“She speaks of loneliness turning to insight, but what makes such loneliness tolerable enough for insight to take place?” . . . “to tolerate such affects which erupt as a severe form of mourning – such a woman would need containment and contact …”

“Without the capacity to mourn through the creative process, artistically gifted people can remain endlessly trapped unable to experience how creativity can move them toward a richer interpersonal life.” (1993)

I will be responding to the Demon lover Complex and the compulsion to create from some of Bion’s concepts and work. This is quite a challenge for me since Bion writes in a different language. Yet I believe there are significant threads to Bion’s work that connect and weave into Susan Adler’s creative psychic tapestry.

Bion’s psychology has a binocular vision. His view of the psyche is catastrophic, murderous, turbulent, violent and explosive, as well as hopeful, indestructible, with an attitude of faith in the unknown terror and faith in learning from experience. Kavaler-Adler’s concept of the Demon lover and compulsion to create as addictions speak to Bion’s addressing the phenomenology of absence. He calls it the no-thing or no breast. Bion addresses what happens when the object (in Adler’s scenario – the mother) is absent, and isn’t there for the child – there is an absence of fulfillment for the desires of the infant. There is pain over this absence, and this absence is experienced as a “no thing.” One then attempts to close off absence by keeping oneself out of contact with inner reality. What is really present is absence and the feeling generated by absence as loss, emptiness, etc. Instead of experiencing the absence and the related feelings and representing them, that is to symbolize what’s missing, the person evacuates psychic reality and substitutes another emotion. As Bion (1970) writes, “the emotion is replaced by a no emotion. In practice this can mean no feeling at all or an emotion such as rage that is an emotion of which the fundamental function is the denial of another emotion.”

If the person is unable to represent the no-thing, any chance for thinking is evacuated. Bion (1970) writes, “the patient may be seen as facing a choice, either he may allow his intolerance of frustration to use what might otherwise be a ‘no-thing’ to become a thought, or he may use what might be a ‘no thing’ to be the foundation for a system of hallucinosis.”

How one relates to what “is not” plays an important role in how one relates to “what is.” Bion believes the temptation to fill in the gap as to nullify no-thing is ubiquitous. In Susan Kavaler-Adler’s formulation the addiction to creativity and internalizing the demon lover are ways to fill in the no-thing. For Bion tolerating the no-thing is linked with vulnerability, openness and learning from experience. The opposite is “by treating objects as no-things and no-things as objects makes it impossible to use symbols as vehicles for experiential learning. We associate this state with murder.” Eigen (1996) Bion (1965) writes, “thus actual murder is to be sought instead of thought represented by the word ‘murder’.” Eigen (1996) writes “Short-circuited thinking is already a kind of murder, a murder of the mind. When words are used to evacuate rather than to build meaning, meaning is murdered. No-thing is murdered insofar as it is treated as an object. That is the capacity to think about murderous feelings is killed off. Instead of learning from experience, one kills experience or rather kills the capacity to support experiencing.”

I believe that hallucinating the no-thing is linked with the psychology of addiction. That is, one is addicted to fill up the space, where emptiness-absence and horror should be. The filling up can be excessive sex, alcohol or drugs. In Kavaler-Adler’s thinking, it’s creativity itself that fills in the hole. The black hole in the psyche is filled up with the radiance of compulsive creativity to forestall experience. The demon lover father plugs the hole and rupture so one doesn’t experience the lack of good maternal caring. A maiconaissance develops where healthy creativity gets confused, distorted and controlled.

Eigen (1993) writes, “Bion maintains the critical importance of not confusing creative experiencing with introjections of mother and father images or functions. The sources of creative experiencing run deeper than internalization and go beyond it . . . One discovers that the primary object of creative experience is not mother or father but the unknowable ground of creativeness as such . . .

The wholling tendency is not primarily based on mastery or control. It grows most basically through a spontaneous play of experiencing and meaning which aim to express and unfold what is most real for the subject, his emotional truth or way of being a subject, who one is.”

Bion believes that attempt to rid oneself of no-thing, to blank no-thing out, to fill it in with numbness or a demon lover, immobilizes the psyche to connect with experience in fruitful ways.

The “Devil” is what Bion calls thoughts without a thinker. Grotstein (1979) writes “An abandoned self has no soul, mind or will and is therefore quite vulnerable to be taken over.”

Bion ups the ante when one is not met with a proper emotional feeling by the mother. Thinking is atrophied. He writes (1970), “the ‘place’ where time was or a feeling was, (or a ‘no thing’ of any kind was) is then similarly annihilated. There is created a domain of the non-existent . . . this is followed by an externalization or evacuation of ‘non-existence’. Non-existence immediately becomes an object that is immensely hostile and filled with murderous envy towards the quality of existence where it is to be found. The super ego is denuded of characteristics usually associated with it, and is denuded at existence itself.

Insofar as it’s resemblance to the super-ego is concerned, shows itself as a superior object asserting its superiority by finding fault with everything. The most important characteristic is the hatred of any new development in the personality as if the new development were a rival to be destroyed.” The demon from Bion’s point of view cannot tolerate the frustration of what is not there. The patient attempts to get rid of space and temporality in one fell swoop. The feeling in Bion is that “space” is occupied by non-existence. The patient has to fight for space against the pervasive feeling that deadening processes have the only right to be. Any usage of life can have catastrophic consequences. For Bion it is how to regain the creative use of space. How to start building a capacity for meaning where there is no meaning. Where you are not is where you ought to be. No space, no gaps, no holes. Everything should be filled, the violent and tyrannical demand by the patient for the analyst to be totally present. No limitations and no distance for the analyst to think, feel and intuit.

The demon lover is at work. One hallucinates that one can rid of pain, understanding and meaning by attacking. Bion’s psychotic superego is parasitic; it fills the empty hole and substitutes its own persecution to avoid persecution that one has to undergo. The conflict arises between psychoanalytic exploration and inquiry versus the punishment of inquiry. The moral judgments and negativity that vulnerability and openness are bad, keeps the patient in a hallucinatory idealized world. Besides object relations failure, Bion believes the inability to tolerate tension, and inability to experience is lacking in patients. He feels the human race is flawed in the capacity to experience. It’s part of the human condition. He also relates inability to tolerate “no-thing,” and feeling starts with the loss of one’s omnipotence. His belief is that the baby oversimplifies reality. The breast ought to occupy a space it does not in order to maintain one’s omnipotence. There should not be absence. The psychotic attitude cannot tolerate build-up of experience. “If I allow experience to build, I don’t know where it will lead.” The helpless state is no longer an omnipotent state.

Bion’s psychology explores the violence, turbulence, horror and madness of our psyches. The demonization of experience leaves one in aguish and despair. Yet his concepts have a binocular vision. Bion writes about the survival mind and truthful mind. One can survive the traumas of life yet one also needs emotional truth and integrity to one’s experience if a person is going to live a full and intimate-creative life. Bion believes if truth becomes atrophied, the personality deteriorates. One needs truth to live as one needs food to live. The seeking of truth in part is why patients come to analysis. Bion feels there is an invariant structure in the psyche that seeks an object to be soothed, understood, find a home in and to be supported. “Can I put my feeling self into another when I experience stress or trauma?” When the object isn’t there, disaster results. There is a result in loss of contact with reality. Eigen (1999) states, “the baby needs mother’s feeling self. The object that is hostile to projective identification as a method of communication damages the capacity to communicate.” Another reason a patient is a patient in Bion’s (1994) view is that he is seeking an object to project into. A patient of mine recently said “thank God I killed myself off psychically so I would have a chance in therapy to regain parts of me I have lost.” Bion greatly values projection where something of the patient is placed in the analyst – a patient attempting to repair his seeking capacity that ended up in disaster. Bion views himself as a receiver – as a container. He wants to give the patient the freedom to let things come up from the unconscious.

Bion (1970) envisions the psychoanalytic attitude as freedom from memory, desire and understanding. He is not against these attitudes per se, but only if they interfere with the open space for exploration and evolvement between patient and analyst. He opts for a faith in O. O (1965) represents the realness of anything. Eigen (1998) writes “O is inaccessible, unknowable, yet nothing is more accessible, since O is everywhere and everything. Nothing is more threatening or nourishing than the realness of anything, any O. Resistance is resistance to O. The problem of building tolerance for reality is basic for Bion. Lying, illusion and falsehood help regulate the dosage of O that is bearable.”

Bion partly describes faith as a stripping away of mind . . . he relates this radical openness to Freud’s free floating-attention so that intuition of psychic reality builds.

Bions’ binocular vision has “a force that continues after . . . it destroys existence, time and space (1965) with its counterpart a faith in the infinite of O. On the one side, there is faith in the emotional truth or, on the other side a force that destroys existence, time and space. I believe Bion finally is for a primary of opening over oblivion. Bion (1980) writes, “so few people think that it is important to be introduced to themselves, but the one partner the patient can never get rid of while that patient is alive is himself.”

Susan Kavaler-Adler’s description of her work with Ms. A in the Compulsion to Create is on the same wave length as Bion. In Bion’s terms how does one experience and represent the lack of “no-thing.” Kavaler-Adler early on says that her patient would need containment and contact. Adler relates Ms. A. was overwhelmed with the pain of loneliness. She states (1993) “this pain was raw and open since her rage was too great for her to contain . . . she related agonized feelings of total emptiness, expressing a wish for a quick and painless form of suicide “to get rid of the pain.” Bion postulates the most primitive experience is governed by Beta elements or raw elements of emotional experiences. They lend themselves on to projective identification. Those elements are projected into the breast. It is the mother’s-analyst’s response to the infant’s-patient’s projections which gives sense and meaning to the infant’s-patient’s experience. In Bion’s terms, this is alpha function. The beta elements are transformed into alpha elements and meaning. Alpha function receives, contains and processes the raw beta emotional experiences into dreams and myths, fantasies, emotions and awareness of needs.

Kavaler-Adler (1993) states, “I used myself as an auxiliary ego, a holding and containing object . . . each time that I subsequently interpreted her projections, actually projective identifications, Ms. A. heard me with increasing clarity.” What a miracle that the person gets another chance to be seen, heard and understood via projective identification in the felt presence of the analyst. Kavaler-Adler (1993) writes further about the patient’s evolution. “It unfolded slowly as Ms. A allowed herself to feel and respond to my presence, thereby opening up an overall reparative mourning process.”

Adler discriminates with Ms. A. the mournful suffering from masochistic suffering. She writes (1993) “closed to feeling the genuine affects of her pain, she was also closed to being interpersonally touched by another.” Bion (1970) also writes about patients who feel pain but will not suffer it and so cannot be said to discover it. Kavaler-Adler states “Ms. A. finally felt the grief of her own hatred towards her parents.” The hate in Bion’s terms may be the no emotion to thwart the loss of the ‘no thing’. Ms. A. finally acknowledges, “It’s really hard for me to face reality!” In Bion’s terms a resistance to O and the emotional truth is acknowledged. Adler writes (1993) “She discovered that facing loss and accepting limits were preferable to holding an illusion of surpassing all needs for others with an image. No image, Ms. A. realized could save her from feeling empty and alone.” Bion would concur.

In therapy and in life one needs to build a tolerance for ‘feeling’ states. Bion (1970) little by little, the more one can tolerate feeling states, the more one can build a capacity for one’s felt deficit. A patient of mine was amazed he didn’t die from experiencing his own feelings. On some level it may be that patients are fearful what would die is the destructive and demonic force which saves one for a time from experiencing one’s experience.

“It’s the human dilemma and human tragedy that each of us in our own way have to face absence, loss and the “no-thing.” We also are never enough for ourselves. There is always more; desire is infinite. There always will be something we don’t have, some gap and absence to ourselves. One finds ways to tolerate the horrific absence and “no-thing.” The addictive personality is a testament to this ability in human beings to tolerate the horrific, by evacuating the horror of absence and loss.” Lifschitz (1997)

Susan Kavaler-Adler addresses this psychic evacuation by focusing on the compulsion to create and utilization of a demon lover to enhance the addiction. Her work brings to light another addiction which is to creativity. Her focus on this particular addiction is itself creative, since one doesn’t usually think of creativity as an addiction. Her work is original and a major help and value to analysts and the analytic process.

Her work on the demon lover brings to mind James Grotstein’s (1979) statement that, “We as analysts are at bottom I believe exorcists of internal demons whose dark contagions have long awaited our arrival. We are to be the deliverers of this diabolic toxin by containing it.

It is our analytic capacity to contain and understand transference and to interpret it that renders us exorcists of a rare breed.”

References

Bion, W/R/ (1965) Transformation, London: William Heinemann
(New York: J. Aronson, 1983)
(1970), Attention and Interpretation, London: Tavistock Publications
(New York: J. Aronson, 1983)
(1980), Bion in New York and Sao Paulo, Strathelyde: Clunie Press
(1994), Cogitations, ed F. Bion, London: Karnac Books
Eigen, M (1993), The Electrified Tightrope, “The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion” originally published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis v. 62 pp, 413-433, 1981
(1996), Psychic Deadness, Northvale, New Jersey: J. Aronson
(1998), The Psychoanalytic Mystic, Binghamton, New York: Eff Publishers
(1999), Ongoing Seminar on Bion

Grotstein, J.S. (1979). Demoniacal Possession, Splitting, and the Torment of Joy. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 15:407-455.

Kavaler-Adler, S. (1993), The Compulsion to Create, New York: Routledge

Lifschitz, M. (1997) Unpublished Paper: Constructing a Psychology of Addiction from Winnicott’s “Absence” and Bion’s “No Thing” presented at the International Centennial Conference on Bion in Turin, Italy.

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