Neville Symington Memorial
Bion in Mexico 2022
Jeffrey L. Eaton, MA, FIPA
It is my honor to have been asked to say a few words in remembrance of Neville Symington.
Many of you will have known Neville personally, or heard him speak at international meetings, or read one or more of his many books or articles. For those who did not know him, I hope to give some sense of the man and I will include some voices of others who knew him.
Neville was born in Portugal. He was educated in England, first as a Priest and then later as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. He taught for some time at The Tavistock, in London. He moved with his wife Joan, also a widely respected psychoanalyst, to Australia in 1985 and together they were instrumental in the development of psychoanalysis down under.
Many of Neville’s books are well known. For example, The Analytic Experience, Narcissism: A New Theory, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, and A Pattern of Madness. He wrote many more interesting books; I will not name them all. Additionally, there are many articles and chapters in edited books. Neville has also written poetry, a novel, and what he called “an emotional autobiography” titled A Different Path. In it, he describes in detail his early years, his complex relationships with his parents, his experience as a Priest in the east end of London, and much more about his inner world and its formation. I think he was probably inspired by Bion’s Long Weekend and All My Sins Remembered.
Neville was a thoughtful, intuitive, curious, generous, creative, complex man.
Here is a story to give a little glimpse of Neville. Many years ago, Neville was invited to Seattle, WA, where I live, to give a series of lectures. One of the lectures was called “The Personal Mystery of Being”. I was asked to be a discussant for the meeting. I liked the paper very much. In the paper, Neville was a very good storyteller. I think Neville appreciated that story telling is a large part of what makes us human. For thousands of years the wisdom of individuals and groups has been passed from body to body, mouth to ear, mind to mind, through the song and dance rhythms of telling stories.
Neville cared about experience, the intimacy of discovering and articulating and sharing experiences. In “The Personal Mystery of Being” Neville emphasizes the impact of his college philosophy teacher, a man named “George”. He evokes the tangible presence of George’s sensibility, including his North Country accent and values. Neville described George as “talking from his soul”. I was looking forward to the meeting.
After the moderator had introduced Neville, Neville made the following statement: “I should like to make it clear to the audience that I instructed the organizers that no discussant was necessary for this lecture. In fact, I expressed my preference that there be no discussant. However, in their wisdom, they have provided one. I will be interested to hear what he will have to say”. Luckily, Neville appreciated my discussion, and this created a positive link between us.
I wondered why Neville had said what he said at the beginning of the meeting. Eventually, I understood that Neville did not want any intermediary imposed between his communication and the opportunity for each person to respond in their own unique and spontaneous way.
The novelist Henry James once said that we must have the courage to speak from our own perceptions. Perceptions, according to James, are different from opinions or beliefs. James wrote that “there is a whole side of our perceptive apparatus that we in fact neglect”. This is a sentence that Neville might have written and certainly would have endorsed.
Neville was a model of “saying what you think”. He valorized personal experience. One aspect of getting in touch with personal experience involves eschewing jargon. Neville favored using clear, simple, direct language. He might say “why talk about libido when you can talk about energy, or movement, or desire”. Why talk about transference when you can describe “a mistaken belief about someone imposed upon the moment”. He felt that it was important to perceive the unconscious patterns coloring a patient’s picture of the world and to try to find ordinary language to describe that experience.
Neville’s psychoanalytic writing is at once personal and deeply philosophical. The same was true about him as a person. His care for philosophy is an important dimension of his work because it places psychoanalytic experience in a larger, richer, multidimensional context. Neville was a deeply curious person. He was, in this way, like Bion. He was not interested in repeating conventional forms. He was always seeking a more personal voice, a greater expression of authenticity. He wanted clarity in expressing the intimacy and ephemeral nature of inner realization and transformation. Words mattered to him. He was very interested in the link between language and reality.
One evening Neville was visiting us for dinner. We were all talking together in our living room and my wife got up to check on the food she was cooking. I poured Neville another glass of wine. He said, “You know, you really are quite fortunate. It does not appear that either you or your wife feel a need to control each other. That is quite uncommon in my experience.” At first, I felt a bit startled by this affirmation. As we continued to talk, I started to feel that Neville’s remark was, perhaps unconsciously, his way of saying that he felt safe and relaxed in a foreign home.
Neville deeply relished genuine conversations; conversations that were alive, where a person disclosed their own lived experience, not just conventional attitudes. I think he felt that in genuine conversation we not only discover the other, but through contact with another, and especially their differences, we discover ourselves more fully.
Neville’s son David paid homage to his father in the eulogy he gave at Neville’s funeral in 2019. David writes:
When I was young, some of my vivid memories are of times Dad was literally trying to show me how big the universe was. When I was a small boy, Dad bought two things for the house: a microscope and a telescope. They were never used as much as he probably intended. But I remember happy weekends spent looking at tiny insects; or trying to find Jupiter’s moons. What I remember more about those moments than anything else was his infectious enthusiasm and this sense that as we looked at some miniscule arachnid or distant galaxy, we might really discover or realize something new: something that no one had thought about or seen before. In later life, the telescope and microscope were put away. Their role was replaced by conversation…the world always seemed bigger and richer after those conversations.
Most of you probably know the book The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion written by Neville and his wife Joan and published in 1996. I think Neville continued to work through and personalize the impact of Bion’s influence for the remainder of his life. Perhaps a bit like Winnicott, Neville needed to find his own words to make psychoanalytic concepts real and alive to him. This aspect of his writing might have frustrated some people, but I can see the benefits of it. It allows a generous reader to approach an experience from a new angle, to get a different point of view, to be jarred out of the comfortable habits of familiar expectations.
One of the themes of Bion’s work that I think was particularly compelling to Neville was the relationship between the sensuous and non-sensuous aspects of experience and reality. The Italian novelist Umberto Eco writes:
There are non-material forces, which cannot be measured precisely, but which nonetheless carry weight…we are surrounded by their intangible powers…
This is a theme that is very important in Neville’s work. You can trace the development of his interest in the importance of non-material mental actions through many of his books. Neville introduced different words to describe the importance of mental actions, including the idea of “a vital realization’. Neville writes:
What we know is that a combination of inner acts with the external catalyst brings about this transition from blindness to wakefulness and from inert reality to vital realization. I call this new state of affairs vital realization because the individual has, through an inner act, created a new relation to reality. What has been created is a personal emotional relation to an aspect of reality.
Neville posits that change happens when the intangible ephemeral “weight” of certain kinds of mental actions or events are recognized and realized. Vital realizations sponsor transformations both within the self and between persons. It is this realm that Neville properly, in my view, emphasizes as the true concern of psychoanalytic investigation.
Another example of personalization was the idea that Neville called “the life giver” in his book Narcissism: A New Theory. This idea helped me to appreciate more deeply what Klein called a “good object” as a vitalizing life-giving process. The main characteristic of this process is the achievement of recognizing emotional significance within one’s own experience. This process involves an ongoing generative interaction between a person’s capacity for selective attention and the complex interplay of internal and external worlds. When one turns consciously or unconsciously to the life giver as a force, one is embracing and protecting the process of symbolization and meaning making despite all the other forces within and around that can disrupt or threaten to destroy meaning.
As part of preparing these remarks I asked some colleagues who knew Neville well if they would contribute some reflections. Louise Hird is a Training Analyst at the Sydney Institute, in Australia, and Jeanne Magagna, is a Senior Child Psychotherapist in London.
Louise writes:
Neville had a fundamental love of learning and I believe that it was this love… that forged his exploration of human experience in great depth. He shared this with us in his many creative offerings—the analyst’s act of freedom as an agent of change; know yourself and be healed; change through person to person contact; waking from dogmatic slumber, and transference interpretation as a cataract operation.
Louise continues:
Mostly, when I think of Neville now, I remember his magnificent smile—it was the most welcoming of smiles, and his irreverent sense of humor. I remember his creativity and intellectual freedom, he was truly an original thinker. first and foremost… he was always ready to take his mind along new paths with me…
Jeanne Magagna expresses appreciation for the freedom of Neville’s openness of mind. She writes:
Neville was a missionary, really. Trying to find the most truthful way of being with a patient without any stereotyped ways of being with him or her… and trying to encourage us to do the same. In many ways I think Neville’s mind was flying “beyond conventions” but within the psychoanalytic discourse of creating an inner space where new thoughts can emerge”.
There is probably not enough encouragement for the difficulty and necessity of creating a welcoming space for the thought in search of a thinker. Neville kept trying to point out this space and to help it stay open. He was keenly attuned to the complexity of becoming a person. I find it very helpful how Neville emphasized “waking to inner communication”. In some of his writings he calls this “a vital realization” and links this kind of inner event to the therapeutic action of analytic conversation.
From Neville I learned that you can and do realize many things over time. You must learn to pay attention to your own experience and value it. That’s what waking to inner communication means. You wake up to a communication happening within yourself about your own experience. Such internal mental events and even inner conversations matter. They are the stuff of learning and growth. It is important to value how you are changed by your own emotional experiences. It is only from this starting point that we can then ascribe meaning to an experience and discover the deeper more mysterious sources of creativity.
Taking the risk to sincerely share experience, generative creative conversations become possible. Neville emphasized the link between creativity and conversation. He embodied it under the best circumstances. I will continue to recall fondly how spaces of expressive freedom could unexpectedly open and moments of discovery could be shared together.
Neville was searching I think to embody what Bion called a language of achievement. His example created generative paths to continue to explore and develop.
Bion in Mexico 2022
Jeffrey L. Eaton, MA, FIPA
It is my honor to have been asked to say a few words in remembrance of Neville Symington.
Many of you will have known Neville personally, or heard him speak at international meetings, or read one or more of his many books or articles. For those who did not know him, I hope to give some sense of the man and I will include some voices of others who knew him.
Neville was born in Portugal. He was educated in England, first as a Priest and then later as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. He taught for some time at The Tavistock, in London. He moved with his wife Joan, also a widely respected psychoanalyst, to Australia in 1985 and together they were instrumental in the development of psychoanalysis down under.
Many of Neville’s books are well known. For example, The Analytic Experience, Narcissism: A New Theory, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, and A Pattern of Madness. He wrote many more interesting books; I will not name them all. Additionally, there are many articles and chapters in edited books. Neville has also written poetry, a novel, and what he called “an emotional autobiography” titled A Different Path. In it, he describes in detail his early years, his complex relationships with his parents, his experience as a Priest in the east end of London, and much more about his inner world and its formation. I think he was probably inspired by Bion’s Long Weekend and All My Sins Remembered.
Neville was a thoughtful, intuitive, curious, generous, creative, complex man.
Here is a story to give a little glimpse of Neville. Many years ago, Neville was invited to Seattle, WA, where I live, to give a series of lectures. One of the lectures was called “The Personal Mystery of Being”. I was asked to be a discussant for the meeting. I liked the paper very much. In the paper, Neville was a very good storyteller. I think Neville appreciated that story telling is a large part of what makes us human. For thousands of years the wisdom of individuals and groups has been passed from body to body, mouth to ear, mind to mind, through the song and dance rhythms of telling stories.
Neville cared about experience, the intimacy of discovering and articulating and sharing experiences. In “The Personal Mystery of Being” Neville emphasizes the impact of his college philosophy teacher, a man named “George”. He evokes the tangible presence of George’s sensibility, including his North Country accent and values. Neville described George as “talking from his soul”. I was looking forward to the meeting.
After the moderator had introduced Neville, Neville made the following statement: “I should like to make it clear to the audience that I instructed the organizers that no discussant was necessary for this lecture. In fact, I expressed my preference that there be no discussant. However, in their wisdom, they have provided one. I will be interested to hear what he will have to say”. Luckily, Neville appreciated my discussion, and this created a positive link between us.
I wondered why Neville had said what he said at the beginning of the meeting. Eventually, I understood that Neville did not want any intermediary imposed between his communication and the opportunity for each person to respond in their own unique and spontaneous way.
The novelist Henry James once said that we must have the courage to speak from our own perceptions. Perceptions, according to James, are different from opinions or beliefs. James wrote that “there is a whole side of our perceptive apparatus that we in fact neglect”. This is a sentence that Neville might have written and certainly would have endorsed.
Neville was a model of “saying what you think”. He valorized personal experience. One aspect of getting in touch with personal experience involves eschewing jargon. Neville favored using clear, simple, direct language. He might say “why talk about libido when you can talk about energy, or movement, or desire”. Why talk about transference when you can describe “a mistaken belief about someone imposed upon the moment”. He felt that it was important to perceive the unconscious patterns coloring a patient’s picture of the world and to try to find ordinary language to describe that experience.
Neville’s psychoanalytic writing is at once personal and deeply philosophical. The same was true about him as a person. His care for philosophy is an important dimension of his work because it places psychoanalytic experience in a larger, richer, multidimensional context. Neville was a deeply curious person. He was, in this way, like Bion. He was not interested in repeating conventional forms. He was always seeking a more personal voice, a greater expression of authenticity. He wanted clarity in expressing the intimacy and ephemeral nature of inner realization and transformation. Words mattered to him. He was very interested in the link between language and reality.
One evening Neville was visiting us for dinner. We were all talking together in our living room and my wife got up to check on the food she was cooking. I poured Neville another glass of wine. He said, “You know, you really are quite fortunate. It does not appear that either you or your wife feel a need to control each other. That is quite uncommon in my experience.” At first, I felt a bit startled by this affirmation. As we continued to talk, I started to feel that Neville’s remark was, perhaps unconsciously, his way of saying that he felt safe and relaxed in a foreign home.
Neville deeply relished genuine conversations; conversations that were alive, where a person disclosed their own lived experience, not just conventional attitudes. I think he felt that in genuine conversation we not only discover the other, but through contact with another, and especially their differences, we discover ourselves more fully.
Neville’s son David paid homage to his father in the eulogy he gave at Neville’s funeral in 2019. David writes:
When I was young, some of my vivid memories are of times Dad was literally trying to show me how big the universe was. When I was a small boy, Dad bought two things for the house: a microscope and a telescope. They were never used as much as he probably intended. But I remember happy weekends spent looking at tiny insects; or trying to find Jupiter’s moons. What I remember more about those moments than anything else was his infectious enthusiasm and this sense that as we looked at some miniscule arachnid or distant galaxy, we might really discover or realize something new: something that no one had thought about or seen before. In later life, the telescope and microscope were put away. Their role was replaced by conversation…the world always seemed bigger and richer after those conversations.
Most of you probably know the book The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion written by Neville and his wife Joan and published in 1996. I think Neville continued to work through and personalize the impact of Bion’s influence for the remainder of his life. Perhaps a bit like Winnicott, Neville needed to find his own words to make psychoanalytic concepts real and alive to him. This aspect of his writing might have frustrated some people, but I can see the benefits of it. It allows a generous reader to approach an experience from a new angle, to get a different point of view, to be jarred out of the comfortable habits of familiar expectations.
One of the themes of Bion’s work that I think was particularly compelling to Neville was the relationship between the sensuous and non-sensuous aspects of experience and reality. The Italian novelist Umberto Eco writes:
There are non-material forces, which cannot be measured precisely, but which nonetheless carry weight…we are surrounded by their intangible powers…
This is a theme that is very important in Neville’s work. You can trace the development of his interest in the importance of non-material mental actions through many of his books. Neville introduced different words to describe the importance of mental actions, including the idea of “a vital realization’. Neville writes:
What we know is that a combination of inner acts with the external catalyst brings about this transition from blindness to wakefulness and from inert reality to vital realization. I call this new state of affairs vital realization because the individual has, through an inner act, created a new relation to reality. What has been created is a personal emotional relation to an aspect of reality.
Neville posits that change happens when the intangible ephemeral “weight” of certain kinds of mental actions or events are recognized and realized. Vital realizations sponsor transformations both within the self and between persons. It is this realm that Neville properly, in my view, emphasizes as the true concern of psychoanalytic investigation.
Another example of personalization was the idea that Neville called “the life giver” in his book Narcissism: A New Theory. This idea helped me to appreciate more deeply what Klein called a “good object” as a vitalizing life-giving process. The main characteristic of this process is the achievement of recognizing emotional significance within one’s own experience. This process involves an ongoing generative interaction between a person’s capacity for selective attention and the complex interplay of internal and external worlds. When one turns consciously or unconsciously to the life giver as a force, one is embracing and protecting the process of symbolization and meaning making despite all the other forces within and around that can disrupt or threaten to destroy meaning.
As part of preparing these remarks I asked some colleagues who knew Neville well if they would contribute some reflections. Louise Hird is a Training Analyst at the Sydney Institute, in Australia, and Jeanne Magagna, is a Senior Child Psychotherapist in London.
Louise writes:
Neville had a fundamental love of learning and I believe that it was this love… that forged his exploration of human experience in great depth. He shared this with us in his many creative offerings—the analyst’s act of freedom as an agent of change; know yourself and be healed; change through person to person contact; waking from dogmatic slumber, and transference interpretation as a cataract operation.
Louise continues:
Mostly, when I think of Neville now, I remember his magnificent smile—it was the most welcoming of smiles, and his irreverent sense of humor. I remember his creativity and intellectual freedom, he was truly an original thinker. first and foremost… he was always ready to take his mind along new paths with me…
Jeanne Magagna expresses appreciation for the freedom of Neville’s openness of mind. She writes:
Neville was a missionary, really. Trying to find the most truthful way of being with a patient without any stereotyped ways of being with him or her… and trying to encourage us to do the same. In many ways I think Neville’s mind was flying “beyond conventions” but within the psychoanalytic discourse of creating an inner space where new thoughts can emerge”.
There is probably not enough encouragement for the difficulty and necessity of creating a welcoming space for the thought in search of a thinker. Neville kept trying to point out this space and to help it stay open. He was keenly attuned to the complexity of becoming a person. I find it very helpful how Neville emphasized “waking to inner communication”. In some of his writings he calls this “a vital realization” and links this kind of inner event to the therapeutic action of analytic conversation.
From Neville I learned that you can and do realize many things over time. You must learn to pay attention to your own experience and value it. That’s what waking to inner communication means. You wake up to a communication happening within yourself about your own experience. Such internal mental events and even inner conversations matter. They are the stuff of learning and growth. It is important to value how you are changed by your own emotional experiences. It is only from this starting point that we can then ascribe meaning to an experience and discover the deeper more mysterious sources of creativity.
Taking the risk to sincerely share experience, generative creative conversations become possible. Neville emphasized the link between creativity and conversation. He embodied it under the best circumstances. I will continue to recall fondly how spaces of expressive freedom could unexpectedly open and moments of discovery could be shared together.
Neville was searching I think to embody what Bion called a language of achievement. His example created generative paths to continue to explore and develop.