Bion and Buddhism

This thesis takes the form of a PhD by articles. There have been several attempts during the past five decades to indicate the connections between Bion and Buddhism. This project foregrounds the need to research the connection between ‘Bion and Buddhism’ in more depth. The three articles forming my PhD are named (1) ‘Wilfred Bion’s Annotations in the Way of Zen: an Investigation into his practical encounters with Buddhist ideas’; (2) ‘A comparison between two methods of dealing with desire: Bion’s “no memory no desire” and Buddhist “bare attention” mindfulness meditation’; and (3) ‘A comparison between Paul Cooper and Mark Epstein’s ideas and clinical applications of Buddhist concentration (Samadhi), mindfulness (Vipassana) meditative stances in relation to Bionian and other psychoanalytic thoughts and practices’. In the first article, I (Zhang, 2019) provide concrete evidence of Bion’s deep interest in Zen Buddhism by analysing the annotations and underlinings in his personal copy of Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen. It demonstrates five main thematic strands to Bion’s interest in Buddhism as exemplified in his reading of this text: the ‘Four Noble Truths’; conventional knowledge versus spontaneity; non-verbal communication; ‘no memory no desire’; and ‘O’. In the second article, I focus on Bion’s concept of ‘no memory no desire’ and argue that although Bion urges for the elimination of memory and desire, the very process of retaining a ‘bare’ or minimal awareness of such desires – as advocated in certain Buddhist approaches – could generate beneficial intuitions that can provide the psychoanalyst with a fresh angle with which to examine clinical material. The third article, Z concentrates on a systematic review and comparison of the actions taken by Mark Epstein and Paul Cooper to develop specific attentional states within the field of psychoanalysis and Buddhist meditation, in the hope of finding attentional strategies that are therapeutically beneficial for relieving the pain and suffering of the patient. This PhD seeks to provide clear evidence of Buddhist influence on Bion’s psychoanalytic thinking, and it further pinpoints the clinical benefits of attentional states derived from combining Buddhist meditation, Bion’s clinical thinking and other clinical ideas in psychoanalysis.