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European perspective follows these developments with regards to symbolization- representational processes in the following way: Bion’s starting point was to explore the lack of symbolic functioning in the psychotic. He called attention to his finding that, due to ego fragmentation and substituting projective identification for repression, with symbolic equation in place of symbolization, psychotic patients did not dream: “…he now moves, not in a world of dreams, but in a world of objects which are ordinarily the furniture of dreams” (Bion 1957, p. 269). Such patients with a tenuous hold on reality, who live in a symbolic void of psychosis, where pain is felt but not suffered, are further described later in “Attention and Interpretation”: “There are patients whose contact with reality presents most difficulty when that reality is their own mental state. For example, a baby discovers its hand; it might as well have discovered its stomach-ache, or its feeling of dread or anxiety, or mental pain. In most ordinary personalities this is true, but people exist who are so intolerant of pain or frustration (or in whom pain, or frustration is so intolerable) that they feel the pain but will not suffer it and so cannot be said to discover it. What it is that they will not suffer or discover we have to conjecture from what we learn from patients who do allow themselves to suffer” ( Bion 1970, p. 221). In the paper “Psychoanalytic Study of Thinking” (Bion 1962a), which became the first chapter of his first book “Learning from Experience” (Bion 1962 b), where he fashions the first formulation of his Container-Contained Model, he raises the question whether psychological development might be linked to the development of vision. To establish perception in depth, he maintains, binocular vision is required. The visual model permeates all his work: it uses binocular vision as a meta perspective on the interplay and differentiation between symbol and concrete thought. Binocular vision forms two views that are likely to be integrated through common sense. An object seen either as loved, or as hated is perceived "monocularly". When one realizes that the loved object and the hated object are one and the same person, achieves a sense of truth. In this conception, the symbol would not only be the representation of an absence but also the presence/absence relation: the ability to consider the object and its absence as two distinct spaces. This ability allows a fruitful oscillation between concrete/abstract and object of thought/thought. When this is not possible, the space where the object must be and is not becomes "absence of space", a black hole. The depressive position associated with the Oedipus complex involves the binocular ability to differentiate between physical/psychological space, fantasy/perception, and hallucination/memory: it constitutes the step from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality. However, the fruitful oscillation between these poles, tolerating the paradox, is what confers dynamic quality on true symbolic ability: the possibility of seeing things from different perspectives (Grimalt 2007). Throughout, Bion sets out to determine , how does a sensory experience become a psychic representation. The facts of psychoanalysis are invisible and intangible. Bion shifts attention to the kind of sensitivity required to apprehend these facts. He therefore proposes
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