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Bions Grid: A Tool for Transformation
Marilyn Charles
Abstract: The author explicates the principles underlying Bions Grid in a way that makes them useful for the clinician. The grid represents an attempt to provide a tool by which we might better understand the abstract rules and principles that facilitate understanding1 in the analytic process. Bion believed that content often obscures meaning unless we can move beyond the ostensible meaning in our attempts to understand the complexity of a statement and the uses to which it is being put. For Bion, the grid itself was not so important as the attempt to increase ones powers of observation, intuition, interpretation, and transformation. A clinical illustration is provided in which the grid provides a useful means for facilitating these endeavours.
Key Words: Bion; grid; Klein; myth; truth; lies
Bion left us a rich legacy through his attempts to better understand the psychoanalytic process. One of the tasks that he set himself was to try to set aside content in order to better understand the underlying structures and processes. To this end, he devised an annotation system in which the elements were to have no inherent meaning, so that he could assign meanings to those elements. This move to a formalized, abstract system represented an attempt to dispense with the particulars of content that tend to distract us from noticing essential similarities of form or function. Too much emphasis on content results in a situation similar to that depicted in the tower of Babel story, in which too many languages were being spoken for any real communication to take place.
Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., is in private practice in East Lansing, MI.
*A previous version of this article is being published in French in Le Mouvement Psychanalytique (main title), revue des revues freudiennes (in italics), volume IV, n1, 2002, LHarmattan, Paris, pp. 121133.
**The author would like to extend her gratitude to James Grotstein for his illuminating and enriching comments on a previous version of this paper.
1Bion was not fond of the term understanding, believing that it borrowed too heavily from the domain of the senses, and therefore belongs more rightly to K (Knowledge) than to O: the true experience that is really beyond the senses. The only...