Bion, W.R., Cogitations. Edited by Francesca Bion. London: Karnac Books (1992)
Mental health
The man who is mentally healthy is able to gain strength and consolation and the material through which he can achieve mental development through his contact with reality, no matter whether that reality is painful or not. This view may owe its origins to experience in no way metaphysical, but such as might be achieved through failure to admit the existence of a physical hazard to physical progress and the resultant fall. The reciprocal view is that no man can become mentally healthy save by a process of constant search for fact and a determination to eschew any elements, however seductive or pleasurable, that interpose themselves between himself and his environment as it really is. As a psycho-analyst I include the man’s own personality as a part, and a very important part, of his environment. By contrast it may be said that man owes his health, and his capacity for continued health, to his ability to shield himself during his growth as an individual by repeating in his personal life the history of the race’s capacity for self-deception against truth that his mind is not fitted to receive without disaster. Like the earth, he carries with him an atmosphere, albeit a mental one, which shields him from the mental counterpart of the cosmic and other rays at present supposed to be rendered innocuous to men, thanks to the physical atmosphere.
p. 192
[Bion’s copy of The Future of an Illusion (1927c) is heavily annotated. The following passage is written at the end of Chapter II, p. 14. – comment by F. Bion]
Reading this chapter seems to show the extent to which the advance of psycho-analysis renders its own formulation obsolete. Freud has for the foundation of his discussion, as its realization, his own conjectures on the nature of the civilization. He then has theories about the conjectures. Because the conjectures are those of a man of genius, they command attention. But there is no recognition of the status of the conjectures or of the status of theories about conjectures. In psycho-analysis it is assumed that a theory is false if it does not seem to minister to the ‘good’ of the majority of mankind. And it is a commonplace idea of good. The whole idea of ‘cure’, of therapeutic activity, remains unscrutinized. It is largely determined by the expectations of the patient though this is questioned in good analysis (as I know it). But in nuclear physics a theory is considered to be good if it aids the construction of a bomb that destroys Hiroshima. Too much of the thinking about psycho-analysis precludes the possibility of regarding as good a theory that would destroy the individual or the group. Yet there will never be a scientific scrutiny of analytic theories until it includes critical appraisal of a theory that by its very soundness could lead to a destruction of mental stability, e.g. a theory that increased memory and desire to a point where they rendered sanity impossible.
p. 378