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a North American version of Bion’s theory of transformations is inevitably marked by the same differences and variations. For the sake of complete representation, this entry includes a section describing additional usages of the term that do not refer to Bion’s work, within other orientations of North American psychoanalysis. III. Ba. James Grotstein James Grotstein was the preeminent North American — and, perhaps, international — scholar of Bion studies. His work has influenced every North American contributor to Bion studies, most of who communicated with him directly in some form. Grotstein’s first and last published contributions took up Bion’s work (Malin and Grotstein, 1966; Grotstein, 2019), and he contributed four books related directly to Bion’s influence and work (Grotstein 1981, 2000, 2007, 2009a, b). Perhaps “A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis” (2007) offers Grotstein’s most encompassing rendition of Bion’s approach to psychoanalysis. Grotstein did not structure his book as a Bion primer for the new reader. Rather, it reflects his personal and complex take on the whole of Bion’s work. While his papers and books are comprehensive in content, Grotstein’s writing style is evocative, effusive, poetic, and allusive, which may overload some readers. His intention seems to have been to put everything he could think of in as many ways as possible, hoping that readers would find those parts that spoke most directly to them. Chapter 20 discusses transformations (Grotstein 2007, pp. 213-234). It succeeds best for readers with a basic understanding of the concept. Grotstein advanced the position that “Bion invoked the concept of transformations to move psychoanalytic thinking from stasis to flux – that is, the constancy of movement and change – and to help us to understand the intermediate processes by which we ‘learn from experience’: how we ‘digest’ experiences and ‘metabolize’ them into emotional meaning and objective significance” (p. 213; italics in original). He wrote that the concept of transformations “is the mathematical function of adjusting to being alive. Remaining emotionally human is its incarnation” (p. 233). Grotstein states that the primary O, or the primary transformed, of psychoanalysis is, equivalently, emotions, emotional experience, and “emotional truth” (p. 219). He describes transformations with metaphoric models of the “alimentary canal”, “synapse”, “immune system”, and the “Möbius strip”, intending each metaphor and its description not only to describe one of transformations’ (innumerable) forms, but also to evoke the reader’s imagination to further transform and organize their understanding of the concept as they find useful. Grotstein adds these to Bion’s forms of rigid motion and projective transformations, as well as transformations in hallucinosis, to which he devotes several pages of discussion. He also discusses Korbivcher’s contribution of “autistic transformations” (pp. 229-230).
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