IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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(Taylor, 2011; Tabakin, 2015). The conflict of later Bionian thought is that which pertains to the known and the unknown, to certainty and uncertainty. Bion’s analytic stance towards the fulfillment of his clinical aesthetics of emergence requires a new stance by the analyst. Expanding Freud’s (1912) technical ideas of evenly suspended attention and an objective acceptance of whatever the patient’s material brings, Bion suggests developing a fresh state of mind, one open to reverie, which necessitates that the “knowing” elements implicated in memory and desire be suspended so that the analyst may achieve a state of mind theorized by the poet Keats’ definition of “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Bion,1970, p. 125). In this way, Bion can be seen as moving towards a dialectical resolution, a sublation, in Hegel’s terminology (Rosen, 2014, pp. 138-9), of innate conflicts, where one develops a state of mind that tolerates the interplay between PS (paranoid-schizoid) and D (depressive) elements and configurations signified by Bion as PS ó D. Thus the later Bion does not leave behind the premise of conflict for one of emergence; emergence is rather placed into a dialectical relation with conflict. III. E. Donald W. Winnicott An object relations alternative to the conflict model of the mind is offered by Winnicott. In his first book of collected papers written in 1930’s to mid 1950’s “Through Paediactrics to Psychoanalysis”, Winnicott (1978) formulates gradually his contributions to the dynamics of early child development and childhood neuroses, in conjunction with primary maternal preoccupation , trauma, regression, transference and countertransference. His model takes its starting point in the concept of a primary state of development that he nominates un-integration (Winnicott, 1945). Whereas Klein tended to view the early mind as dis- integrated by splitting, projective identification and other defenses based on infantile omnipotence, Winnicott views the early mind as not-yet-come-together . As such, the mind for Winnicott is not in a situation of basic conflict at its beginnings but is more in a state of needing to come together, which then later eventuates in the conflicts that Freud and Klein described. Until this primal integration takes place, for Winnicott there is no psychic structure. One can see Winnicott’s point of departure by considering that Freud, Klein, and Bion each built a theory out of the primal instinctual and emotional conflict that arises from the experiences of life and death, originally emanating from the id. In contrast to this idea of primal conflict, Winnicott suggests a state of primal ‘unintegration’, where conflicts are not engaged until this primal integration has occurred. Thus for Winnicott “there is no id before ego” (Winnicott, 1962, p. 56); and ego development does not take place without a good enough mother providing a holding environment which enables the infant to begin to integrate its various parts into a rudimentary ego. Then, and only then, do processes of symbol-formation and the organization of “personal psychic content” begin, which forms a basis for “living relationships” (Winnicott, 1960, p. 45) begin. As Winnicott puts it, at this stage “the infant is not yet an entity having experiences” (1962, p. 56). Klein, by contrast, believed that there is a rudimentary ego, some reality

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