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TRANSFORMATION(S) Tri-regional entry
Inter-Regional Editorial Board: Arnaldo Chuster (Latin America), Barnet D. Malin (North America) and Rudi Vermote (Europe) Inter-Regional Coordinating Co-Chair: Felipe Muller (Latin America) Advisor: Eva D. Papiasvili, Chair of IRED
I. INTRODUCTION AND INTRODUCTORY DEFINITION(S)
Wilfred R. Bion’s epistemological model of transformations presents his basic model of psychic change in its most abstracted form. In this model, psychic change occurs through recursive processes of mental transformation, which produces mental growth and development. All paradigmatic and epistemological issues developed by Bion previously in “A theory of thinking” (1962a) unfold in the texts “Learning from Experience” (1962b) and “Elements of Psychoanalysis” (1963), and converge to a deep and unprecedented psychoanalytical reflection in the book “Transformations” (1965). Originally, Bion gave the outlines of his theory of transformations in a presentation to the British Psychoanalytical Institute in 1963, and published the theory in his third book, “Transformations”, in 1965 (Bion 1963b, V, pp. 93-114; Bion 1965, V, pp. 116-280). Due to its density and complex dialogue with several disciplines of thought, Transformations (1965), represents the utmost challenging part of the work of Bion, offering itself as a permanent defy to the reader. With the clinical objective of trying to understand and treat psychotic patients, Bion constructed a model of what he called the ‘thinking’ of sensorial perceptions, emotional experiences and thoughts (Bion, 1962a, 1962b). In further exploring this ‘thinking’ process, he came to delineate the ‘elements’ of psychoanalysis like Euclid did in studying the elements of geometry and Newton in physics (Bion, 1963). The elements compiled in “Elements of Psychoanalysis” include concepts such as PS↔D, L(Love), H (Hate), K(Knowledge), etc. First published in “Elements of Psychoanalysis” and much elaborated and explicated in “Transformations”, Bion’s Grid categories denote the genetic development of thought on the Y axis, and the function or use of the thought on the X axis. Inspired by neopositivists’ search for ‘truth-value’ of scientific statements, Bion attempted for psychoanalysis to become a predictive science not unlike so-called hard sciences. Bion’s “Transformations” (1965) shows these efforts in using abstract formulae. At the end of the book, it can be seen how Bion realized that the transformations that he described so far are at a representational level while the fundamental transformations in psychoanalysis are beyond this representational level. This implies that the abstract mathematical method may
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