Learning from Experience

by Wilfred R. Bion

In this book Bion describes his use of the term "alpha-function" to conceptualize how the data of emotional experience is processed and digested. This includes his thinking on "contact barriers" and the bearing of "projective identification" on the genesis of thought.

A Jason Aronson Book

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Nonfiction

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

Reviews

[Jamey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a wasteland of cold abstraction, produced by a deeply traumatized person as his picture of fundamental psychic reality. Heartbreakingly empty of any warmth or texture, Learning from Experience is a daytrip to the dark side of the moon. The prose in Bion's memoir The Long Weekend is exquisite--he could write wonderfully when he wanted to. That's why the militantly bad writing in the four books from 1960-1970 (including Learning from Experience) is so diagnostic of a sustained, manic attack on human subjectivity, beauty, and understanding. Emulate this overrated tyrant at your peril.

Also: do not fall for the all-too-common claim that Bion’s four epistemological books are “difficult, but worth it.” They are not difficult—they are slow, murky, schizoid, and ugly, but not especially difficult—and they are not worth it. Bionism is a cult, and its devotees are invested in a subculture of reverence, hagiography, and mystification. Adorno is difficult, but worth it. Kant is difficult, but worth it. Bion is, for the most part, full of shit, and his disciples are even more so. Caveat emptor.

[Tylor Lovins · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this work, Bion is concerned with the functions and factors that yield “learning from experience.”

Here you will find his introductory ideas about alpha function, beta elements and beta screen, alpha elements and contact barrier, as well as L, H, and K.

This book is remarkable for its brevity (about 100 pages with over 25 chapters) and absolute logical clarity. There is, as it were, no fat on the bones. The form of the book, how he presents the ideas, essentially coincides with how he perceives the origination and use of abstraction and concretization in thinking as well as the development of scientific deductive systems. You will find that in his explanation of the ideas he shows how they work in thinking itself.

I have never read a book like this, and I plan to read it again soon. This is a book that lends itself to several very close readings. It is a work of pure genius.

[sean]

Despite putting off reading the second half of this (very) short book for more than a month while I finished my final papers... I think I liked it.

Obviously it's not fun... there's no jokes.... but it is a serious engagement with metapsychology of a caliber that I've only encountered (outside of Freud) in Lacan. Bion offers here a much-needed expansion of the development of thought specifically springing from Freud's "...Two Principles..." and his Project. It almost makes me think that perhaps there is something salvageable in Klein or the object-relational project as a whole. That being said, it is enormously British in a philosophy of mind kind of way and it rests also upon an employment of algebra much less interesting than that of Lacan. Still... I cannot say that this guy wasn't seeking truth or whatever.

[Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult but satisfying read. Provided framework for abstracting and understanding our thoughts and thinking process.

[Mawr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to this short book, I now have a better understanding of container/contained, alpha function/elements, beta elements, L/H/K/-K, etc.

[Leah Ginnivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Bion deals with the origins of thinking ("a procedure for unburdening the psyche of accretions of psychic stimuli"), how learning is established relationally and developmentally, and how we extract models and theories from what happens with us.

This was a very complex, abstract and difficult read, with writing that could have benefited from a brutal edit. For me (without a psychoanalytical grounding, especially in Klein/Freud's work that this book draws on) it required slow reading in small pieces over months with a smarter friend to discuss with. In Bion's words, "obscurities exist because of my inability to make them clearer". Worth it, though.

Some of what I took from this:

- Much of our thinking, feeling and learning takes place on psychic apparatus unsuited to these uses, which perhaps underlies our flailing
- Dreaming is a process happening continually - while we are awake, as well as when asleep, and relegating certain things into the 'dream' of our lives makes consciousness possible
- Mechanistic views of thinking and reasoning about the world are inadequate, because we learn in and through relationships (being contained/containing others), but as adults we are left only with the residue of our learning experiences - psychoanalysis is one way to revisit and re-order
- Certain patterns of mental disturbance/thought disorder have origins in infant-child attachment
- Knowledge (K) is a way of linking experiences. It is a relationship of 'getting to know', and when this relationship is faulty, knowledge/learning is denuded of meaning. It is damaging when we attempt to replace the vulnerability in 'getting to know' with hollow bits of fragmented information about something.

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As alpha-function makes the sense impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious and dream-thought the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up."

Given this clinical picture of disturbed thinking, Bion tries to think about thoughts and thinking and their origins, and finds that the psychotic has a model of thought, even a "theory of knowledge," you could say. . . . Unlike many (most?) analysts who focus on the unconscious, desires, phantasies, wishes, Bion places K (knowing) and even -K on the same level as Love and Hate, finding a proliferation of models, pre-conceptions and conceptions, and tries to trace things back to the moment when unconscious and conscious are separated, and Envy can color all models, blocking abstraction and the movement between general and particular. A difficult text.

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this dense and opaque work, Bion models the insights of his insights to thinking. You grind your way through the confusion and abstraction, catching a glimmer here, a glimpse there. You wonder if you've "got it", realise, frustratingly, you probably haven't, not least because "it" keeps moving and evolving, only then to experience an "a-ha" moment, that makes sense of (part of) "it".

But what's a stake is the very stuff of thought. The mystery of meaning, realised; from the ground up. For those who have read Daniel Stern, the nitty-gritty of RIGs.

[Marina Andronova · Rating 4 out of 5]

С одной стороны, я почерпнула из этой книги несколько весьма и весьма ценных для практики идей. С другой стороны, стиль повествования производит впечатление перегруженного и как будто обрывистого: в некоторых местах возникает вопрос «и что?…» или «а на фига?…» С другой стороны, это можно объяснить моей элементарной невежественностью в области кляйнианской парадигмы. В целом же текст показался мне хорошим объектом!

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

read Bion for a reconceptualisation of the core psychoanalytic ideas using algebraic terminology. the mind, filtering and creating meaning from experience, is described as the alpha-function. images and impressions and memories from daily life are beta-elements, which are evacuated or expelled in mania and psychosis. and the core emotions? H for hate, L for love, and K for knowing. if you engage in self-sabotage you are living in a -K mode. reads like wittgenstein

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leitura difícil, mas rica. Descreve como podemos aprender com a nossa experiência lidando de forma fluida com a nossa atividade emocional, e o que impede que tenhamos uma digestão de nossas experiências, retendo emoções indigestas. Clássico da literatura psicanalítica.

[Ethan · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a staunch orthodox Freudian I found this unnecessary.

[José Bahamondes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siendo un libro confuso y de lenguaje complicado, es segunda vez que lo vuelvo a leer,.extrayendo nuevos elementos y miradas a la teoría de Bion. Una joya.

[EDM · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is supposed to be an 'experience', so expect it to unfold in its unique progression and induce both satisfactory and frustrated feelings in an intentional sequence.

[FiveBooks]

Psychoanalyst Dr David Bell has chosen to discuss Learning From Experience by Wilfred Bion on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject - Psychoanalysis, saying that:

“…He is very seminal to my work. There are three elements in Freud’s thought that deal with what promotes development. The first is overcoming repression of sexual and destructive instincts, the second is allowing the life instinct to dominate the death drive and the third is knowledge, that is, knowledge of the self. ‘Where Id was there Ego shall be,’ he said. Crudely speaking, the Id is the raging primitive passion and the Ego is the voice of reason and reality. Bion brings knowledge into the centre of psychoanalytic scrutiny. What forces, he asks, can interfere with knowledge? He doesn’t mean knowing things, he means the lifelong process of understanding, of coming to know things. He’s a genetic epistemologist – he deals with the development of knowledge.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget did wonderful work on cognitive development but he leaves emotion out entirely. For Bion emotion and knowledge are intimately connected. He links the emotional capacity to develop and know to the capacity to tolerate frustration. If we can hold ourselves in check whilst we endure frustration then we can come to know things. To some extent we are born with the capacity but we are fundamentally influenced by the world in which we develop, and he deals especially with the relationship between mother and baby.

The more the mother can help the baby, intuitively, to tolerate primitive frustrations, the more the baby can develop and internalise this capacity to manage himself. The psychotic patient, for example, has great difficulty in bearing frustration and his capacity for knowledge of the world is replaced by delusions. Freud talks about this in his essay on the principles of mental functioning, in which he talks about the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In order for the reality principle to function man must be able to manage what he describes as disappointment. Bion leans very heavily on Freud but he also brings in Klein and his own work with psychotic patients…”

The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/david...

[Sergey Kochergan]

Detailed explanation of his method of analysis.