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suggest that the analyst and patient’s curiosity in searching for the truth displays arrogant stupidity in their belief that, unlike Oedipus, they would be able to face, metabolize, and think about what they discovered (Bion 1958, VI, pp. 131-137). When psychoanalytic observation and clinical work deepen to these realms and anxieties, both participants may experience growing feelings of dread and terror. Bion once said that “In every consulting room there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst” (Bion 1973, VII, p. 10). The capacity to transform emotional truth through thinking is thus vital to survival. II. Dg. Transformations, Emotional Turbulence, and Catastrophic Change Bion discusses what he calls emotional turbulence and catastrophic change in numbers of passages. Catastrophic change refers to the result of transformations of such intensity that their impact on the actual situation and the personality become overtly manifest. “Catastrophic” indicates the scale of the situation, and not necessarily any moral quality of disaster or badness. It may initiate what Bion called, “subversion of the system” (Bion 1965, V, p. 133), which may entail either disaster or profoundly needed growth through disruption of the status quo (Bion used the concept for society as well [Bion 1966, VI, pp. 21-43]). In catastrophic change, emotion rises to the level of “violence”, but again this violence may function in the service of both defense and growth. Sometimes transformations at the level of catastrophic change and violent emotion are necessary to disrupt the power of Grid column 2 resistances against thinking and Truth, in order to make subsequent evolutionary growth and development possible. II. Dh. Transformations in K and O Bion introduced the emotional linking signs L, H, and K — loving, hating, and knowing — in Learning From Experience (Bion 1962b, IV), and continued studying them in Elements of Psychoanalysis (Bion 1963a, V). The concept of transformations in K, or T(K), brings thinking together with the emotional invariant qualities that orient the mind towards or away from Truth (see Fisher 2006). With respect to the emotional turbulence of undertaking painful and frightening work, Bion wrote, “transformations in K are feared when they threaten the emergence of transformations in O [see below]. This can be restated as fear when Tα ➔ Tβ = K ➔ O. Resistance to an interpretation is resistance against change from K to O” (Bion 1965, V, p. 268). Bion notated the impact of Grid column 2, or anti-truth and anti-growth emotions on the linking functions with the signs -L, -H, and -K (for example, Bion 1962b, IV, pp. 361-365). Transformations in -K are active defensive processes of not-knowing, often stimulated by emotions of envy, greed, fear, and others. Transformations in -K attack and distort thinking processes with the aim of misunderstanding, evading or destroying Truth. Transformations in L and H, and their Grid column 2 defensive functions, may be considered similarly within the total theory of transformations.
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