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More generally: — The sign O represents a total originating situation or stimulus of an ensuing series of transformations — The sign Tα represents “the process of transformation” (Bion 1965, V, p. 135) — The sign Tβ represents “the end product” of the processes of transformation (p. 135) o Additionally: — The sign T alone represents all ongoing processes of change, that is, “the total operation which includes the act of transforming and the end product” (p. 135) — Bion assigns the term “invariant” to represent the essence or qualities that remain constant from the total situation, O, through the painter’s transforming emotional experiences, Tα, to the completed painting, Tβ. — The invariant is essential to the mathematical representation of transformations, O ➔ Tα ➔ Tβ, even though Bion did not propose a sign for it. — Bion assigned the mathematical term “realization” to indicate the actual fact of the total original situation, and used it to denote a form of O. In the example, the realization includes this particular painter being in that particular field of poppies at that particular moment, in his particular emotional state of mind; of the infinite set of possible painters, places, and moments from which a painting might emerge, this set of circumstances has been made real, or have formed a realization, from an infinite set of possibilities. Bion took the term “realization” from the mathematics of geometry. In psychoanalytic work, a realization may often represent an emotional state of being. — Bion assigned the term “constant conjunction”, borrowed from Hume, to denote fixed correlations between elements; constant conjunctions serve the function of keeping organization of previously observed elements or data intact. “Binding” indicates the process in which the new constant conjunction forms, and “constellation” denotes the entire process. — Bion took the concept of the “selected fact” from Poincaré. The selected fact is that bit of observed data that brings organization to a previously unorganized field of data. Both selected facts and constant conjunctions function to organize data according to the properties of the invariant. Sandler (2005, p. 22, p. 25) has noted that Bion’s concept of mental transformations mirrors the physical world concept of transduction, in which the content of data remains constant, while the form of the data changes. Consider, for example, making an audio recording of someone singing a song. The microphone transduces the voice’s air-borne sound waves into electrical impulses. Those impulses are fed into another transducer, a device that turns them into digital data. This series continues through the final transductions of the speaker cone’s vibrations into sound waves carried in the air. In this example, O represents the total situation
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