (this is the psychoanalytic orthodoxy
of transformation in the individual). In addition, I think, we can also allow
ourselves to wonder about the multiple futures that lie awaiting us, unthought
of, still drowned out or overshadowed (depending your preference for an audible
or visible metaphor) by the transformations in process.
When
devising his theory of thinking (1962b), Wilfred Bion realised the most serious epistemic
obstruction before him was that one seems to need the object of the theory in
order to devise it. Here one is easily struck by a similarity with the interplay
between future and present, this time reproduced at the level of epistemology
itself. Like for the young Deleuze and many philosophers before them, Bion’s
problem was to overcome a basic difficulty introduced into philosophy by
Immanuel Kant (1783): that the transcendental conditions of thought are in
fact modelled on the empirical domains they were supposed to found (Rajchman, 2000). Michel Foucault
(1978) pointed at a way around this impediment when he wrote
that in the history of science …
“…error is not eliminated by
the muffled force of a truth which gradually emerges from the shadow, but by
the formation of a new way of ‘speaking true’.”
Like Foucault, Bion also left the path of Cartesian orthodoxy that
thoughts presuppose the thinking, although unlike his French contemporaries he
did not give up truth and transcendence altogether and dealt with the problem
by logically disconnecting his concept ‘O’ (absolute truth, ultimate reality)
from the thinker. Rephrasing Nietzsche, who called ‘truth’ the most profound
lie, Bion summarised his ideas by formulating two definitions:
“1. True thought requires
neither formulation nor thinker, and 2. The lie is a thought to which a
formulation and a thinker are essential” (Bion,
1970).
Taking these famous definitions from Bion as a pointer,
we can now leave the path of another orthodoxy – this time Voltaire’s lie, that
the present is pregnant with the future. Who then would have been future’s
father? A sketchy, bloodless affair indeed.
In this paper I have
explored the continuity between present and future the other way around.
Concluding, I would say that on the reverse of Voltaire’s shady image of
future, Bion painted a picture of a truly transformational model for it,
logically independent from the here and now. Echoing his dictum of ‘thoughts
without a thinker’, we may open our minds to the idea of ‘futures expecting a
present’.
Amsterdam / Mühleturne – 2004
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Acknowledgements
I want to dedicate this paper to the late Anton Berkouwer,
my mentor in the mind. For other contributions and support, I am indebted to
many people who remain unnamed. I’m particularly grateful to those colleagues
and clients who – parallel to our business – enable and allow us to learn
together.
Abstract
Following the theme of the symposium (‘the
shadow of the future’), the author presents a comparative reading of the
context from which the quotation is taken, before going back over ‘future’ as
it is currently portrayed in literature and utilized in business.
This paper, covering a prismatic
collection of associations and references, is composed of two strands of
analysis: a second reading of the historical evidence for the quote, and a
philosophical reflection on the thought that creates future. By distinguishing
these two (reading and reflection), the author aspires to expose meanings that
otherwise may remain obscured.
Over the course of the
paper, working examples of futures and shadows are drawn from a variety of
sources. One of the detours undertaken is into the realm of fiction, borrowing
from works as Coetzee’s ‘Elizabeth Costello’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’.
Building on a role analysis vignette and examples from business consulting, the
practice of forecasting is understood as a strategy to split off future from
past and present experiences. The phallic image of ‘implementation’ is
contrasted with more dynamic change strategies based on best practices and
progressive learning. Finally, finding support in twentieth century
epistemology and contemporary theories of consciousness, the author considers
Bion as having guided psychoanalytic thinking from structuralism into
post-structuralism. Bion’s model for future is presented as truly
transformational, logically independent from the present, and immanently
manifold.
Gerard van Reekum (1953) was educated in community
development, marketing and organisation theory. As a member of the Dutch
Association of Organisational Consultants (OOA), he is a certified management
consultant. Gerard works from De Galan & Voigt, an OD firm in Amsterdam
(the Netherlands). He is a board member of Group Relations Nederland, a member
of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations
(ISPSO), and an associate of OPUS (an Organisation for Promoting Understanding
of Society).
Address for correspondence: Gerrit van der Veenstraat 32
– 1077 ED Amsterdam (NL) gerard@reekum.net
appendix:
On a
quotation from Freud (1976)*
Wilfred R. Bion
‘There
is much more continuity between intra-uterine life than the impressive caesura
of the act of birth would have us believe.’ I don’t know if I am
misinterpreting this quotation, but I think it is not inappropriate that Freud
says, ‘the impressive caesura. . . would have us believe’, as if it were the
caesura that governed us. This reminds me of the early Homeric description from
which one gets the impression that the phrenes is really the origin of human
thoughts and ideas – a very reasonable scientific conclusion because it is
obvious that when a person expresses himself the diaphragm goes up and down.
The diaphragm, the caesura, is the important thing; that is the source of the
thinking.
Picasso painted a picture on a piece
of glass so that it could be seen on both sides. I suggest that the same thing
can be said of the caesura: it depends which way you look at it, which way you
are travelling. Psychosomatic disorders, or soma-psychotic – take your choice –
the picture should be recognizably the same whether you look at it from the
psychosomatic position, or from the soma-psychotic position.
I want you to join me and try to
achieve the same depths of ignorance I have managed to reach, to get back to a
frame of mind which as nearly as possible is denuded of preconceptions,
theories, and so forth. What I am asking is really something of a mental
acrobatic feat. I can well appreciate that; it is not easy for people well
versed in anatomy, physiology, psycho-analysis and psychiatry to get back to a
state of primary ignorance.
I want to say something which sounds
just like saying something for the sake of saying it; and perhaps it is.
‘Bloody cunt’. ‘Bloody vagina’. The first phrase is, I suspect, part of a
universal language. It is not sexual; it is not physiological or anatomical,
not medical; it is something quite different. But ‘bloody vagina’ might be the
sort of thing about which doctors talk, probably obstetricians or
gynaecologists. What about the other one?
I am not going to try to produce the
answer, not because I hope that the cure is ignorance, but temporarily, at any
rate, I shall treat the answer as being a kind of disease of the question. (Doctor André Green once drew my
attention to the quotation from Maurice Blanchot, ‘La réponse est le malheur de la question.’) I want to draw attention to the
sounds – bloody cunt. As I say, ‘cunt’ is not an anatomical or physiological
phrase. What it is I don’t know. Indeed, I throw it open to you, because if you
investigate this question, you may find what this very primitive and archaic
language is. ‘Bloody’ does not have much to do with the white cells, red cells,
or whatever. It is, in fact, an abbreviated way of saying, ‘By Our Lady’. So it
is really part and parcel of what in more sophisticated terms we think of as
being sacred.
This is very peculiar – ’cunt’, and
this sacred term mixed up with it. The sacred aspect of it would probably be
much more meaningful to people familiar with the Roman Catholic religion. But I
think one could find a similar sacred element without it necessarily having a
Christian version. This is simply by way of introduction, to try to draw
attention to the actual sounds of ‘bloody cunt’ and whatever its counterparts
are. I do not, for example, know to what extent this phrase could be translated
or recognized, shall we say, in Chinese or in Russian. The Chinese, at any
rate, seem to be able to detect a difference in muscular movements of the face
which are not the same among Russians as they are among themselves. The
advantage of a conference of this kind is that so many different kinds of
experience can be brought to bear on these matters.
The queer thing about this ‘language’
is that it seems to have an archaic quality which nourishes the more
intellectual and less lively aspects of one’s characteristic thinking, although
without emerging to a point where one could verbalize it. A person, for
example, who is very angry with somebody else might find that his intellectual
and angry expression is nourished by these archaic factors which he cannot
express but which do make the angry expression much more alive if he calls the
other person a ‘bloody cunt’. It will almost certainly lead to a great deal of
turmoil of one kind or another.
Leonardo, in his Notebooks, has a great many drawings of water and hair. This seems
to me to be an artistic delineation of this same turmoil. When we disperse to
the loneliness of our respective consulting rooms and offices, I suggest that
what is there is turmoil. It may appear in a form revealed in verbal
expression; it may appear in a form that would seem more appropriately called
‘latency phase’. Palinurus is described, at the end of the fifth book of the Aeneid, as saying that Somnus must think
he is very inexperienced if he can be led off course while steering his fleet
on the calm and beautiful surface of the Mediterranean. This is something we
should not forget; we should not be misled by the superficial and beautiful
calm which pervades our various consulting rooms and institutions.
I would like now to indulge in some
scientific fictions. I don’t mean by that that I am not taking the problem
seriously, but I know I shall never get anywhere nearer to a scientific
statement. It seems to me that from a very early stage the relation between the
germ-plasm and its environment operates. I don’t see why it should not leave
some kind of trace, even after the ‘impressive caesura of birth’. After all, if
anatomists can say that they detect a vestigial tail, if surgeons likewise can
say that they detect tumours which derive from the branchial cleft, then why
should there not be what we would call mental vestiges, or archaic elements,
which are operative in a way that is alarming and disturbing because it breaks
through the beautiful, calm surface we ordinarily think of as rational, sane
behaviour?
A baby, quite satisfactorily born,
cried and yelled at birth and could not be quieted; the more the mother soothed
the child, the more it yelled. It became impossible for the mother to sleep
because of this apparently indefatigable yelling. I suggest that this was a
very late event in the story, hidden only because of the ‘impressive caesura of
birth’.
I don’t suppose there will ever be
any chance of knowing, so to speak, what a foetus thinks, but – to go on with
my scientific fiction – I suggest that there is no reason why it shouldn’t
feel. I think it would be quite useful to consider that some stages of fear, of
intense fear, are more easily visualized or imagined by us if we think of them
as thalamic fear, or as some sort of glandular manifestation such as something
to do with the adrenals, or what later on turn out to be the genital
structures. You can look at this as you like, say as memory traces, but these
same memory traces can also be considered as a shadow which the future casts
before. I could say that this meeting itself can be regarded as an expression,
as a revision of such experience and knowledge as we have managed to pick up in
the course of our lifetime, but it can also be regarded as showing the shadow
of a future we don’t know any more than we know the past, a shadow which it
projects or casts before. The caesura that would have us believe; the future
that would have us believe; or the past that would have us believe – it depends
on which direction you are travelling in, and what you see.
It seems to me that there are certain
premature and precocious developments that are too premature and too precocious
to be tolerable. Therefore, the foetus, the Id, does its best to sever that
connection. At a later stage the individual can shut himself up. This happened
with a man of thirty-odd years who drew the curtains of his room and as far as
possible insulated himself from the universe in which he found himself. He
objected to that universe, and at the beginning of the analysis objected to me
sufficiently to bring his Smith and Wesson revolver to the sessions; he laid it
ostentatiously by his side so as to have available the means of putting a stop
to the interpretations. Luckily, or unluckily, having been an instructor in
small arms, I paid a great deal of attention to that Smith and Wesson. It did
rather distract me from paying attention to what the patient was saying, and I
think the patient was similarly saved from having to pay too much attention to
what I was saying.
Another patient was extremely
sensitive to sight, so sensitive that it was difficult for him to wear ordinary
clothes because their colours were intolerable. Another patient found it
intolerable to listen to the Philharmonia Orchestra at a time when it was one
of the supreme orchestras, because, according to him – and I believed him – the
clarinettist played sharp; the problem then became how to shut it out.
A patient of this kind is very often
intelligent, sometimes wise. I remember one poor wretch who had committed a
murder, but his sentence was limited because it was discovered that he was of
very low intelligence. Unfortunately for him, by the time he saw me, his
intelligence was not low enough to be less than that required by the British
Western Command which was anxious to punish him if he did not look after his
rifle and bring it on parade. He said to me, “Sir, I am not fit to bear arms. I
have been allowed out of gaol because they said I could be free if I would
serve my country.” Very difficult to do, very difficult, especially if the
country insists on giving him a lethal weapon which he knows he is not capable
of carrying.
To continue with my science fiction,
one cannot very well say this about a foetus, but I can imagine a situation in
which, due to variations in pressure of the amniotic fluid, it could see light
which might be intolerably bright, and hear sounds which might be intolerably
loud. Is a foetus at full-term a character and personality, or not? When is that
character or personality born? And when does that character or personality
forget, get rid of, dispense with all that it has picked up in the course of
existence in a liquid medium? In this liquid medium it seems to be possible,
for certain animals at any rate, to achieve a kind of long-distance perception
by being capable of smelling things; dogfish and mackerel congregate around
some piece of decaying matter.
There appears to be quite an
impressive change when this foetus changes to a gaseous medium, air, which is
not liquid but is fluid. Therefore, once again there are oscillations and wave
senses. I certainly do not see why there should not be a carry-over of
extremely primitive sensitiveness; the foetus could be a healthy or sane
object, and yet have been subjected to pressures communicated long before we
would think there was such a thing as a personality, and long after it.
When I was a medical student, a small black cat used
to appear at very regular hours in the forecourt of the hospital. It would ‘do
its stuff’, cover it up neatly, and walk off. It was known as Melanie Klein –
Melanie, because it was black; Klein, because it was little; and Melanie Klein,
because it had no inhibitions. I have a feeling that this is repeated, as it
were, on a rather different level of the heliacal progress of the human mind –
borrowing from the molecular distribution of the DNA molecule. We come back to
these same things, but on a somewhat different level. I think we are trying to
get back onto the different levels without losing the vital contribution made
by these archaisms.
[2]
My copy of Krantz’ paper did
not clarify this date, but I suppose he refers to the Topeka Proceedings (that
were not available in published format before the next year).
[3]
Freud’s original reads “… and earliest infancy… allows us to believe” (Freud, 1926), quoted in full as a source for Bion’s paper
‘Caesura’ written the next year (published in Bion, 1989).
[4]
Banquo’s demand for a good
prediction, in MacBeth. For a connection of MacBeth with Bion’s quotation, see Torney Souter, K. & J. Wiltshire
(1998).
[5]
In Hamlet (II.2, 191-193),
shortly before Polonius will conclude: “Though this be madness, yet there is
method in’t” (205-206).
[6]
Compare this to how prince Frederik, Danmark’s present heir to the throne,
shocked his people by publicly attacking his father at his parents’ 25th
anniversary. That was twelve years ago, still on his way to consume one
doubtful ‘Ophelia’ after the other, and long before he established a future for
Danish royalty by marrying Mary Donaldson.
[7]
Hamlet swearing solemnly to
the Ghost (in Hamlet, I.5, 188 - 189).
[8]
In his dissertation at the
Ecole Normale Superieure: Bergson (1889).
[9]
Explaining Bergson’s concept of experiential time (which he named durée:
duration) would use much more space than fitting for the purpose of this paper.
In fact, it took Bergson himself 50 pages or so (in L’Evolution créatrice,
1907) to balance his respect for the progress of science
against philosophically critiquing the concept of time in physics. For a
contemporary attempt to develop the scientific language needed to discuss
Bergson’s concept of time without resorting to the vocabulary of a vertex he
wished to outdo, see Deleuze (1966).
[10] Particularly his phrase “la réponse est le malheur de la
question” (1969). Maurice Blanchot was a French author and critic, in
touch with Foucault (see his 1986 essay).
[11] Around 1900 Proust had been in Bergson’s audience, they
visited the same salons and stayed in contact also because Bergson married one
of Proust’s second cousins (see Painter, 1959 and Tadié, 1936).
* From the Proceedings of the International Conference on
Borderline Disorders, held in Topeka, Kansas (1976), published in 1977 by
International Universities Press, New York (later included in Clinical
Seminars and Four Papers, published in 1987 by Fleetwood Press, Oxford).