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posited at the root of the psyche yields a view of the conscious and the unconscious as reversible mental states within the mental experience. In some of his work focusing on psychotic functioning, Bion differentiates between the psychotic and the non-psychotic part of the personality. He thus develops the concept of projective identification described by Melanie Klein, with reference to the transference of the split destructive components projected onto the analyst, and he endows it with another meaning: that of the deep affective communication that normally operates between mother and baby. Maternal reverie welcomes and transforms the projected raw sensory and emotional elements and thus makes them tolerable and thinkable for the baby. Thanks to Bion, projective identification and the container-contained relation take on a key significance in the understanding of the transference ( cf. entry CONTAINMENT). Bion considers that the kind of transference at work with schizophrenic patients reflects the conflict between the life drive and the death drive, making the relationship to the analyst “premature” and “precipitate” insofar as the violent destructive drives and the hate of internal and external reality are in the forefront (Bion 1967 [1956]). What the analyst-archaeologist therefore uncovers does not consist in the traces of an ancient civilisation but in a primal catastrophe rooted in the deficiencies inherent in the early bond with the mother, along with the nameless dread that comes with it, reactivated in the transference by the attacks on the capacity for thought and for the toleration of psychic pain. The persistence of the psychotic transference (ibid) contrasts with its lack of depth, its lability and its extreme variability: any change is reflected in the transference in an undifferentiated fashion, access to meaning being jeopardised, if not annihilated, by the attacks on linking which prevent any awareness and any link with the object. The sensory aspects of the interpretation, the intonation of the voice and other material features of the frame, are thus used by the patient at the cost of the interpretation itself. Bion underscores that “elements of the transference are to be found in that aspect of the patient’s behaviour that betrays his awareness of the presence of an object that is not himself. No aspect of his behaviour can be disregarded” (Elements of Psycho-Analysis, 1963: p. 69). With the “Grid”, Bion envisions a system of “notation and record” of the analytic experience, defined as an emotional experience. The transference can then be represented by one of the categories of the Grid, it sheds light on the link K (knowledge) between analyst and patient, a link featured among the basic links of psychic life, along with the links L (love) and H (hate). In the Freudian sense, the transference includes, in Bion’s view, the “rigid” transformations pertaining to “a model of movement of feelings and ideas from one sphere of applicability to another” (Transformations, 1965: p. 19). “The feelings and ideas appropriate to infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex and its off-shoots are transferred, with a wholeness and coherence that is characteristic, to the relationship with the analyst. This transformation involves little deformation” (Ibid.). Such transformations are specific to the non-psychotic part of the personality and refer to a “linearity” that elicits the distinction of what is transferred onto the analyst by the patient.
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