ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the meaning of philosophical and psychoanalytic thoughts on toleration, and discusses their significance in Bion’s psychology and clinical practice. It addresses these concepts to Wilfred Bion’s notes on thinking, exploration of experience, the expansion of mental pain to emotional suffering, and to concepts and thoughts about the analytic relationship. Bion acknowledged his indebtedness to Freud, which he told Andre Green directly. A painful emotional experience may activate an attempt either to evade or to modify the pain according to one’s capacity to tolerate frustration. Evasion removes the pain through a belief in one’s own omniscience, while modification indicates a process of learning through mental work rather than the possession of total knowledge. Bion is recommending direct dialogue in a spirit of tolerance as the essential relationship in psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Voltaire and Karl Popper, Bion believed that psychoanalytic relationship is based on enhancing reciprocal toleration.
