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be transformed into a vast array of uniquely subjective mental forms. In Latin America , faithfulness to the original Bion’s text also guides Brazilian author of “The Language of Bion” Paulo Cesar Sandler (2005), a principal translator of Bion’s opus into Portuguese, who especially underscores that “Transformation and Invariances are part of the same concept which forms an observational theory”. Transformation “is defined by Bion as “a total analytic experience being subjected to interpretation” (Sandler 2005, p. 763, original italics). He further stresses that for Bion, Transformations and Invariances are a dynamic activity, covering wide range of human endeavors, among them painting, mathematics and psychoanalysis. It is in this context, that psychoanalysis belongs to the group of transformations. “The original experience, the realization, in the instance of the painter the subject that he paints, and in the instance of the psychoanalyst the experience of analyzing his patients, are transformed by painting in one and analysis in the other into a painting and a psychoanalytic description respectively” (Bion 1965, p. 4, emph. by Bion; Sandler 2005, p. 769). Another important trend of contemporary Latin American theorizing on the subject, is a highly original ‘wide sense’ definition of ‘Transformations’, under the aegis of the ‘vertex of complexity’ and the principles of uncertainty and infinity (Chuster 2014, 2018), aiming to enrich the understanding of those mental processes that combine to produce the movement from a pre-conception and realization to a conception. Stressing that Bion viewed human mind as operating through nonlinear processes of growing complexity (Chuster 2014), here, a transformation is defined as a function that in an infinite set combines two elements in order to create a third one. Regarding Bion’s use of mathematical models, this broad view considers that in many areas of mathematics, a transformation may simply be any function, regardless of domain and codomain. Multiple theoretical and clinical ramifications of this approach to ‘wider sense’ definition, in reference to the combination of elements performed by psychoanalytical functions as described by Bion (1965), and its further and contemporary developments are specified below in the Latin American section. In Europe , “The Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis” (Skelton 2006) notes that internal reconfiguration (transformation) was central to Bion’s work, and that Bion saw psychoanalytic theories as group of transformations. A transformation being a change in form, for Bion, as a psychoanalyst, transformation is a change in forms in the mind, from realization to representation: just as painter transforms the landscape (the realization) into a painting (representation), the work of psychoanalyst transforms the facts of psychoanalytic experience (the realization) into an interpretation (the representation). “The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis” (Mijola 2002/2005) carries the entry Transformation written by North American James Grotstein, a noted Bion student and scholar, who writes, “Bion envisions psychoanalytic transformations as the psychoanalyst’s attempt to help the analysand transform that part of an emotional experience of which he is unconscious into an emotional experience of which he is conscious. Transformation here would be changing the form but not the fundamental nature of invariant aspect of the emotional experience…” (p.1790-1791).
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