The limits of interpretation. A reading of Bion’s “On Arrogance”

Civitarese, Giuseppe

doi:10.1080/00207578.2020.1827954

Cited by 22 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…My close reading of Bion’s paper comprises three steps. First I question Bion’s decision, in the paper’s opening move, to generalize his claims beyond the patient at hand to “a certain class of patient.” This has caused “On Arrogance” to be read as the “discovery” of a “new syndrome” (see Civitarese 2020), rather than a generalization from what may have been no more than a single case. 9 Indeed, the clinical outcome in the paper may even have been an artifact of Bion’s own remote, impersonal demeanor, itself legible as post-traumatic (Hinshelwood 2014).…”

Section: Aims and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bion infers an “obstructive object” in the patient, while his paper’s language suggests that this internalized analyst is not (only) a transferential projection, but a match for the real analyst who refuses the patient’s needs for containment in a working therapeutic alliance. Thus the “obstructive object” is another element in what has been called the “play of mirrors” (Civitarese 2020) that Bion’s “On Arrogance” employs to ambiguate what it must.…”

Section: Unconscious Autobiography In Bion’s Use Of Sophoclesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bion tells us he is the obstruction blocking the patient’s projections: “From his feelings about me when I was identified with the obstructive object, I was able to deduce that the obstructive object [Bion] was curious about him, but [Bion] could not stand being the receptacle for parts of his personality and accordingly made destructive and mutilating attacks, largely through varieties of stupidity, upon his capacity for projective identification” (§90). What Civitarese (2020) calls the “hall of mirrors” of “On Arrogance” might also be metaphorized as a rhetorical shell-game of deeds without doers, rather like the “stray” thoughts-without-a-thinker that Bion later discussed in Taming Wild Thoughts (1997). At the rhetorical level, “On Arrogance” describes a patient who uses verbs without nouns, speaking of acts without actors, eliding agency and responsibility—while Bion’s own prose is often striking for just that feature, and nowhere more than here.…”

Section: “Could Not Stand It”: the Failure To Introject The Other’s P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bion at the Crossroads: A Contrarian Reading of “on Arrogance”

Hecht¹

2022

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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In “On Arrogance,” Wilfred Bion made a remarkable claim: “the analyst who is treating an apparently neurotic patient must regard a negative therapeutic response together with the appearance of scattered, unrelated references to curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity as evidence that he is in the presence of a psychological catastrophe with which he will have to deal.” However Bion came to believe this, he sought grounds for it in a reading of Oedipus that seriously distorts that tragedy. Since the clinical outcome in “On Arrogance” appears to be impasse, perhaps even iatrogenic injury, the text’s value is perhaps best consolidated by historicizing its construction through a psychoanalytic lens. Thus, while “On Arrogance” has been canonized as prescriptive for the treatment of difficult patients, it can instead be read as the illuminating trace of a grievously difficult intrapsychic struggle, a personal reckoning that resulted in Bion’s 1958 return to the battlefield at Amiens where he had “died” in the hell of combat forty years earlier. “On Arrogance” thus reflects a prodigious episode of sublimation that proved essential to Bion’s lifelong development as a psychoanalytic writer and thinker.

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Section: Aims and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unconscious Autobiography In Bion’s Use Of Sophoclesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: “Could Not Stand It”: the Failure To Introject The Other’s P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bion at the Crossroads: A Contrarian Reading of “on Arrogance”

Hecht¹

2022

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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“…To assert such a thing is to misrepresent what I am trying to say in my text: namely, that reflecting on the concept of intersubjectivity, also thanks to Husserl, can help us go beyond the I/you split that characterizes the traditional analyst's suspicious listening (Ricoeur 1965), which is sometimes truly dehumanizing. Rather than dwell on this point, I refer readers to my paper on arrogance and the limits of interpretation (Civitarese 2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer" (1929, p. 13). But on this, too, I would refer to my discussion of Oedipus and the will to know (Civitarese 2021).…”

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Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Analytic Process: Reply to Commentaries

Civitarese¹

2021

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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I would like to begin by thanking the anonymous readers of my article and the editors of JAPA for helping me improve it in the evaluation process, and the latter for asking me if I would allow colleagues to comment on it and for me to then respond. I also thank Donna Orange and Lewis Kirshner for their comments. I am honored that such well-known and respected authors have accepted the invitation of the JAPA editors. Since my essay is already long and demanding, I intend to respond to them as briefly as possible and only on the most relevant and controversial issues.A careful reading of my paper would show that I do not use "weak" and "strong" as judgments of merit, but only descriptively, just as I might say "less or more inclusive" with respect to a factor or element X. There are situations in which a weak light is much better than a strong light and vice versa, for instance at the cinema or theater or restaurant, as well as, in analysis, if we think metaphorically of Enlightenment reason. It is no coincidence that one of the sources of inspiration for field theory was an Italian philosophical current called "weak thought" (Vattimo 1981; Vattimo and Rovatti 2010), where the adjective weak is used positively to indicate a modern or postmodern sensibility. The central thesis is the crisis of a "strong" notion of the subject as the repository of knowledge in which there is correspondence between words and things, thus close to an absolute idea of truth. Hence, for example, the "post-metaphysical" idea of "unsaturated interpretation."By the way, the judgment on the strengths and weaknesses of the various models could not be derived from a single element of a metapsychological order. Instead it will be based on the conviction of the community of researchers as to whether or not a model is capable of producing new or more integrated perspectives in the field of observation, the theory

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Bion’s Graph of “In Search of Existence”

Civitarese¹

2021

Am J Psychoanal

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The limits of interpretation. A reading of Bion’s “On Arrogance”

Cited by 22 publications

References 13 publications

Bion at the Crossroads: A Contrarian Reading of “on Arrogance”

Bion at the Crossroads: A Contrarian Reading of “on Arrogance”

Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Analytic Process: Reply to Commentaries

Bion’s Graph of “In Search of Existence”

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