“A nephew of mine —he was about five or six at the time— (...) used to tell me his dreams every morning. I remember that, one day, as he was sitting on the floor, I asked him what he had dreamed. Patiently, knowing that I had that hobby, he told me: “Last night I dreamed that I was lost in the forest. I was scared, but I came to a clearing, and there was a white house, made of wood, with a staircase that turned around, and steps arranged like a corridor, and there was also a door, and through that door you came out.” He stopped sharply and added: Tell me, what were you doing in that little house?”
(Jorge Luis Borges, Siete noches [Seven Nights])
This story by Borges belongs to a lecture where he argues that dreams are mankind’s first form of artistic expression. This proposition by a writer, who thought about mankind’s problems, is not far from Bion’s: myths are the common elements in men’s dreams, and consist of a relevant way of thinking which resulted in Homer or the Bible.
There, Borges honors the question of a child that values his dreams and asks his uncle, in his own right, what his hobby consists of. He believes that the character in the dream matches up with his very uncle; evidencing no alteration in thinking, he has a particular view that takes us by surprise. In his paper on emotional turbulence, Bion paints a picture for us. When an adult sees a lark flying and singing, a child sees a sparrow that cannot go up or down, but does make noise[1]. With this double vertex we define a flying object[2] identified in different ways.
When an infant experiences the trauma of birth and is looked after by the women who take care of him, he sees, after all, a world placed in what he will then refer to as ‘above’ and has no other choice but to identify flying objects: gods and heroes that inhabit dreams. Many of these objects were described by Freud, Klein, and Bion himself. The latter would refer to them as realizations of innate pre-conceptions and their developments.
Let us assume that the lark is a dream –that first selected fact which Freud founded psychoanalysis on, and let us see how it can go up or down in the grid. Bion placed Freud’s realization in row C; but he was also capable of conceiving it in row A, with different meanings. However, it might take new significations other than those proposed by these thinkers to understand dreams. Otherwise, psychoanalysis would only survive. Any vertex implies to make a decision in order to both select and name a fact from the turbulence, and this works as a caesura that sets aside unselected facts. Oedipus-Laius had become a pair in inseparable conflict until Bion went beyond the implicit caesura and showed Tiresias as Oedipus’ counterpart. Tiresias offers more than one possible reading. First of all, he is the blind man who cannot see the present but the future, and dissuades arrogant Oedipus. But, moreover, if we do not split him from Oedipus as two entities clearly separate from each other [Tiresias-Oedipus], they become a caesura that allows for a reading of the thoughts and feelings involved in any research, which sets aside other possible choices that have not been found yet. Concerned about the vitality of the analysis, Bion urges us to imitate the attitude of Galileo or Newton, who were regarded as rebels in terms of the standards of their working environments and time, and devoted themselves to looking beyond what Aristotle had looked. Without such attitude, science would not have emerged or moved forward.
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the latency/turbulence in both the practice in the consulting room and the communication between colleagues. We will focus on Bion’s explicit or implicit descriptions of turbulence:
- in his experiences in groups,
- in individual analysis,
- in the development of his way of communicating ideas.
The Turbulence and the Group
Without much ado and furthering the splitting, the lark may become a flock of seagulls that threatens anyone who dares to entertain a thought without a thinker. In a group, a patient who was usually passive made a decision which she soon regretted –she told a dream. “Well, since nobody else is saying anything, I may as well mention my dream. I dreamed that I was on the seashore, and I was going to bathe. There were a lot of seagulls about…There was a good deal more like that. A member of the group: Do you mean that that is all you can remember? Woman: Oh, no, no. But it’s all really rather silly.”[3] The thought without a thinker was “the group” which took over Bion, visible in the dream as the flock of seagulls, though invisible if we look at the six or ten people who make it up and assume that there are six or ten personalities defined by the physical aspect. The group foretells Tiresias. The caesura that silenced the patient and resisted Bion’s proposals consisted of the demand for individual analysis and previously digested knowledge (C or H 2/3). The constant conjunction –“the group”- allowed for a fruitful development. The members of the group could not withstand the presence of that constant conjunction. Bion was part of that same group and suffered to overcome his own fears when testing Freud’s social hypotheses in the experiment he devised. Back then, he already anticipated the importance of the group’s attitude assessment by each individual and, thus, the study of the reactions triggered in it by the situation under analysis, a topic which we will soon discuss.
Experiences in groups provides descriptions of dubious value included in the bare vignettes. They are details related to lighting, time, and atmosphere. Why does Bion waste his time in such irrelevant aspects? Perhaps, by resisting the seagulls, a UFO can be imposed to be selected, as he always argued that there is no device to record, select or contain emotional turbulences.
Bion was marked by his experiences in groups. The group and the individual, the culture, the work group, and the specialized work group pervade his ulterior developments. This results in pre-conceptions that find realizations in the realm of psychoanalysis, which he repeats when writing about the emotional turbulence. It is important to find an aura for the typhoon, something that impacts us while it is still latent, something that allows for the birth of the potential in what it is contained. “Superficially, an analytic session may appear boring, or featureless, alarming, or devoid of interest (…). The analyst, seeing beyond the superficial, is aware that he is in the presence of intense emotion. The intense experience is ineffable but once known cannot be mistaken (…) if such a contact is maintained, the analyst can devote himself to evaluating and interpreting the central experience and, if he sees fit, the superficialities in which it is embedded. One such group of superficialities pertains to the circumstances in which analysis is conducted. These are usually physically comfortable and bear the stamp of unadventurous civilized existence[4].” This quote belongs to Transformations, but we find descriptions of this kind based on his experiences in groups. The earliest refers to the time when he interpreted that, while all the evident needs were met, the group needed a leader, based on the fact that when they rejected him as the leader, they looked for temporary substitutes. In Chapter II of Experiences, two vignettes are an omen for the descriptions below. In a group, member contributions fade away: “the pauses are getting longer, comments more and more futile, when it occurs to me that the feelings which I am experiencing myself ‑in particular, oppression by the apathy of the group and an urge to say something useful and illuminating‑ are precisely those which the others present seem to have. A group whose members cannot attend regularly must be apathetic and indifferent” (a good illustration of Thebes’ pest) “to the sufferings of the individual patient[5].” Bion observes that those absent are the leaders, while those present are the followers attacking the possibility of working. In the other quote, he tells how eight members speak at length, giving each other pieces of advice which they know are useless for plaintive and trivial nuisance. Discouraged, he comes up with an idea: “Vendors of quack nostrums unite”[6] and arrives at the brilliant conclusion that the group does not work without harmony, but as a unit whose members cooperate with one another and against Bion. And in Chapter III, Mr. M plays the role of the leader’s deputy, Mr. X, thus allowing the group orchestra to perform only martial songs, regardless of people’s verbal contributions. In these and in the following instances, he already applies the binocular vision model.
Emotional Turbulence and Individual Analysis
Outside the group environment, this approach reappears in The Imaginary Twin, where the patient’s statements were uniformly drained of emotion and the ambiguous use of pronouns allow for diverse readings if the emotional tone to identify what is important fails to be considered. In Learning from Experience, he designates with the three letters L, H, and K the set of associated emotions that he proposed when describing the behavior on basic assumptions for the first time. However, perhaps the most moving example would be the one found in A Memoir of the Future. After describing the conflicts between Alice, Roland, Rosemary, and Tom –which might be perfectly well understood using Freudian concepts-, Alice, who lives comfortably on welfare, cherishes naïve expectations in the face of the imminent invasion (man: emergence of the psychotic part of the personality contained in the treatment.) Another of Alice’s versions, Rosemary, expects a welcome in a different tone, while Roland has very different omens. K, L, and H. Meanwhile, Bion recalls his own appalling war stories. Bion always bears in mind that both the analysand and the analyst are embarked on a risky adventure as hazardous as those circumstances in which dangers are more obvious and dramatic. In his group it is essential to have a binocular approach that allows for observing the patient’s material –what the patient says, everything we refer to as statement, Tpβ, or association, the text-, and the association established with the patient-partner, with its relevant implied dangers. They include, among others, the use of that which he felt driven to do, not like an expression of his unanalyzed psychopathology, but as a phenomenon worth studying to understand men’s behavior when faced with the demands of taking part in the society for their full development.
In statements, Bion takes into account the lyrics, and, moreover, the music and, based on the latter, the dangers faced. This approach is the obvious counterpart of that which consists in regarding the verbal language as significant, taking for granted that the patient uses it as we do, instead of as a tool for making projective identification successful by triggering reactions, like the infant had an opportunity to do with its mother. Obviously, this implies a giant leap from Freud’s work. Another quantum leap, this time from Klein, consists in using these reactions triggered by the patient as a tool instead of as an obstacle that should be removed with further training analysis. Its counterpart brings about an inevitable implication: the patient regards what the analyst says as something he does, which has the same nature as what he does. This provides both the opportunity to recreate the early stages of development and to enable the psychotic patient to demolish analytical performance. The analysand uses and causes to use the means of communication that he discovered in the groups. Therefore, the patient’s superego decides that the members of the group (the duo) should destroy the lyrics of the songs and the meanings that they try to convey, and only listen to martial, erotic, or school songs. In these cases, it is not possible to apply the uses 4 and 5, but 2 and 6 and, of course, working through or negative growth will not be possible either.
New Visions beyond Dangers. The Value of a Constant Conjunction.
Taking those risks into account, Bion warns us that, in the clinical practice, the point that provides for an opportunity to intervene is the one that evidences a wish and an unability to learn, which brings us back to the example of the typical session that we will quote: “I don’t suppose I shall do anything today…[7]”. In those situations, primitive levels of thinking are stimulated to discover the “cause” of the obstruction, moving on a level similar to that of the phenomena that are no longer subject to Newton’s laws. These are now subject to the principles of subatomic particle physics, where psychoanalytic objects made up of α elements leave their place to agglomerations of β elements. The cause is an inevitable component of objects in rows C and F. Both the patient and the analyst use causal determinations that explain how they regard O. However, the use of the theories of The Grid and Transformations attribute a relative place to the causes, which are only regarded as “true” provided that they allow for developments in the horizontal axis. That patient, who needed lengthy movements to make himself comfortable, faced with this constant conjunction of common elements at the beginning of each session, said that its cause was his hernia. Conversely, Bion devoted a lot of time to understanding it, as progress in the vertical axis requires; however, it was important to rescue a constant conjunction from the turbulence and support it with its negative qualities. He believes that every observer feels (i) that he needs the constant conjunction to have meaning, as a psychological need that reason turns into logic; (ii) that he feels that the meaning attributed to the constant conjunction should have a counterpart in its realization; and (iii) that the objection to a meaningless universe derives from the fear that the lack of meaning is a sign that meaning has been destroyed. In a meaningless universe, narcissism requires the existence of a meaningful god to benefit from. In some instances, the meaninglessness of meaning is attacked by splitting and projected into an object. Once again, he is rethinking the phenomena that he found in groups. This cannot be otherwise for every man, though it does not make development impossible –everything depends on the behavior of the specialized work group. Perhaps in this Meeting, it would not be difficult to discern if we have an inspiring god. The specialized work group has convened us: it is up to us not to turn the job into a Mass.
In Transformations, Chapter VI, Bion provides an excellent example of discomfort facing a constant conjunction. He confronts the psychoanalyst with the geometric problem of finding the points in which a straight line outside a circle cuts the circle. He puts us in the same place as the patient that he has been describing since Chapter V, who could not stand constant conjunctions, and bears many similarities to the one we have quoted, and to whom we will go back. Will the reader be able to stand the mathematician’s model to understand the tasks he urges us to do: to research into the laws that govern patients’ actions when verbal language does not matter? This problem can only be solved using conjugate complex. Then, he argues that a pre-Cartesian mathematician has an inadequate apparatus (grid) to solve the problem and says that he is unconscious→ of the future. The reason for this is that he cannot imagine i, he cannot accept square roots for negative numbers. Therefore, real numbers –which allowed for so many mathematical breakthroughs by including irrational numbers (e.g., p, e)- are a caesura for him. The psychoanalyst will face a similar problem when studying the phenomena of hallucinosis if he takes the point, the straight line, the circle or the lark from C to A. Thus, he shows us the extremely rich experience of his clinic in terms of geometric elaboration by developing C1↑.
Whenever constant conjunctions are rescued from new vertices, the technique varies and allows for observing different objects and getting different maps of the world. Freud chose to explain his working method, and soon discovered the ability of dream images to convey meaning. He also understood the possibilities that the geometry implicit in those images had in the manifest content of dreams, and discovered the value of displacement, both in images and in the use of verbal associations. When these failed, despite the demands of the fundamental rule, he discovered the key technical piece in 1905. Melanie Klein went beyond by matching dream with play, thus enriching the construction of reality and describing a world where objects inhabited both the outside and inside worlds on different planes and in different versions. Her contribution with the theory of the positions and the projective identification provided for understanding the possibilities of early development and its alterations and above all, she created a tool essential for subsequent development. Both of them ruled out the value of the analyst’s feelings –at least as regards theoretical-technical thinking. Bion included it. This resulted in the characteristic observable elements of row A: (1) The issue of enactment has been thoroughly studied by many English thinkers, and no-one but he has contributed samples of developments in the field of (2) enforced splitting and hallucinosis.
A memorable example of such ability is the session with the patient that fills most of the writings in Second Thoughts, also evident in his later works until “Attention and Interpretation.” As recommended by Bion, we suggest a C4 description. In his practice, he has long observed a patient who does not look at him when he comes in the room, as his eyes are on the horizon, and maneuvers on the couch for a long time in every session. He feels his way until he makes contact, like a blind man stretching his arms to find the wall. He has long ago got rid of his ability to think of the material and, thus, the analyst has assumed that he has placed it inside himself, as he took on it. Therefore, when the patient says: “Nothing but filthy things and smells”. “I think I’ve lost my sight,” Bion, instead of looking at waves of water or hair, focuses on the olfactory vertex and thinks that the patient smells an atmosphere filled with feces, which includes his eyes. There he triggers a revolutionary leap that consists in considering how it is possible to think with things instead of ideas. The sight and the dark glasses are the things that the patient used, thus agglomerating b elements to recover the tool, D4, which he had got rid of. This is the same tool used by Bion –the turbulence radar- amid a session in which nothing seems to happen over half an hour of scattered phrases. In order to show it, he avails of a long description of the patient’s repetitions as regards his attitude in the sessions, which might be placed in rows A or B, but decides to place them in column 4, in the hope that they may or may not have a meaning.
Why radar?
As a title we could have used the name of any other instrument to detect what is not evident to the senses, but we chose this because we find it suitable for guiding us in dangerous situations. According to physicist Robert B. Laughlin, an explorer is always a frontiersman; and he adds: “The great power of science is its ability, through brutal objectivity, to reveal to us truth we did not anticipate. (…) The idea of science as a great frontier is timeless (…) While there are clearly many nonscientific sources of adventure left, science is the unique place where genuine wildness may still be found. (…) We are also built to be impatient with the opposite -forests of facts from which we cannot extract any meaning.” Therefore, let us consider some of the typical characteristics of the territory we explore, our set of instruments, and the relationship between them. For such purpose, we turn to the model proposed by Bion in his Transformations, which both includes and underlines the role played by the emotional turbulence. He combines the theories of a set of dominant emotions, the theory of transformations using a grid for research. Instead of taking into account the relationship between the landscape and the painting, he focused on the relationship between the landscape, its reflection on the water, and the disturbing breeze. The model equivalences and their implications are as follows: the landscape is the object; the reflection is the representation; and the breeze is the emotions. Moving one step further and taking the place of the patient we intend to understand: the object of the patient is the analyst, his contribution, an interpretation or his absence. Tpβ is the representation, i.e., the association, he makes. Emotions are L, H, or K. Therefore, the model helps us realize that:
1) the reflection is related to the landscape disturbed by the breeze. The patient’s association is related with O, what the analyst interpreted, though Tpβ is disturbed by L, H, or K. A practical example: a patient filled with hate for his analyst transforms his analyst’s contribution and now he has that Tpβ in mind.
2) The breeze is related to the landscape (it shakes the landscape), though we notice that it is disturbed by the effects of the reflection. Active emotions (L, H, or K) are related to what the analyst did, though they are disturbed by the patient’s associations. Tpβ, the representation held by the patient of the analyst's contribution, is consistent with the hate that affects his transformation.
3) The reflection is related to the breeze, and, in turn, the breeze is related to the reflection of the water surface, and what we observe is influenced by the landscape. The association is either related to L, H, or K; or L, H, or K is related to the association Tpβ, though influenced by the analyst's contribution. The patient holds a transformation Tpβ influenced by the hate he feels for his analyst, whose interpretation he transformed.
What adds value to the model is that the object of study, the bond between the patient and the analyst, is far from running out in the words, and focuses on emotions. Then, he believes that the relationship between the three elements is a constant conjunction in the mind of the observer, which may or may not have a counterpart in reality. Still, he believes that a factual situation, i.e., the interpretation (its meaning and significance), an emotional state –also conjectured-, and a representation (the association) come constantly together. To develop an enlightening observation of what happens in a session, he does not give an account of it. The tools he had developed to speculate about other possible readings of the material in Elements of Psychoanalysis should come into play in the heat of the session. The analyst’s knowledge of the tools should be such that he can use them in situations of stress in an unknown and dangerous field. The circumstances he studies modify the tools, i.e., the grid and the theory of transformations. This is so because, as in small-particle physics, the elements used to observe and the observed subjects modify each other. The characteristics they retain outside the session are transformed by both the dangers of the established association and the way in which O is considered, to the extent that they may not notice that they are using them. The grid can be used as a representation of the involved minds, as used during the session. There is always the risk of playing the role the patients induce, of observing with memory and desire to find ourselves in a known territory and cling to causal theories, as if they had a counterpart in the realizations. If the grid undergoes no transformation, it loses ability to enlighten. Using the beauty of his example, no concert can be played as if it were merely arpeggios and scales. It needs the emotion conveyed by the musician’s score, the presence of the audience, and a moving performance.
As long as we consider the feelings and the couple (association-interpretation), even outside the session, we will continue in contact with the emotional turbulence and the possibility of finding the objects that foster development in it.
Among the elements formulated by Bion in a phenomenal version, and which account for the fact that the emotional experience can be regarded as a psychoanalytic session but nothing else, it is worthwhile to point out 2, 4, and 6: 1) ideas; 2) feelings, including pain; 3) association and interpretation; 4) the couple (association and interpretation); 5) conflicting pairs; and 6) the two axes of the grid (as special cases.)
The aim of feelings, including pain, is to drive the analytic intuition to elicit emotions so that they become obvious to the analyst before they become obvious to the patient, in which case they would become painfully obvious. In this regard, the radar helps the patient’s emotion maintain their nature of premonition. “(…) Many subtle expressions of feeling can be missed if the ideas by which they are expressed are regarded, wrongly, to be the main burden of the communication”[8], thus perpetuating a deceitful latency that goes against growth.
The couple (association and interpretation) refers to the relationship between the category of both the association and the interpretation, regardless of their contents. The observation of the couple (association and interpretation) allows for acknowledging the patient-analyst agreement or disagreement in terms of the underlying assumptions to perform the task, i.e., what background music supports, stifles, or drives the exchange of statements. Bion defines two main disagreements between categories. One of them is related to the vertical axis, which distinctive characteristic is the identification of the β-screen function in the patient. In this case, the patient is unable to recognize the interpretation or his associations as communication of ideas. Disagreements relative to the horizontal axis deal with the restrictive use of some columns and the exclusion of others, so that associations and interpretations are deprived of their dynamic quality. The patient’s maneuver will be targeted to moving every I (especially those belonging to columns 4 and 5) to columns 1, 2, or, eventually, 3.
The two axes of the grid (as special cases) are used to recognize situations or moments during the analysis where not only the session fails to progress, but the very psychoanalytic process shows no improvement either. The movement across the Grid is expressed using ↑←, when referring to anti-growth., and →↓, when it comes to growth.
A Clinical Example in the Practice
So far, a boy has had no problem in high school. He has been seeing an analyst for a while. We cannot know, though we can imagine, why his former analyst asserts that the patient has only suffered from neurosis and, moreover, he has discharged him, because one of his first contributions is an interpretation that precedes his account of certain daydream: parricide. However, as we were not involved in such experience, we cannot understand it. Everything seems to be right until something changes after a trip to the US. Since then, J, a hard-working and successful student, has decided that what he refers to as political militancy is what maters. The situation resulting from the change unfolds in his sessions and forces us to discern whether or not what he shares and calls dream or daydream, and the stories he refers to should be placed in row C and interpreted as a model of an object relationship that reflects what happens in the transference. Political militancy, that oddly moral thing, justifies his actions in the world, his family, and the therapy. Exams, couple relationships, and the meaning of an interpretation can be diverted in the name of political militancy and the struggle against capitalism. In terms of that, he chooses the subjects that he wants to study, with dark criteria and notorious incompetence. The people and ideas that he accepts are either retained or ruled out based on such militancy. We are not faced with delirium or hallucinations as described by psychiatrists, but it is obvious that he suffers from thought disorders more worrying than the evident sexual dysfunctions. “Last night I went out with a girl, and I spent the entire weekend with her. She’s friends with some friends of mine, and really cool. They all want to see if I am a great lay. We ended up making up at a doorway on the street. I didn’t go to her place because I had to get up early.” Later, in the same session, he tells how he got hooked on a movie with demons like flying gargoyles. We wonder what place deserves the story about the girl, the interest of all women in his sexual skill, and the gargoyle movie in the grid. The university environment, the family, the job, and the relationship with the analyst share a common denominator. He must resist any attempt to integrate them either explicitly or implicitly hinted at him. He can’t, but he says that he does not want to be part of the family system. The most frequent answer is a confrontation with the work during the session: “I don’t want to be here,” “I don’t want to study. I don’t want to focus,” as if the analyst requested him to do so. A pathetic megalomania makes him rule out everything he fails to understand, thus reviling it with the term “adjustment.” “Not adolescence, because it is very sociological. I didn’t like the bibliography of the other.” The environment strives to help him overcome the issues imposed by the society on someone of his age and he makes up pseudo-jobs. “The other day I went to buy a jacket with my old man. He said that he changed his mind about me. He told me to feel free to be politically active if I wanted, and not to study psychology if I didn’t want, but that I had to work. I told him that I was interested in psychology and that politics pervades it all, psychology too. He explained that, to them, a profession was not a must and he didn't want to push me. I don’t know if I believe him. The truth is that they've been pushing me.” He attends some of his classes or political meetings, as well as his sessions, though he takes almost no exam nor can provide written contributions to his group. Despite this, he seems to lead a normal life.
However, sometimes it seems that he wants to understand and find where to apply Bion’s considerations mentioned on page 6; he feels incapable. “I have two stones in my backpack; I have to graduate from childhood. I picture it as an abyss. It is a giant stone and, besides, I have to study on my own. It's been almost a year since I became an activist now, and I’ve been trying to understand what it means to be a revolutionary activist.” This situation regarding the abyss and the struggle for taking on his role was drawn during the therapy. What happened in the US is still in a dark nebula. Nevertheless, as he receives a visit he can say: “The American is in my bedroom. I realize I hide it, I feel ashamed. I think that, perhaps, it brings back a past I don’t want.” Maybe repression has acted as a sort of death, and now the turbulence triggers a break down or psychosis difficult to identify.
Turbulence and Communication of Ideas
Finally, why does Bion write like this? Does he deliberately choose this style to the detriment of more conventional expressive alternatives, or is it a shortcoming? Does this degree of sophistication hide a redundancy resulting from a lack of new ideas, or does it have a purpose, goal, meaning, and value? Is it necessary to be acquainted with Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Homer, astrophysics, the theory of the quanta, and non-Euclidean geometry to understand his ideas? Does such level of complexity place him too far from the needs of ordinary clinical psychoanalysts? Is it worth writing down this pandemonium of vertices on paper to address psychoanalysis? Is this disjointed sequence of unconnected ideas a confusion between the assessment of the free association and evenly suspended attention in the clinical practice and that of communications with colleagues? In Transformations, he questions the reader: Can the theories of his book fall into categories different than those of row F? Are the author and the reader two individuals who share the same assumptions? They do not even share the same time and space. He sets out to choose names for definitions and scientific hypotheses, but did he really do that? How does the reader take them? Does he place them in the same categories? Perhaps he believes that reading the intricate paragraphs induces sleep. Perhaps he chooses to smell the book. Perhaps he believes that Bion assumes the attitude of a resurrected Socrates.
In the articles he compiled in Second Thoughts, Bion was already concerned about the method he should adopt to make himself understood by his colleagues, those who were closely involved with him as his readers. He wavers between choosing to propose theoretical hypotheses or sessions to account for his findings in the field of psychosis. An original alternative was to compile the material from different therapies to show how to enhance the capacity for communication with the psychotic patient in Attacks on Linking. No matter how fruitful his contribution became, he was not satisfied. Thus, he adds notes at the end, in which he questions the potential of his own records and rules out the possibility of bringing into consciousness the past where the events took place and replace them with those images evocative of the future, categorizing them as C4. Just a short step from D4, the topic that we are dealing with. Later, in Learning from Experience, he dispels his doubts about how to convey his findings, as he believes that the only way to do so is through the patient with whom he shares the analytic experience, and their conversation is reduced to them and no-one else. He needs to find a meta-psychological tool to help him both explain himself and convey his exchanges with his patients. While that book provides a thorough description of the thinking processes, the tool takes shape with the grid in Elements of Psychoanalysis. He does not need external criticism to be aware of the difficulties posed by the theory and the need for progress which provides for accuracy while exercising the intuitive capacity. He is certain that the psychoanalyst confirms what he is looking for. He knows that every reading of a material should pay attention to the unknown in the shock of emotional turbulence –it is no worth revisiting what we know. The rest of his work, the darkest part of it, from Transformations to A memoir of the future, stands as the best proof that, to understand him, readers should arm themselves with patience in the hope of becoming O with him. He urges us to stay alert in order to maintain the vitality of the discipline, and restate patients’ materials relative to those addressed in Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Personalities, using geometric and mythological models –he even argues that a patient's material can be represented by a point and analyzes what he believes that point consists of. The example of those who paid attention to radio interference rather than words is moving. Even more moving is the effort to convey an analytic experience by means of a novel –a novel which requires not to be read as such. In this story, the sequence of phonemes and terms organized according to syntax is not the only thing that matters to convey a message. Instead, it is a work that collects his own experience, both as an analyst and an individual, and describes the risks he took –in fact, it is a risk and a challenge in itself-, but, above all, it depicts the uncertainty of what he really meant on each page, the same uncertainty as that faced by the analyst in front of his patient at all times. Aloof and oblivious to British literary evocations (barely and superficially bridged by Google) and unaware of the overwhelmingly thorough knowledge of other subjects, we try to save the attitude of both the analyst and his patient, and find encouragement to face our own analytic dangers. We can get a grasp of the vast domain he proposes. However, perhaps what we wrote is a mere note on his ideas, peppered with flashes of our own clinical experience.
We believe that he wrote as he did because, for an artist, it is not worthwhile to compose after his favorite masters. It would be pointless to write like Freud, Klein, or Klein’s followers, whom, no doubt, have a clearly-defined style. He intends to show us that the field of psychoanalysis has flexible boundaries which should stand out on paper, and that it exists in the inevitable present in which the text is written, thus foretelling futures yet to come, both to honor the past and to let it go. Perhaps that is the reason why he shows us false cognates. “The religion becomes impregnated with the religion whose place it is attempting to take”[9]. He wants to show the value of psychoanalysis as a field of research for topics addressed by philosophy and other subjects, rather than as a therapeutic method. He is probably uncertain about the accuracy of the truths he has to communicate, and chooses to resort to the potential power of threatened curiosity. Perhaps he wants us not to address open ending problems as if we had a definitive solution.
Dr. Angel Natalio Costantino
Address: Arenales 2396, 1st Floor 4
1124 C.A.B.A – City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Telephone: (5411) 4825-6325
E-mail: titocostantino@gmail.com
Dr. Ricardo Daniel Spector
Address: Santa Fe 3288, 5th Floor B
1425 C.A.B.A – City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Telephone: (5411) 4822-2578
E-mail: rispector@gmail.com
Lic. Verónica Elba Ginocchio
Address: Ecuador 1575, 7th Floor B
1425 C.A.B.A – City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Telephone: (5411) 4827-3169
E-mail: veronicaginocchio@fibertel.com.ar
[1] Bion, W. Emotional Turbulence. “Seminarios clínicos y cuatros textos” [Clinical Seminars and Four Papers.] Buenos Aires, Lugar Editorial, 1992, p. 224.
[2] Bion, W. held at A.P.A. on 07/30/68. In this lecture, he reported a session with a patient who told that he had dreamed of clouds with very specific shapes. They were flying saucers. In fact, he could not distinguish whether he was dreaming or awake. He wanted his analyst to interpret the “dream” in order to prove that the experience was just a dream.
[3] Bion, W. Experiencias en grupos [Experiences in Groups]. 1st Edition, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1963. p. 41.
[4] Bion, W. Transformaciones. Del aprendizaje al crecimiento [Transformations. From Learning to Growth.] Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1972. p. 94.
[5] Bion, W. Experiencias en grupos [Experiences in Groups]. 1st Edition, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1963. p. 45.
[6] Bion, W. Experiencias en grupos [Experiences in Groups]. 1st Edition, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1963. p. 48.
[7] Bion, W. “Volviendo a pensar” [Second Thoughts], 3rd. Edition, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Hormé, S.A.E., 1985, p. 77.
[8] Bion, W. “Elementos de Psicoanálisis” [Elements of Psychoanalysis], 2nd Edition, Buenos Aires: Hormé, 1988, p. 129.
[9] P. Bion, W. Emotional Turbulence. “Seminarios clínicos y cuatros textos” [Clinical Seminars and Four Papers.] Buenos Aires, Lugar Editorial, 1992, p. 230.
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