Introduction to Bion’s Theory of Thinking
Wilfred Bion was a British psychoanalyst whose life spanned from 1897 to 1979, but whose influence continues today to provide psychoanalysis with rich insights as to how our minds function, why we suffer, and how therapy can help us live more emotionally in tune, honestly, and fully. In this brief essay, I will discuss Bion’s ‘A Theory of Thinking’ and explain how his ideas are helpful for us to understand our emotions, thoughts, and behaviours when inside and outside of therapy.
How Thinking Develops: The Role of Emotional Needs
Bion’s (1962) ‘A Theory of Thinking’ attempts to explain how we develop the capacity to think thoughts. With different people having varying capacities to think deeply or to reflect on their feelings, it seems that thinking is by no means a guaranteed or fixed ability.
One of Bion’s first assertions is that “thinking is a development forced on the psyche by the pressure of thoughts and not the other way round” (p. 179). When considering earlier and contemporary psychoanalytic writings at the time, it seems as though Bion is saying that our needs put pressure on the mind in hopes that it will think up solutions to meet these needs. For instance, we need food; we may therefore feel hungry, and feeling hungry may motivate us to think about how we can get the food we require (e.g., go to the grocery store).
The Importance of Tolerating Frustration
However, Bion reminds us that every one of us struggles, in some way, to think up solutions to some problems. Therefore, he connects the ability to think with the capacity for tolerating frustration – in a sense, if we cannot bear to feel out an emotional problem (need), we cannot sit with it long enough to adequately think about it. Thus, as Bion says, the “incapacity for tolerating frustration tips the scale in the direction of evasion of frustration” (p. 180).
Binary Thinking and Its Impact on Relationships
This ‘evasion of frustration,’ for Bion, appears to be related to the mind very quickly and erroneously arriving at simple conclusions to complex problems, and often unreflexively acting upon those conclusions. These phenomena may relate to a more familiar term: binary thinking, where someone holds things as either good OR bad, right OR wrong, etc. The issue with this way of viewing and interacting with the world is that something may be good and bad simultaneously. An example may be a parent of ours who is critical of our decisions; though we may dislike them because they critique us, we may also love them because they care for us in other ways.
Therefore, for Bion, developing the capacity to tolerate feeling emotions (sometimes multiple simultaneously) is a prerequisite for someone being able to think more deeply about themselves, others, and their relationships together. I will discuss how we develop this capacity later, but for now, I would like to ask: why might someone struggle to tolerate their emotions in the first place?
Early Relationships and Emotional Development
To answer this, Bion reflects upon what life may be like for an infant. As we, at this stage, were unable to solve our own problems in the world (owing to a still-developing body and brain), we were both physically and psychologically dependent on our caregivers. We could not feed ourselves when hungry, change ourselves when dirty, or soothe ourselves when lonely. Not at all. Thus, we often cried, or in other ways attempted to communicate our distress, what it was that we desperately needed, and we wholly entrusted our caregivers to provide the essential love, warmth, and nourishment we yearned for.
Therefore, a rough sketch of a good-enough environment for an infant is the following: the infant feels distress, they communicate their distress in some form, the caregiver feels the infant’s distress with them, this feeling guides how they will help the infant with their need, and the infant then receives adequate care that alleviates their specific distress.
This model is ideal, but not how the daily motions of raising a baby usually unfold. Sometimes babies are left crying for many minutes. Sometimes caregivers do not understand what the baby is feeling and attempting to communicate. Sometimes caregivers are unable to ‘tolerate’ the baby’s distress. Sometimes caregivers provide very different care than what the baby needs, leaving them confused and still distressed.
Bion details here how these varying elements in a child’s upbringing leave lasting marks on the developing mind. Simply put, the way in which our caregivers interact and feel with us in our early years influences our predictions of how others will be with us in later years. For instance, if our caregiver was unable to tolerate our crying in infancy, we may develop and maintain beliefs that crying cannot be tolerated by anyone; thus, we may suppress our expressions of distress throughout our adult life. And critically, to return back to Bion, our distress remains largely unthinkable in these circumstances, as we never had another person in our earliest years to help us feel through and think about these experiences with us. Thus, in these situations, we remain estranged from ourselves, not able to reflect upon how we feel and what we could do about it.
The Role of Therapy in Emotional Growth
This, I believe, strikes at the central aspect of good therapy. Most of us go through our lives unaware of our early relational patterns, and we may therefore also find it difficult to reflect upon the current relationships we find ourselves in, whether friends, romantic partners, co-workers, or family. Similarly, we may live our days oblivious to how we feel on one hand because we may not understand what we feel, and on the other, because we may be terrified of what we could feel.
It is with this framework that psychoanalytic psychotherapists, like myself, work with clients. People seeking therapy often sense they have distanced themselves from feeling, or find it almost impossible to confide in another person because of worries of judgment or not being understood. Thus, good therapists are open to feeling with their clients first and foremost, and allowing their relationship together to develop naturally. Things can be shared at a pace the client wishes, and we can gradually learn to understand one another.
And most importantly, as we have often mistrusted others with our emotions, therapy works by learning to trust again – by having moments with a therapist where they feel our emotions together with us, and thus allowing previously overwhelming distress to become “more tolerable to the psyche” (p. 183) – in a word, becoming more thinkable once again.
If you’re interested in exploring how therapy can help you better understand your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, you can learn more about our psychoanalytic therapy services and book a free consultation. Additionally, check out our related blog on psychoanalysis, memory, and confabulation for further insights into the fascinating world of psychoanalysis.