Drawing a Blank: Bion Speaking on Chinese Writing

Abstract:Wilfred Bion briefly discussed Chinese writing some dozen times, attributing to it various counter-intuitive features. A review of these passages suggests they were part of Bion's larger effort to evoke the challenges of bridging communication gaps with patients, where Bion held that the very means of communication itself was at issue. Chinese also helped evoke a sense of mystery in listeners who, like Bion, knew no Chinese. The main source of Bion's Sinology, an influential 1908 essay by Ernest Fenollosa, was broadly discredited by the 1950's, yet Bion propounded it in five countries through the 1970's. Psychoanalysis, not linguistics, was his subject as he used a mystifying intellectual fantasy (of a Chinese cognitive Other) to discuss incomprehension—a state of unknowing common to clinical impasse and to a philosophical mindset. That Bion induced (deliberately or not) a receptively confused mental state in listeners as he discussed written Chinese, is consistent with discerning observations of Bion's presentations by Leo Rangel and Donald Meltzer. Bion's claims about Chinese are largely false; more interestingly, they are largely incoherent, yet he used them again and again. That they have evaded critical scrutiny these fifty years may be due to the same effects they produced in performance.