Wilfred Bion and The Language of Achievement

손홍석 2025-01-01

1. Limitation of language in psychoanalysis

The very limitation of language becomes apparent in every failure to convey its essence in the universal communication of emotional experiences in any psychoanalytic dialogue. The deeper the psychoanalytic explorations move forward, the dilemma becomes more pronounced: the dilemma between the verbal and preverbal, or the phenomenal world and the numinous world. It arises from the simple fact that “not only is the human mind a vast internal universe that far outstrips our capacity to understand it, but analysts rely heavily on verbal language that often must be used to express pre-verbal mental states.”[1]

    Bion asserted that the insufficiency of language was fundamental aporia in psychoanalysis by noting that the “problem presented by psycho-analytic experience is the lack of any adequate terminology to describe it.”[2] The problem becomes more relevant when approaching a mental life “unmapped” by the previous theories elaborated for the neurosis,[3] especially in the respect that the unstructured and unsymbolized aspects of experience are literally unthinkable.[4] Working with the patients who are severely compromised in psychic structuralization, Bion could not but postulate that the mental space or the human psyche is “a thing-in-itself, that is infinite and unknowable, but [nevertheless] that can be represented by thoughts.”[5] Thus, the discrepancy is always laid between the thing-in-itself or the existential realm of the raw emotional life and what can be represented in mind or known to be experienced, and finally what can be put into verbal thought or conveyed in words.

2. The Language of Achievement

Amid the seeming impasse, Bion conceives of the Language of Achievement as not the most sufficient but at least the proximate language used for the ineffable emotional interaction and communication in the psychoanalytic experience – the communication between the analysand and the analyst, or that between the analyst and other analysts. He coins the term from Keats “Man of Achievement” and “Negative Capability.”[6]

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. – John Keats.[7] 

    Bion contrasts the Language of Achievement with the language of substitution.[8] The latter denotes language that is solely sensuously derived, based upon representations of objects and substitutive symbols. The unsuitability of these ordinary languages to convey ineffable experiences makes requesting other sorts of language necessary. Therefore, the Language of Achievement is “the language of emotions before they become represented as concepts or ideas—and it also is the language of models—that is, analogue models and experiences outside the system under investigation.”[9]

   The Language of Achievement, according to Bion, is employed for elucidating the truth revealing itself from the communications “deriving not only from sensuous experience but also from impulses and dispositions far from those ordinarily associated with scientific discussion.”[10] Bion places this language in the domain where there is no time or space, where one is open to the non-sensuous infinite realm of the unconscious emotional life.[11] This mean that the Language of Achievement indicates the capacity to contain the primitive emotional life. In contrast, the language of substitution indicates the defensive stance that obstructs real communication.[12] Lies – e.g., illusions, omnipotent fantasies, and delusions – substitute the truth when one is intolerable of frustrations derived from primitive emotions and unable to contain those feelings – not only of love but also hatred, envy, and greed that dominates the earliest period of life and analytic sessions.[13] The growth or the development into mature personality is acquired through not the preclusion of these cruel psychic realities but the transformations of the fragmented into the whole through intersubjective exchanges. The Language of Achievement is transformative in its nature and sought for

an activity that is both the restoration of god (the Mother) and the evolution of god (the formless, infinite, ineffable, non-existence), which can be found only in the state in which there is NO memory, desire, and understanding.[14]

    According to Grotstein, Christian mystics’ description of apophatic mystical language of unsaying deemed “so as not to defile the essence of the deity by capturing him in language.” – as in Meister Eckhart’s notion that any spoken word must be followed by its opposite.[15] He further designate the Language of Achievement as the language of paradox in that the numinous would never fall into the category of object of which can be captured by any language. The unsaying and the dialectical procedure are required to preserve the deity’s vitality and transcendence.[16] 

    It appears plausible that Bion borrows the term from the language suitable for literature or religion in a struggle to convey the experiences in a not yet represented psychic level. It must have had to be the language in contact with the a-sensous and undifferentiated reality – of which Bion terms the ultimate O - and evokes psychic change. Bion acknowledged the similarity of the realm that poetic or religious language touches and that of the psychoanalytic one and, moreover, intended to produce a poetic anthology for the analyst in his late and autobiographical works.[17] However, he was more aware of the danger in using poetry to convey psychoanalytic experiences, in a sense that the artist’s capacity may provide a substitute for the truth – a warning already made by Plato.[18] According to Vermote, the beauty of a poetic and religious approach may become a substitute for the truth rather than an apprehension of it. Bion never renounced apprehending the ultimate reality but altered the mode of understanding as becoming or being at-one-ment. What Bion maintains is a radical attitude, “adopting a stance which eschews understanding, and does not look for coherence, but rather attempts to be in touch with an undifferentiated zone from where thoughts arise.”[19]

[1] Annie Reiner, “What language are we speaking? Bion and early emotional life.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 81(2021): 7.

[2] Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Karnac, 1962), 68.

[3] Learning from Experience (London: Karnac, 1962), 37.

[4] Wendy Katz, “Silence, second skin and the unrepresented” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 92.1(2023): 83-84.

[5] Wilfred R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation (London: Karnac, 1970), 11. “nevertheless” in square bracket is exposition of Howard B. Levine. In his paper “To Feel in My Flesh: Receptivity, Resonance, Representation and the Beta Screen,” first presented May 2, 2023, as the 2023 Sandor Rado lecture at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York City, New York. Also presented on January 14, 2024, in a seminar at the Korean Psychoanalytic Society (KPS), Seoul.

[6] Bion intentionally use the term “Language of Achievement” in capitalized words.

[7] John Keats, “Letter to George and Thomas Keats” 21 December 1817, cited in Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 125.

[8] Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 125.

[9] James S Grotstein, A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis. (London: Karnac, 2007), 110.

[10] Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 3.

[11] Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 2.

[12] Annie Reiner, “What Language are We Speaking? Bion and Early Emotional Life.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 81 (2021): 6-26.

[13] Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 125-128.

[14] Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 129.

[15] Grotstein, A Beam of Intense Darkness, 113.

[16] Grotstein, A Beam of Intense Darkness, 113.

[17] Wilfred R. Bion, All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life and The Other Side of Genius: Family Letters, ed. Francesca Bion (Abingdon: Fleetwood Press, 1985); Rudy Vermote, Reading Bion (Abingdon and New York: Routledge 2019), 140.

[18] Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 2.

[19] Vermote, Reading Bion, 141.