Conference

Our conference will offer various modes of engagement with Bion’s clinical thinking, particularly as it concerns itself with states of mind in which the possibility of thought, of experience itself, is called into question. Throughout his work, Bion focuses on the conditions of experience, specifically emotional experience. What must be the case for it to be possible? How does it fracture, and become deadened? In a remarkable way, he brings us inside a space where the possibility of emotionally alive thinking is in question--a space characterized by collapse into more fragmented particularities, where thoughts might exist but not be thinkable. Here, it may be said, we are in the area of psychosis. Bion warns us, however, that looking through the lens of psychotic process runs the risk of being too “macroscopic”, thereby missing another more “microscopic” vertex, one perhaps closer to the particularities of the ground of experience itself. Can we speak of a “sane psychosis”? Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Bion has a story to tell, a story of catastrophe and redemption. Only how can it be spoken—or heard? How might we develop the “psychic apparatus,” in Bion’s terms, to bear what he brings us? And how might we, in turn, enlist Bion's work to engage the catastrophes of mind and world we face today?

Bion presents us with his own struggles to convey his experience in language. He reports that he is unable to recognize himself or his patient in his account of their work together. This awareness arises as Bion is also realizing how his attempts to interpret the patient’s process can become what obstructs his reception of the patient’s communication. In this context, Bion’s focus turns more to the navigating the clinical situation where containment through language fails, often by virtue he comes to think of our misunderstanding the uses of our language. He realizes the need to attend more closely to how we use language and specifically how we might attend to the “communication of the ineffable.” As his work develops, Bion turns to thinkers and artists outside psychoanalysis who open different vantage points, different “vertices”, on this territory. Poets, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists and mystics are enlisted to extend psychoanalytic thinking, often by casting new light on its limits, toward clarifying the area of our primary concern, “the most fundamental and primitive parts of the mind.” Psychoanalysts need philosophy, says Bion, more than the philosophers do. How is this? The same may be asked of each of the vertices tapped by Bion: how are they being enlisted, being invoked to reveal something of psychoanalytic import in territories of nascent primitive mind? These questions will form the orienting threads for our conference.

Our meeting days will also include opportunities to engage with specific Bion passages from the various vertices being described, allowing more of a first-hand sense of what Bion was seeking to open for us in drawing on these various vertices. For example, local poets will be writing original material in response to Bion’s words. They will also be offering daily poetry writing groups for those attendees who might wish to participate as well as other experiential groups.

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Discount hotels will be offered, details forthcoming.

CE credits offered for online pre-conference seminars and full conference events.