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II. THE OBSERVATIONAL THEORY OF TRANSFORMATIONS IN BION’S WORK
For the sake of comprehension, this section will start with the wider context of the roots of Bion’s “Transformations”, and proceed from those expositions of Bion’s observational theory of Transformation closest to his text, towards those that view his work through a particular lens (i.e., complexity), or organize it around a particular theme (i.e., psychoanalytical object). II. A. INTERDISCIPLINARY ROOTS AND THEIR USE With the unprecedented access to Bion’s library and notes on the margins of the books he read, Paulo Cesar Sandler (2005) constructs the long list of interdisciplinary sources of Bion’s writing of “Transformations”. The list of prominent influences includes, among others, Plato’s Theory of Forms, Aristotle’s Mathematical objects, Pythagoras’ and Euklid’s theorems; Domain of Minus of St. John of the Cross; Rene Descartes’ epistemology of ‘thoughts constituting of the subject and not the other way around’; David Hume’s Constant conjunction; Immanuel Kant’s Noumena and phenomena and sensible intuition; G. W. Friedrich Hegel’s perception of the truth, limits of idealism, religion and rational processes, the infinite and the absolute; Blaise Pascal’s intuition, limits and possibilities of the search for truth; especially influential Sylvester’s and Cayley’s algebraic forms, transformation and Invariants; Jules Henri Poincare’s selected fact and intuition; Max Planck’s quantum theory; Albert Einstein’s relativity; Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, influence of which was also explored by Arnaldo Chuster; R. B. Braithwaite’s ideas of reality and his scientific deductive system, applicable to immaterial, including unconscious processes, influence of which on Bion’s work was also researched and documented by Barnet Malin (2021); work on assertions by Tarski and Carnap; Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes, theory of numbers and his view of personal authority; and Isaiah Berlin’s sense of reality. After a thorough research of Bion’s library, Sandler feels he is in a position to emphasize the foundation of the twin concept of transformation and invariance, developed originally by mathematicians James Joseph Sylvester and Arthur Cayley, here ‘translated’ into psychoanalytic theory of observation: “The first transformation is linked to the act of observation about “something” (whatever it is); the observation itself creates an impression in the mind of the observer that produces transformation. Transformation means a change in form... The trans-formation, the alteration in the aprehensible form ... also implies a conservation of seminal features of the material or immaterial fact, object or person ...” (Sandler 2005, p. 767, original font). Throughout, Sandler (2005) emphasizes that the interdisciplinary sources, including the quasi-mathematical signs, symbols, equations and the grid, are used by Bion as analogies to further an understanding of the transformational representational communicative processes
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