Wilfred Bion, Thinking, and Emotional Experience with Moving Images Being Embedded

Wilfred Bion?s theories of dreaming, of the analytic situation, of reality and everyday life, and even of the contact between the body and the mind offer very different, and highly fruitful, perspectives on lived experience. Yet very little of his work has entered the field of visual culture, especially film and media studies. Kelli Fuery offers an engaging overview of Bion?s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis- his theory of thinking- and demonstrates its relevance for why we watch moving images.

Bion?s theory of thinking is presented as an alternative model for the examination of how we experience moving images and how they work as tools which we use to help us ?think? emotional experience. ?Being Embedded? is a term used to identify and acknowledge the link between thinking and emotional experience within the lived reception of cinema. It is a concept that everyone can speak to as already knowing, already having felt it - being embedded is at the core of lived and thinking experience. This book offers a return to psychoanalytic theory within moving image studies, contributing to the recent works that have explored object relations psychoanalysis within visual culture (specifically the writings of Klein and Winnicott), but differs in its reference and examination of previously overlooked, but highly pivotal, thinkers such as Bion, Bollas and Ogden. A theorization of thinking as an affective structure within moving image experience provides a fresh avenue for psychoanalytic theory within visual culture.

Wilfred Bion, Thinking, and Emotional Experience with Moving Images will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars and students of film and media studies, cultural studies and cultural sociology and anthropology, visual culture, media theory, philosophy, and psychosocial studies.

Chapter 1 Introduction

On ‘Being Embedded’

Different Psychoanalytic Thinking and Cognitive Film Studies

Embedded and Embodied: A Relational Distinction

Chapter 2 A Theory of Thinking for Moving Image Experience

Toward a (Meta)Theory of Thinking

From Drive to Feeling: Melanie Klein and Projective Identification

Satisfaction and Frustration: Bion’s Apparatus for Thinking

On the capacity to tolerate frustration

Chapter 3 Wandering Reverie and the Aesthetic Experience of Being Adrift 85

A note on wandering

Wandering as Reverie

Devious Journeying: Reverie and Spectatorship in Walkabout

Reverie as Spacings: The Irregular turning of aesthetic experience

The Affect of Spacing in Don’t Look Now

Aimless Passing: Being Embedded through Dreaming

Chapter 4 Metaphor, the Analytic Field, and the Embedded Spectator

Metaphor, 1970s Film Theory and Beyond

Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese’s Metaphor within the Analytic Field

Analytic Field Theory and Field Theories of Cinema

The Embedded Spectator

Chapter 5 Group Experience, Collective Memory and Dreaming

Bion’s Experiences in Groups

The Task of the Group

Memory Work and Memory Texts: Force Majeure and Prisons Memory Archive

Immersion and Being Embedded with regard to Groups and Memory

Dreams and Memories

The relevance of Bion’s revision on dreaming

Chapter 6 Linking, Intentionality and the Container-Contained

Phenomenology: Experience, Consciousness, Intentionality

Husserlian beginnings and Casebier’s ‘in-between’ qualities

Sobchack’s Reversible Intentionality in Rabbit Proof Fence

Bion and Arendt: Linking, Emotion, and Thought

Cinema as Container-Contained

Container-Contained in Unforgiven

Chapter 7 Transformation: The Idiomatic Encounter and Use of Moving Image as Object

Bion’s Concept of O

The Importance of Invariance in Transformation

Antonioni’s Blow-Up

The Moving Image as Transitional and Transformational Object

An Aesthetic of Being: Westworld

Chapter 8 Being Embedded: Rhizome, Decalcomania and Containment

Reverie as Space and Rhizome

Rhizome

Decalcomania

Negative Capability

Time, Territory, and Surface

Containment

Boyhood

Kelli Fuery is Assistant Professor at Dodge College for Film and Media Arts, Chapman University, USA. She is the author of New Media: Culture and Image (2009) and co-author of Visual Cultures and Critical Theory (2003). She has also published widely on the themes of visual culture, psychoanalysis and critical theory.