Louise Braddock, 'Annihilation anxiety, the death drive, and Bion's theory of thinking'

In this paper I explore the idea of annihilation anxiety as a generic, profound affect lying behind the many clinical types and manifestations of anxiety. The vexed question of the Death drive lies in the background. Kleinian thinkers writing of the mind in the grip of the Death drive have described a canonical phenomenology of depicted or enacted mindlessness. The Death drive is the placeholder name for those forces in the mind which produce this phenomenology. To understand the idea of a destructive force, what its functional relation to anxiety is, and why it should be directed at the thinking capacities of the mind, I suggest we need an account of how the mind grasps its experience of anxiety and why it might under certain conditions be attacked and disabled from doing this. Critically, I look further at Bion’s theory of thinking and what the Kantian inspiration behind it might yield. Bion’s theory has been a powerful organiser of psychoanalytic observation, but the use he made of Kant needs to be more clearly understood. I shall evaluate the Kantian inspiration behind Bion’s theory in the light of Bion’s own critical intention in calling on ideas he drew from philosophy of science. I shall argue that Bion uses Kant’s account of cognition as an ‘as if’ model with which to organise his own clinical theorising. It provides, in Wittgenstein’s words, a ‘new notation’, an opening-up of new ways of seeing old things, and here the theory of thinking has been signally successful. Re-positioning Bion’s theory may allow us to make further progress on the question of how the mind grasps the experience of profound anxiety and what prevails when it cannot do so. To do this I look further at what Bion, borrowing from Kant, might provide us with.