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II. D. STAYING (MOSTLY) WITHIN THE LIMITS OF BION’S TEXT (NORTH AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE) The opening phrase of Bion’s book, Transformations, is, “Suppose a painter sees a path through a field sown with poppies and paints it …” (Bion 1965, V, p. 127). This initial situation or circumstance introduces his model for those mental processes that combine to produce the final painting of that field. One may expand this scenario by casting the role of “a painter” with an iconic example. Imagine the moment when, in July 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise during the days before ending his life, Vincent van Gogh arrived at a path leading into a wheat field under dark skies. He left the field having created one of Western art’s greatest masterpieces. It is impossible to know how his unspeakably painful emotional experiences became represented in oil paint on canvas, only that this miracle occurred. Also unknowable is how the essence of the actual scene — path, wheat field, sky, perhaps crows — remained constant and recognizable in the finished painting. If van Gogh added the crows from his imagination, one cannot know how his emotional experience in the field transformed in part to emotional “crow qualities” that themselves were transformed into dark, crow-like brush strokes of intense emotionality. Finally, one cannot know how this masterful depiction of turbulent, roiling emotion presents not any wheat field with crows, but one that is unmistakably of van Gogh’s creation. Bion’s theory of transformations provides the foundation for his entire psychoanalytic perspective, which employs emotions and emotional experience as core instigating elements informing all of his published work, including the theory of transformations in particular. His approach to emotions has clear roots in his earliest published works, which reference his experiences as a military psychiatrist, and at the Tavistock Clinic (Hinshelwood 2018). Bion produced a significant body of literature on unconscious group functioning before, during, and just after completing his psychoanalytic training (Mawson 2014), in which he proposed the concept of “basic assumptions” as unconscious defenses protecting the group from emotional pain encountered in work situations (Bion 1952, IV, pp. 205-245). Bion wrote seven psychoanalytic contributions between 1950 and 1959. Three papers in particular contain origins of his theories of thinking, container–contained, and of functions, all of which inform his theory of transformations directly. “The differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities” (Bion 1957, VI, pp. 92-111), includes the phrases “that- which-links” and “that-which-joins” to denote unconscious mental functions. “On arrogance” (Bion 1958, VI, pp. 131-137) and “Attacks on linking” (Bion 1959, VI, pp. 138-152) propose that emotions and emotional experiences serve linking functions, conscious and unconscious, and as such are essential to the mind’s growth and development. These three papers also make explicit an important shift that was vital in developing the theory of transformations several years later, and which was evolving in Bion’s ways of observing psychoanalytic phenomena. The following passage from “Attacks on linking” demonstrates this shift: “The conception of the part-object as analogous to an anatomical structure, encouraged by the patient’s employment of concrete images as units of thought, is misleading
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