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James S. Grotstein: A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion's Legacy to

Psychoanalysis

Article  in  The American Journal of Psychoanalysis · January 2009

DOI: 10.1057/ajp.2008.26 · Source: PubMed

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402 BOOK REVIEWS

quest to find a results-oriented clinician, it behooves the clinician to show

prospective patients that psychoanalysis can be a results-oriented treatment
approach as well. I believe that if more analysts worked like Renik and if
we then did some solid outcome research on patients so treated, psycho-
analysis would soon become the treatment of choice for most emotional
problems.

Lawrence Josephs, Ph.D.

Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies,
Adelphi University, Garden City,
Long Island, NY 11530;
Josephs@adelphi.edu

REFERENCE

Josephs, L. (2006). The impulse to infidelity and Oedipal splitting. International

Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87, 423–437.
DOI:10.1057/ajp.2008.27

A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis, James S.

Grotstein, Karnac Books, London, 2007, 395pp.

Much like reading Bion himself, Grotstein’s new volume may be most
usefully experienced as a meditation on the psychoanalytic process. As
such, he invites us to inhabit a porous realm in which all things are possible.
This, to my mind, is the realm of nonverbal communication—the level of
engagement in which our attunement with another offers profound and
multi-faceted information. Although this information may not be easily
digestible, we do absorb it and over time discover that we have been
learning a great deal without necessarily being able to articulate this knowl-
edge in rational, verbal language.
Grotstein, like Bion, is not easy to read. Part of this difficulty lies in the
attempt to articulate nonverbal experience in verbal language, which entails
recurrent confrontations with unresolved paradox. In following the progres-
sion of Bion’s writings very closely, Grotstein invites us to share his obvious
love for and appreciation of the wealth to be mined therein. To make this
journey, however, we must be able to tolerate our feelings of confusion
and resistance sufficiently that we might join in a search for psychoanalytic
“truths” that cannot be imparted by another but only learned through our
 BOOK REVIEWS 403

own experience. We must also be willing to sit with Bion at points of

paradox in which any statement invites consideration of its opposite. From
this perspective, if we can resist the impulse to speak to whatever seems
demanded, then we are in a better position to look at the demand itself
rather than getting rid of the impulse and, with it, whatever insights might
be gained from reflection.
Essential to Bion’s writings is the idea of becoming as the ongoing life
enterprise. Bion seems elusive in part because of his caution to not override
the reflective function of the other by providing didactic information that
might be taken in directly and thus perhaps supercede or sabotage this
process of becoming. For Bion, there is no substitute for developing concur-
rently one’s conscious and unconscious functions so as to increasingly
enhance one’s capacity to perform the crucial analytic function of dreaming
the patient through one’s reverie. Grotstein, in staying very close to Bion
as he experienced him as both his teacher and his psychoanalyst, brings
the reader into proximity with what seems to be his dream of Bion. Thus,
reading A Beam of Intense Darkness is very much like reading poetry. It is
dense, rich, and profoundly layered, best savored and absorbed rather than
“learned.”
Grotstein’s reading of Bion brings us into the heart of Bion’s more
mythical, mystical aspects in which the psychoanalytic universe is ordered
and organized in relation to what Bion terms “O”: a truth that can never
be known but only encountered and experienced. According to Grotstein,
“The recipient of Truth must undergo a transformation of self in order to
accept, accommodate to, become, Truth by rendering it first personally
meaningful through -function and dreaming and then objective through
an advanced form of -function and dreaming—that is, wakeful dream
thinking (Bion, 1962), as contrasted with dreaming while asleep” (Grotstein,
p. 45). In keeping with this view of Bion and his work, Grotstein offers the
reader an experience of encountering conceptualizations from Bion, as he
moves from a deft depiction of Bion’s overarching vision and legacy into
a careful exposition of Bion’s major terms and contributions. Notable among
these contributions were emendations of Klein’s ideas, which in Bion’s
hands moved from a linear model into a multidimensional model in which
transformation was ongoing. Much like our current understanding of human
development, Bion’s vision was one in which new learning that is well
integrated provides a foundation for further growth, whereas information
that is not integrated becomes obstructive to development.
Crucial in reading Grotstein, much as with Bion, is our willingness to
traverse difficult territory in which we do not easily find our bearings but
rather must learn to tolerate swimming in murky waters, gradually becoming
accustomed to that medium. We tend to resist confronting our own blind-
404 BOOK REVIEWS

ness and yet, following Freud’s (1916/1966) statement to Lou Andreas-

Salome, Bion suggests that if we are to attempt to understand obscure
subjects such as “the most fundamental and primitive parts of the human
mind, … instead of trying to bring a brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable
light to bear on obscure problems,” we should instead “bring to bear a
diminution of the ‘light’—a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal
of the searchlight” (Bion, 1990, p. 20). Bion likens this discipline to the
task of observing a game of tennis being played in the dark, suggesting
that if we can tolerate watching in the darkness, we might be able to
stop looking for the net and see, instead, the “holes, including the fact
that they are knitted, or netted together” (p. 21). If we can accept our
ignorance and accustom ourselves to the darkness, he suggests, the object
of our attention might reveal itself to us as it absorbs some of the light
that surrounds it, rather than being overshadowed by our “brilliant”
illuminations.
This model encourages us to tolerate our ignorance and our discomfort
rather than trying to overcome them. When dealing with unconscious
defenses, which by definition resist our efforts to detect them in ourselves,
it may be essential to have in mind a model that encourages us to hold
steady when we would most like to leap away. This type of model would
seem to be an important part of Bion’s legacy. Through Grotstein’s keen
and deep mind, we are invited to plumb further into the darkness of
what we do not yet know but might usefully engage with. If we can use
Grotstein’s exposition as one lens, and our clinical and personal experience
as the other, this “bi-nocular vision” (Bion, 1977) can further our efforts to
usefully encounter the territory to be traversed in a clinical encounter.
Notable in this process is the distinction between models and theories:
for Bion, the model reduces the number of theories needed by the psycho-
analyst, because model-making helps us move past aspects of content that
might obscure the functional relationships, thus affording a better glimpse
of the actual contingencies. This preference highlights another paradox in
Bion: his suspicion but also appreciation of sense experience in providing
data. In being open to information provided by the confluence of sense
experience, Bion seems to have been grappling with the paradox of knowing
that rational thought was not a sufficient tool through which to comprehend
human experience, but that sensory data could be equally misleading. The
tendency to seek meaning, for Bion (1992), leads alternatively to the evolu-
tion of one’s thinking or to the illusion of meaningfulness that allays the
anxiety one feels in the face of uncertainty. Thus, Grotstein suggests, given
our inability to ever entirely master the unconscious forces within us, the
hope in Bion’s metatheory lies in the notion that the capacity for learning,
thinking, and becoming is an evolving one, fed by one’s willingness to
 BOOK REVIEWS 405

encounter “truth” rather than turning a blind eye. For Bion, intrinsic to this
struggle is one’s evolving ability to tolerate frustration and to be interested
in learning about its sources and functions.
This book is not an easy read but is worth the effort. The title is an apt
description of a requirement for this particular journey. It comes, as does
much in Bion, from his careful reading of Freud. In attempting to attune
himself to both sensory experience and rational thought, without overly
privileging either, Bion tried to note, following Freud (1911/1958), the
“constant conjunctions,” those elements of experience that seemed to be
tied to one another, so that the analyst might obtain a clearer glimpse of
how those elements were conjoined for that particular individual. This
vantage point enabled Bion to sit with people who at first glimpse seemed
to make no sense, and to find coherence and meaning in their behaviors
such that that individual could have the experience of making sense in the
mind of another. This capacity that Bion developed in himself seems to be
the capacity that Grotstein points to in this volume, inviting the interested
reader into perhaps a deeper layer in the journey entailed in this very
difficult and ongoing work of becoming a psychoanalyst.

Marilyn Charles, Ph.D.

The Austen Riggs Center, 25 Main Street,
PO Box 962, Stockbridge, MA 01262-0962;
mcharles@msu.edu

REFERENCES

Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from experience. New York: Jason Aronson.
Bion, W.R. (1977). Seven servants. New York: Jason Aronson.
Bion, W.R. (1990). Brazilian lectures. London and New York: Karnac.
Bion, W.R. (1992). Cogitations. London: Karnac.
Freud, S. (1911/1958). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning.
Standard Edition, 12, 218–226.
Freud, S. (1916/1966). Letter dated “25.5.16.” In E. Pfeiffer (Ed.), W. Robson-Scott
& E. Robson-Scott (Trans.) Letters (p. 45), London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1924/1958). Neurosis and psychosis. Standard Edition, 19, 148–153.

DOI:10.1057/ajp.2008.26

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