Bion Catastrophic Change and Winnicott's Breakdown

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Referncias Gaddini, R. (1981). Bion Catastrophic Change and Winnicott's Breakdown. 27(3-4), 610-621. 
Bion Catastrophic Change and Winnicott's Breakdown1 Renata Gaddini, author For a long time the real meaning of Bion's term catastrophe and its relationship with Winnicott's breakdown were not clear to me. The word catastrophe, it is known, comes from Greek kata down, and strephein to turn. Chambers Twentieth Century dictionary defines Catastrophe as follows: An overturning; a final event; an unfortunate conclusion; a calamity. Bion has spoken of catastrophic change, never of catastrophe, in various places in his work, and particularly, in Chapter 12 of Attention and Interpretation ( 5 ), in Learning from experience ( 2 ) and, most of all, in Transformations ( 3 ). In 1966 he had given a paper to the British Society which was entitled Catastrophic Change ( 4 ). That paper was not published separately. It appeared, however, in the Bulletin o the British Psychoanalytic Society and it is printed almost exactly the same in Attention and Interpretation. The image of the catastrophe and of the extreme confusion which the analyst experiences when working in depth with adult psychotics has been associated by Bion with the experience of the archeologist who exscavates in the ruins of a buried city and, in the course of his excavation, due to movements the various geological strata have undergone in the course of years, meets the
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various layers of the city in confusion, and finds rocks and stones which belong to the more ancient layers mixed with vases and amphorae, and with objects of the more recent periods. Similarly, Bion notes, the analyst who works in depth with individuals who present thought disorders finds, in their mind, a confusion of no less degree than that which is found among the ruins of the old buried city, as the more recent layers of personality are confused with the archaic ones. Oliver Lyth ( 9 ), one of Bion's most careful readers, pointed out to me that the word catastrophe in English has become more and more associated with disaster but as so often with Bion he uses it very accurately, and retaining its earlier meaning of an evolutionary change, as well as the disaster element. This lost evolutionary meaning, dramatic in character, according to Lyth, was superimposed on by the disaster element, which seems now to prevail in the current meaning3 Tustin ( 11 ) feels differently. She recalls having had a long discussion in Summer 1977 at tea with Dr. Bion in the Tavistock about the topic of catastrophe, as she was concerned not to travesty his meaning in her paper Psychological Birth and Psychological Catastrophe which she was, at the time, writing as a contribution to the Festschrift for Bion's 80th year4 . The sense which Tustin gave to the word catastrophe in her contribution was of a calamity, a total disaster, a trauma which stopped a normal psychological birth, and distorted growth. It was clear to her she reports that for Bion it was appropriate to link the two concepts (psychological birth and psychological catastrophe) together. In this context the realization by the child that the part of the mother he had taken for granted as being part of is body, was not so, is the trauma par excellence. According to Tustin, Winnicott refers to this trauma as lying at the roots of infants' psychotic depression. It is a disaster which either a) halts or b) distorts and confuses psychological growth. In the first case a) we get unintegration and in the second b) we get disintegration5 . Winnicott's breakdown( 12 ) as we know, is in fact, quite close to disintegration, his fear of breakdown is, for me, the fear which Bion refers to, which holds back the patient in analysis from changing and growing. Both the fear of breakdown as well as the fear of catastrophic change are the equivalents of the fear with which one meets, in the course of the analysis, and these hold back the patient, desperately cohesive fearful of changing, as if he were on the very edge of a catastrophe or a precipice. A young patient of mine dreams: I had a small motor-scooter. I was going along a long, narrow road. On my side of the road there was an iron railing, with vertical and horizontal bars, and a parapet. Beyond this parapet
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there was a precipice. What precipice was unknown There was something different beyond this parapet it was unknown whether it were the same green meadow or what It was a place one leaves from a little pier, perhaps He associates: One leaves on a boat and one leaves on a train You know what: every time we talk like today I find myself thinking of committing suicide. For the rest of the hour the patient filled the room with excited narrations, so as to cover (patient's word) and to confuse the analyst. Tustin points out that Bion does not write about non-integration because this is not seen in adult patients to the massive degree it is encountered in autistic children, particularly in those with infantile autism (Kanner type). There may be a pocket of unintegration in neurotic patients, but Bion did not write about this. On the contrary, Winnicott's work has taken place, for a long time, mostly with children, who presented various psychopathological conditions, and this meant to him that he encountered unintegration, virtually in pure culture. Bion writes about disintegration which he encountered in adult schizophrenics, which was his area of study. He never treated children, though, much of what he has discovered is helpful in treating them. In any cases, Bion did not differentiate unintegration from disintegration the way Winnicott did. In Winnicott's ( 12 ) words, breakdown is the equivalent of the lack of a defensive organization, an organization which would have helped to cope with environmental difficulties and vicissitudes during primary states. It is a failure of a defense organization. In the area of psychoneurosis it is castration anxiety that lies behind the defences, whereas in the more psychotic phenomena it is a breakdown of the establishment of the unit self that is indicated. The loss of psychosomatic collusion, with depersonalization as a defense, and the loss of a sense of reality wich is typical of psychotic conditions, with primary narcissism as a defense, may be found one beside the other, when he enumerates primary agonies: non-integration and disintegration are the closest, one to another. As mentioned above, Tustin has dedicated special attention to the definition of the term catastrophe, and she got a clear impression that Bion views the catastrophic change as something which implied, for the patient, a calamity, which he dreaded, in the same way he had been terrified at the time of his primary experience, when he had gone through it for the first time. On the same occasion (summer 1977) she also got the impression that Bion was inclined to see this primary terror as interfering, in some cases, with normal psychological birth, i.e., with the process which takes place in the first months, of life, in the human infant, through the baby containement on the part of the mother's mind. This containment gives emotional meaning to things and events, and in so doing, makes infant's early sensations gradually grow into affects and thoughts. It is on the basis of sense data, we know, that the complex mental operations of later years will take place.
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It may be noted here that Bion and Winnicott made many discoveries, indipendently from each other, whic we may look at as equivalent, at times even superimposable, at times only close in nature to one another. It will be hard, therefore, for me, to limit myself in this presentation to the concept of catastrophe. Both these authors, as is known, following a line which had been opened up to them by Melanie Klein, dedicated themselves to the study of the very primary levels of development. In this context. Winnicott described the concept of primary maternal preoccupation and Bion the concept of reverie, two concepts which have indeed much in common. Furthermore, Winnicott's holding and Bion's containment have also much in common. In relationship with the mother's nutritional function, we may wonder whether in Bion's containment the mother's capacity of receiving the infant's projective identifications, is perhaps something which is more mental, when compared with Winnicott's holding situation. Bion is clear on this matter: The term reverie may be applied to almost any content. I wish to reserve it only for such content as is suffused with love or hate. Using it in this restricted sense reverie is that state of mind which is open to the reception of any objects from the loved object and is therefore capable of reception of the infant's projective identifications, whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad. In short, reverie is a factor of the mother's alpha-function. (Learning from Experience, p. 36) It has to be noted that, on the subject of reverie, Bion does not talk about containment. In Bion's idea of containment there is, beyond container's and content's interactions, the containment of infant's (or patient's) evacuations which would otherwise overflow. Meltzer's ( 10 ) image of Mummy-napkin or Mummy-toilet fits well to describe the particular mother's function of firmly containing evacuations. If mother is cracked and she can't contain, she can't prevent evacuations overflow from taking place. Under these conditions, there will be, therefore, a continuous passing from inside to outside without a clear demarcation of an inner world where internal objects may be retained. It may be noted, on this matter, that at these primary levels of development, evacuation, more than projection is the mechanism through which infant (or patient) frees himself of his uneasynesses, and/or of his anxious feelings, loosing continuously parts of self, which could otherwise be used in the construction of a personal inner world A woman dreams: A public garden There is Stephanie (daughter), and a young child. I hand over this baby to Stephanie, and I walk out. Stephanie picks her up Soon I come back, and I put baby to sleep, in the parents bed, on the side of my mother Stephanie takes care of the baby normally no protest Later I teach the baby not to wet I take her to the bathroom a pink bathroom and I put her on the toilet She does little business and big business some of it gets out of the toilet I take it and put it back into the toilet. business and big business some of it gets out of the toilet I take it and put it back into the toilet.
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She associates: I felt I was different from my mother. When people used to say that I looked like one of my parents, I always hoped they'd say my father rather than mother Maybe I did not feel like being up to her In the dream, there is a pink bathroom The pink bathroom was that into which, as a child, I used to close myself to manage my tantrums. Once I wrote a note; I seem to remember it was to my older brother. I wrote that I was going to throw myself out of the window. I have just said that, for me, Bion's concept of catastrophic change and Winnicott's fear of breakdown have much in common and so do the concepts of containment and that of holding, and the concept of reverie and that of primary maternal preoccupation What I found most different, among the two authors, is the way they use to express themselves. In contrast with Winnicott's subtle verbal research, tending to find words for that which he felt cannot be expressed in words, Bion's thinking, which is itself abstract and theoretical, is often expressed in an almost reactive way with descriptive and concrete images, and maintains itself at an almost cognitive level. This cognitive style is typically conferred by Bion to most of his studies on depth The description ( 5 ) of the man who, while he was talking about an emotional experience in which he was deeply involved, begun to stutter, a description which Bion makes use of, in order to illustrate the fracture of relationship between container and content, which is implied in his concept of catastrophe, is a good example in this sense: a man speaking of an emotional experience in which he was closely involved began to stammer badly as the memory became increasingly vivid to him. The aspects of the model that are significant are these: the man was trying to contain his experience in a form of words; he was trying to contain himself, as one sometimes says of someone about to lose control of himself; he was trying to contain his emotions within a form of words, as one might speak of a general attempting to !contain" enemy forces within a given zone The words that should have represented the meaning the man wanted to express were fragmented by the emotional forces to which he wished to give only verbal expression; the verbal formulation could not !contain" his emotions, which broke through and dispersed it as enemy forces might break through the forces that strove to contain them. he wished to give only verbal expression; the verbal formulation could not !contain" his emotions, which broke through and dispersed it as enemy forces might break through the forces that strove to contain them. The stammerer, in his attempt to avoid the contingency I have described, resorted to modes of expression so boring that they failed to express the meaning he wished to convey; he was thus no
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nearer to his goal. His verbal formulation could be described as like the military forces that are worn by the attrition to which they are subjected by the contained forces. The meaning he was striving to express was denuded of meaning. His attempt to use his tongue for verbal expression failed to !contain" his wish to use his tongue for masturbatory movement in his mouth. Sometimes the stammerer could be reduced to silence. This situation can be represented by a visual image of a man who talked so much that any meaning he wished to express was drowned by his flood of words. I hope that I have conveyed my meaning to the reader by virtue of the verbal transformations of visual images that I have used. However, the communication is not satisfactory. The visual images are too concrete to be suitable for expressing the relationship of the mystic to the group. They are too evocative of a penumbra of associations which they already carry. In short, the situation is similar to that of the stammerer whose words, or lack of them, contain rather than communicate his meaning. Alternatively, the meaning is too powerful for the verbal formulation; the expression is lost in an !explosion" in which the verbal formulation is destroyed. (Attention and Interpretation, pp. 93-95). Let us go back now to Oliver Lyth, and to his interpretation of catastrophic changes. May I say that an evolutionary idea of the patient, who finds himself in a particular time of the analytic process which he feels threatening, is, for me, strictly connected with the idea of catastrophe. Bion's idea of learning from experience, on the other hand, clearly contains an evolutionary element. It implies learning through elaboration, a process which brings forward new products and new states, on the basis of data acquired during infant's (or patient's) previous experience. Hasn't Bion spelled for us, again and again, that feelings and thinking are based on sense data? Looked upon in this light, knowledge and learning may be seen as a sort of biological adaptation similar to any other adaptation, except for the fact that we are dealing with the mind and with thinking, where the conflict between the subjective and the objective soon comes in. The very same analogy of the Ur burial, violated by brave robbers who dared to defy the taboos of religion and myths, and to rob the treasures hidden in a spot which was guarded by evil and dangerous spirits, may be looked upon as similar to the adventure that patient and analyst live together, when approaching the unconscious. They too patient and analyst break together through the wall of religion and tradition, to search for repressed values. Fear is great. In Bion's words: In every consulting room there ought to be two rather frightened people, the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows ( 6 ). The fear they have in analysis, breaking through the ghostly sentinels of traditions, is fear to meet with the different-from-self, and with changing. This changing may be feared as catastrophic
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in the same way as it has been experienced the first time. The idea is that in analysis things happen suddenly, and violently, and things are never the same again. On the basis of his explorations with psychotic patients on the pathological forms of projective identification and of omnipotence, Bion has provided us with a model of development of the mental apparatus. Development of thought is due, for him, to the meeting of a preconception with a realization ( 2 ) The preconception is the innate expectation of a breast, is the open valence, as I am used myself to represent this idea for myself. When the infant is brought in contact with the breast, the preconception becomes a conception, in so far as he takes for granted a realization. Concepts are therefore associated with the emotional experience of satisfaction. Development of thought, on the other hand, is tied to frustration, with a non-breast. This non-breast is, at first, experienced as a bad object, and expelled, in the infant's omnipotent fantasy. He may have acquired enough tolerance to frustration, however, to the point of not expelling this bad object immediately. He may come to recognize, with time, that the bad thing he has inside is a product of his own mind, that it is not real. The moment he is able to do this, it is a transformation. Bion comes to the conclusion: Without breast, therefore thought ( 1 ). The crucial element of this getting to know is the decision to modify himself (therefore of evolving) or, as an alternative, to evade frustration. Here we find Freud's two priciples of mental functioning which Bion demostrates on the basis of his clinical work with patients. In theoretical terms, primary experiences are, in Bion's view, controlled by beta elements as primary processes are. They are the basic ingredients of sensory and emotional experiences, in which the psychic cannot be distinguished from the physical. They bring only to projective identification ( 1 ). These primary elements are projected into the breast, and the breast turns them into alfa elements, which have mental significance. The alfa elements may be accumulated, repressed, further elaborated, symbolized. They are the elements of dream thought and of fantasy. It is mother's response to infant's projection which gives sense and significance to his experience. If mother's response is adequate, infant may re-introject the breast as a container capable of alfa functions, the function which translated beta-elements into alfa-elements. In closing, I like to illustrate these different ways of being and functioning with the case of a boy now 16, who has been seen in early childhood because he used to ruminate. The patient quitted
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ruminating when he was four, but resumed it once more at 11, with school stress reinforced by environmental changes which took place when his family moved from the South to the North. The relevant characteristics which manifested themselves during treatment are evacuation of thoughts non-organized in concepts and symbols (lack of alfa function), the incapacity of learning from experience, in so far as there is a withdrawal from reality, and no real experience can be incorporated, introjected and elaborated and most of all the trend to obsessive, mystic idealization, which means, for him, to be one thing with God, i.e., to maintain the primitive fusion with mother Antonio is a second born premature of an elderly couple, whose sister is six years his elder. His mother's nipples were cracked: so, after two weeks of battling with a bleeding breast (he regurgitated all my bloody milk) Antonio was weaned. Cow's milk in various forms was then forced into him and, when regurgitated, patiently fed once more to the struggling baby These forced feeding manipulations went on for Antonio's first year. By the end of this year he had become a ruminator, namely, had become able to bring the ingested food back into the mouth and then, slowly, to reingest and swallow it in a reiterated way. able to bring the ingested food back into the mouth and then, slowly, to reingest and swallow it in a reiterated way. He walked at 12 months, and spoke at 25 months. His way of beginning to talk was that of repeating mother's songs and lullabies. He also repeated sister's counting: 2 - 4 - 5. Parents' comment about that period of his life is that his speech could not progress because he could only imitate sounds. They also recall obsessionally his talking in front of a mirror at age 4. At that age, his repetitive capacities appeared astonishing. He was then able to copy a prayer (Fig. 1) without knowing the alphabet. A pediatrician who saw him at the time felt he was peculiar and spoke about mental confusion. Because of this strange behaviour he was brought to my attention. He had just begun to go to nursery school, but was withdrawn and could not share with children. Rumination did not appear at the time a main reason of preoccupation for the parents (it disappeared shortly after starting school) as much as were the words pronounced by the pediatrician: mental confusion. At age 11 he resumed ruminating. It happened when he went from elementary school in Calabria to a high school in Perugia, where he appeared in distress. His school performance, which represented his obsessive thinking 24 hours day, particularly in repetitive things and in maths continued to be good. But he felt persecuted by the class and by the teachers. His persecutory ideas were also of being attacked genitally by schoolmates; he was teased and was made the brunt of their jokes. In addition he felt clumsy, and his mechanisms of potentiating his mind vs a non-integrated sense of his body self, did not seem successful, at the time. Rumination went on and off for 2 years, and is now an occasional symptom which limits itself to fluids. Another symptom however appeared at 14, which brought him back to me, this time asking
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for an analysis. He had become aggressive with his mother and could not stand the view of naked women. He appeared obsessively religious, and life events used to be inscribed in compulsive rituals. He compulsively plays the piano and does school work, claiming that he has to realize himself, meaning with that as it appeared in the short analytical experience that he wants to be, as a protective manoeuvre from breaking down. His stereotyped repeating I have to realize myself is an equivalent of saying: I have to be. Being (mother, object, outside world) appeared to be, for him, a way of surviving ( 7 ). His poor capacity for mental metabolism struck me even more at this time, as well as his ruminating rather than reflecting of mental operations. There was an extreme tendency to idealization the sun source of life, (God, mother, all sources of life, of divine love) and an attempt to abstract, idealization and abstraction proceeding in parallel as primitive defences against early instinctual drives. Instinctual excitement is experienced as a threat and even a panic, as it seems to mobilize primary agonies and fears of break-down. Defensively, he keeps away from body excitement, and moves towards religion and music, in the most ritualistic and stereotyped way. His learning through imitation rather than through identification, due to his expulsive rather than retantive capacities, give his cognitive processes a quick grasping character instead of reflective assimilation. Besides, there is, in his thinking, no personal point of view. He keeps re-producing mother, teacher, books, outside world, (imitation allows him to be what he imitates) ( 7 ) although with an element of deep rivalry and defiance. His being the other (never losing contact) seems to be at the basis of his speedy, compulsive, non-constructive learning, both manual as well as verbal, and of his giving symbols a concrete character, as his ruminated food used to be a perpetually self-enacted image of his feeding and re-feeding mother ( 8 ). Infants do not know they are happy: should I go back to infancy, now I would be able to know But I should have to face school once more, was a consideration I heard from him lately, before separating. The lacking psychic element which is at the basis of Antonio's precocious distortions, which are auto-aggressive, in so far as it is the child's body which is invested rather than the outside world, is the initiating element of psychosomatic pathology. In this way, all forces are bound to the body in the course of his maturational process, and the symbolic functions the alfa functions remain insufficient. This becomes a manifest risk condition at the time verbal thought is implied. Bion's beta elements of thought take place in this case, the latter having more to do with evacuations or with primitive imitation than with the individual's creative capacities which set in through the
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incorporated experiences. A severe failure in mental functioning takes place then, and thinking rests on facts rather than on ideas. This developmental failure, or gap, catastrophe, in Bion's sense, or non-integration, in Winnicott's sense ( 12 ) are the basis of that which not unfrequently is met with in minor forms even in the course of normal maturational processes, which interferes with the capacity of developing an authentic expression of the original self, such as a transitional object, which is the protoype of self-creation, with all instinctual elements included. This lack of primary symbolization of the self is indicative of an early break between the biological roots of instincts and psychic functioning. The clinical vignettes I have reported seem appropriate to me to illustrate Bion's contribution to clinical psychoanalysis, and give me the opportunity of expressing my debt of gratitude to two genial map-makers of the human mind, such as Bion and Winnicott. Footnotes 1 Meeting in honor of W.R. Bion. Rome, March 27th-28th, 1981. Panel C: Bion in the psychoanalytic practice.
2
Human Development Research Unit., University of Rome.
Shortly after our meeting on Bion, Lyth died. I like to use this occasion to remember him with gratitude.
4
As it may be known, the Festschrifs were abandoned by Aronson Publ. They have appeared in the Caesura Press Publ. edited by J. Grotstein, with the title: Do I dare to disturb the Universe? A memorial to Wilfred R. Bion.
5
Discussions with Parthenope Bion, whom I thank here, have further helped me in clarifying these concepts.
This publication is protected by US and international copyright lawsand its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. , 1981; v.27 (3-4), p610 (12pp.) RPSA.027.0610A
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