Wilfred Bion versus Jacques Lacan

Key in Bion's work seems to be the need of people to express what would become a "nameless dread" if it were to remain outside of the field of society and specifically, socially rendered intelligiblity. Bion's is a dualistic paradigm of the mind, just as Lacan's is, but there is much more of a direct metaphysical continuity between Bion's "unconscious" and the articulate, socially structured mind, than there is with regard to Lacan's viewpoint. For Bion, the unconscious is experiential reality that hasn't been articulated. Indeed, the unconscious can never be fully articulated because it is multidimensional (has, in effect, more dimensions to it than we can simultaneously process with our rational minds). Articulation, therefore, is always a process of simplifying (indeed, oversimplifying for the sake of managing) that which is irreducibly complex. From my reading of Lacan, he seems to be inclined to the view that there is a complete transition from the prearticulate level of the infant's experience of the world, to the articulate social interpretation of the experience. His is a more complete mind-body dualism -- idealising a separation of the rational from the irrational aspects of experience, in a way that is designed to be practically impossible (and thus makes place for the Catholicism of "sin" as an automatic part of the human experience, since we must all fall short of the Ideal.)

But for Bion, the unconscious is the catchment system of experiential reality, and the work to be done is in the further interpretation -- the actually simplifying -- of memory, in order to make it manageable, and to reduce the feeling of "nameless dread" (as it were, by giving the dread a name and a social context and meaning). The naming of the "nameless dread" is the social contextualisation of it, by giving it an objectively recognised form (in words) and/or intersubjectively recognised form (in the moment of the communication of it). This is like opening the floodgates to allow the water to go through the wall of the dam. (Actually this is not Bion's analogy at all, but mine. Bion's is that the mother of the infant initially is the one who acts to "contain" or hold the inarticulate emotions of the child, and thus she gives social form and shape to them. My analogy focuses on the production of this "nameless dread" as if it were to occur outside of a defined social context, whereas Bion shows the way in which this "nameless dread" is generally diverted towards becoming meaningful social content.)

But we can see the role of the artist in all of this -- to convert nameless dread into something that is socially meaningful. Thus the interpretive movement between the "paranoid-schizoid position" of disintegrated self and inarticulated experience towards the "depressive position" (of simplified and linguistically reduced meanings, which, nonetheless "make sense" socially).

The Bion paradigm is also shamanistic: the subject mediates between the multidimensional space of the unconscious field (in some senses the "spirit world") and everyday, limited three-dimensional reality, which can be articulated and can therefore be expressed rationally.