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of recording someone singing the song; the data’s content is “the song”, which is the invariant; Tα represents all of the transductions of form; and Tβ represents the air-borne sound produced by the speaker cones. Transducers are “constant conjunction devices”, in that they preserve the invariant (the song) while changing the form in which it is transmitted. All of these transductions may be identified because they exist in the physical world, which is not the case for the non-physical realm of psychic reality. Bion did not alter the basic theory of transformations as represented by O ➔ Tα ➔ Tβ, and concentrated instead on examining each component in detail. However, this immediately became an extraordinarily complex undertaking. O ➔ Tα ➔ Tβ may indicate an all- encompassing process of transformation. It may also represent one of innumerable, seemingly infinite transformations that comprise the total process, as reflected in the song and painting examples. This remains unimaginably complex in the psychoanalytic setting, which involves Tα concerning ineffable emotional experience and non–sensuous psychic reality. Transformations emerge and evolve directly from preceding cycles, and so are recursive in nature. The model allows us to imagine that van Gogh’s experience in the wheat field evolved through innumerable, simultaneous, recursive cycles of emotionally imbued transformations of unimaginable complexity that somehow produced a miraculous, singular, transcendent oil painting. Analogously, it provides a model in which a patient’s unformed experience evolves through innumerable recursive cycles of transformations to produce unconscious mental processes and, eventually, experience and symptoms. Once more, Bion’s theory of transformations suggests a model of how the mind develops, and not why the mind has developed as it did. II. Da. The Sign ‘O’ The most complex element of Bion’s theory of transformations is the sign O. When introducing O, Bion likened the sign directly to Kant’s concept of the “thing-in-itself” (Bion 1965, V , p. 138). O therefore cannot be perceived directly; even non-mental sense perceptions are perceived by the brain and therefore cannot be linked directly with Kant’s thing-in-itself. Perception can only offer a sense, or an intimation or intuition of whatever exists beyond it. O signifies a field of flowers in and of itself, without connection to any human presence or experience. How to conceive of realty existing apart from human perception has been a central problem of philosophy for thousands of years. Freud tackled this problem as well (Freud 1895, 1900). The sign O is therefore a cipher standing in for immaterial and metaphysical abstractions. Bion wrote once that O is linked with the “origin (O)” of the patient’s responses (Bion 1965, p. 139). One may speak about what the sign O represents, but one can never state directly what O is, or what exists antecedent to mental transformation. Bion eventually used several additional terms from philosophy and mysticism to evoke these ideas with respect to the sign O, including Ultimate Reality (borrowed from metaphysics), the Form (borrowed from Plato), and the godhead (borrowed from mysticism). For example, one may conjecture a three- sided Platonic Form inherent in the universe that one could name Triangle. The form Triangle has immaterial existence unrelated to human existence. All three-sided forms we encounter in
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