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not be applicable when approaching these fundamental changes. At realizing this, Bion resorted to other traditions of apprehension of reality as it is, in order to keep the analytic view, those of the so-called mystics, whose formulations also attempt to transmit something that is beyond verbal representation. At this juncture, Bion states that the numinous realm which he calls ‘O’ must be the compass of the analyst. Bion elaborated this approach further in ‘Attention and Interpretation’ (Bion, 1970). According to James Grotstein (in Mijolla 2002-2005), “Transformations” (1965) thus represents Bion’s last venture in employing mathematical notations to bring scientific rigor to clinical psychoanalytic phenomena. Transformations in O constitute ‘a bridge to a new science’, the ‘intuitive’, to which he thereafter devoted his efforts. Having already previously defined the mind that had to develop in order to think ‘the thoughts without the thinker’ [preconceptions], he then undertook to explicate how these thoughts evolve from sense impressions of emotional experience (beta elements) to alpha elements suitable for further mental processing. From there he proceeded to define the steps of ‘mentally digestive transformation’ that these beta elements and alpha elements undergo in the analysand and analyst in order to gain a status in a scientific system. O is the beginning and the end of the transformational cycle. Bion’s epistemological transformation of psychoanalytic metapsychology was then complete (Grotstein, in Mijolla, 2002-2005, p. 1791, brackets added). Bion’s liberal applications of interdisciplinary models of various areas of mathematics (from Euclidian and projective geometry to non-Euclidian algebraic geometry and algebraic calculus), philosophy of science, aesthetics, art, together with the complicated, highly abstract and at times ambiguous presentation leaves room for different interpretations and different (even contradictory) accounts and definitions , emphasizing varying aspects of his Transformations in Latin American, North American and European psychoanalytic thought. Keeping to the premise that transformation is turning one thing from its initial form into a new form, North American definition, following closely Bion’s text , posits that: Bion’s theory models how the mind transforms one’s pre-mental being-in-the-world into mental elements, including emotional experience and cognitive function. Its primary use in psychoanalysis is as a model shaping and orienting clinical observation; it is not a metapsychological theory meant to guide interpretation. The model contains three elements: (1) the sign O: initial unknown and unknowable situations or circumstances, both material and experiential, that are by definition non-mentalized, or not-yet-mentalized; (2) the sign Tα: unknown mental processes and functions that transform essential qualities of the initial situation into newly mentalized forms; the essential qualities, which Bion calls “invariants”, remain constant throughout the processes of transformation; (3) the sign Tβ: the results or products of those transformations; these may be mental, material, and experiential, and they always retain the essential qualities of the invariant now rendered in a new form. In this model, one’s observations when conducting an analysis may be represented as products of transformations, Tβ, in which essential qualities, the invariants, are most often emotional. The model of transformations in psychoanalysis aims to help analysts recognize that emotions may
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