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functions. In his early period, Bion (1957) theorized an inherent conflict between the healthy and psychotic parts of the mind, based on the life and death instincts, respectively. The psychotic part of the mind does not want to know about reality, both external and, most importantly, internal. Where Klein saw the mind dealing with conflict by instituting splitting, Bion (1959) referred to a mechanism more primitive and destructive, that he called ‘attacks on linking’. Attacking links between two objects, or two parts of the mind, is a psychotic method of dealing with conflict by eliminating any connection that places two separate objects in contact with each other. Bion’s theory is based on his conception of primary conflict. As he puts it, “The problem is the resolution of the conflict between narcissism and social-ism” (Bion, 1962a, p. 118), which is a restatement of Freud’s tension between narcissistic object relations and healthy object choice, and Klein’s distinction between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The implied conflict that generates attacks on links is the conflict between fusion and separateness. This idea led Bion (1963) to modify the concept of the Oedipus complex. For Bion it does not primarily evoke a conflict between sexuality and murderousness, between Laius and Oedipus, for example, but between searching for the truth and ignoring the truth, between Tiresias –the blind seer who knows the truth– and Oedipus. Bion further theorizes this conflict in his books “Learning From Experience ” (1962b) and “Elements of Psychoanalysis” (1963), where he writes that there are three kinds of links one can make with an object: L(ove), H(ate) and K(nowing). L and H are the traditional aspects of the Oedipus complex; K is the additional original Bion’s conceptualization. Here, Bion conceptualizes a world of anti-links which is dominated by the grand conflict of mental functions between K and minus K; between the desire to make links and know and the desire to attack links and not know, which correlate to the life and death instincts. Bion achieves this addition to Freud and Klein by transporting instinctual conflicts into analogous mental conflicts between K and minus K. One can see this in Bion’s 1955 paper, “The Language of the Schizophrenic”, where he reinterprets Freud’s castration complex - the fear of the loss of one’s genitals - as also occurring to the ego, where, from the vantage point of “Learning from Experience” and “Elements of Psychoanalysis”, the castration of the ego’s mental functions connected with thinking, is effected by minus K. As Bion’s thinking evolves, the conflict between K and minus K expands into the larger category of truth versus lies. This, in turn, links up with Bion’s concept of experience (Bion, 1959, 1962b). Experience becomes a crucible for truth in terms of one’s ability, or capacity, to have, to engage and to suffer one’s experience. Reason, for Bion, is not the truth; experience is, which means one’s emotional experience. Bion’s early work focuses on developing the capacity to think about one’s emotional experience, while his later work focuses attention on being able to have an emotional experience, or, put paradoxically, to be able to experience one’s experience. Bion (1965, 1970) differentiates this state from K with the designation O. K represents knowing about one’s experience, while O signifies the deepest level of who we are that can never be fully comprehended by the conscious mind but can be experienced. O represents the unknown. The conflict is between K and O - between being and knowing
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