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our material and sense-based world, and which we call triangles, have been created by the mind through transformations of the invariant — the Platonic form Triangle. Such transformations evolve from transformations of O-as-Platonic Form Triangle into the Tβ of any triangle we perceive with our senses. Bion proposed that emotions and β-elements can serve as initial realizations, meaning that the sign O can represent an emotional experience or β-element (not related to Tβ; see below “Transformations and the Theory of Thinking” regarding β-elements). Bion indicates that emotions and emotional experience exist as a form of Ultimate Reality, thing-in-itself, or Platonic Form, which reflects his contention that the primary emotions are Truth. Felt emotional experience, or feelings, emerge as products from processes of transformation of primary emotional experience, equated with Truth and the sign O. Feeling is akin to a painting of emotional experience. Put the other way around, as products of transformations, named emotional experiences such as feelings of joy and sorrow are not represented by the sign O. The majority of psychoanalytic writings on the theory of transformations focus on O. Yet it is important to remember that Bion named his book Transformations , and not O . Bion began to explore O’s conceptual complexity in the last chapters of Transformations by adding the vertices of mysticism and religion to those of psychoanalysis, art, and mathematics. He extended his investigations of O throughout his fourth book, Attention and Interpretation (Bion 1970, VI , pp. 213-330). II. Db. Transformations as an Observational Model for Ongoing Change One illustration often used to depict transformations as processes of ongoing change comes from Plato. In the most well-known English translation, Plato attributed the following words to Socrates, who spoke of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “Heracleitus [sic] says, you know, that all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream” (Plato Cratylus 402a, p. 67) or, put more colloquially, “one can’t step in the same river twice”. The river into which one steps is the realization, and its waters flow — transform — continuously. The waters of the moment of stepping in are the observable products of the river’s never-ending flow transformation. The immaterial concept “River” is the invariant that stays constant through ongoing transformations of all rivers’ waters. These statements present what one might call an observational model of rivers, and they do not offer an explanatory theory of why rivers are the way they are. In like manner, the theory of transformations, despite its name, offers a model for observing evolution and growth of mental life, and not an explanatory theory to use for interpretation of why one’s mental state might be as it is. Bion seems not to have written anything mentioning Heraclitus, although Grotstein wrote of his analysis with Bion: “On one occasion he reminded me of Heraclitus’ koan …” (Grotstein 2007, 27; see also p. 213). A moment’s reflection reveals the relevance of the transformations concept to circumstances other than the mind. The transformations model applies to rivers, seasons, the
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