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A notable European perspective on Bion’s Transformations, relevant to Bion’s development of his method of observation, comes out of the body of research exploring Psychoanalytic Object at the very foundation of all transformations (Vermote 2011, 2019), which is further explicated and specified in the Europe section. On both sides of the Atlantic , there is a recognition of the importance of the built-in relationship between transformation and invariances (Sandler 2005, p. 156, 192). Bion (1965) explains it via an artist’s portrait of a poppy field. “We understand it”, he says, “to portray a field because, during the transformation from landscape to painting, ‘ something has remained unaltered and on this something recognition depends’” (Bion 1965, p. 1). This unaltered aspect of the transformation is its ‘invariant’. Similarly, the analyst interprets symptoms, dreams, etc. as transformations of invariants in the patient. Paulo Cesar Sandler emphasizes that transformations ‘are not a matter of the analyst’s mere individual opinion’ (2005, p. 765). They conserve ‘seminal features of the material or immaterial fact, object or person observed’ (p. 767). In the words of Rafael Lopez-Corvo (2003), a Venezuelan author of “The Dictionary of The Work of W.R. Bion”: “… the recognition of the identity of these elements that have changed [their form], would depend on the existing invariants” (p. 290). There is also for most part a consensus in recognition of Bion’s basic kinds of transformations in clinical practice, although with some variability in the focus of their explanation by different authors from different regions. a. ‘Rigid motion transformation’, which corresponds to past events which may now be relived in the classical transference; b. ‘projective transformation’, which corresponds to Melanie Klein’s concept of projective identification; c. ‘transformation in hallucinosis’, which occurs in psychosis as well during the hallucinatory experience in the therapeutic setting, not necessarily implying any diagnosis d. ‘transformation in ‘O’ by which Bion means a transformation of the ineffable nature of the analytic object, and/or of the analysand’s symptom, through K (Knowledge link), to a state of ‘Absolute Truth’ or ‘Ultimate Reality (from knowing reality to being real). NB: * As a matter of style, the capitalization of concept titles may vary throughout the text of the entry, according to the cited author’s original usage. ** At times, different regions and different language groups used different publications of Bion’s works as a reference. Consequently, the paging of citations refers to the specific Bion’s publication used by that region. Please refer to the chapter References for specification of which sources of Bion’s texts were used by each region. In general, if there are diferent texts with the same year, they either appear as a and b, or one of them (especially in case of Latin America), is marked by *.
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