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a vital and continuing function of unconsciously transforming, naming, signifying, resignifying, organizing, and reorganizing via recall and association”; and, “The capacity to transform the inchoate raw data of experience into psychologically representable (mentalizable) elements is a major goal of psychological development, the essence of successful human mental activity and at the heart of the transformational aims of the psychoanalytic process” (Levine 2007, p. 963; Levine 2009, p. 342; Levine 2014, p. 218). In all cases, Levine employs Bion’s basic concept without modification. III. Bd. Annie Reiner Annie Reiner examines the O concept within the theory of transformations by focusing on its all-encompassing mystical, metaphysical, and religious elements in her book, “Bion and Being” (Reiner 2012). “O represents an ineffable metaphysical state beyond rational understanding and, therefore beyond verbal description” (p. xii ). She writes of achieving the mental state suitable for contact with and access to O, and refers to it as signifying a “daunting and infinite new analytic space”; “a place of experiential awareness rather than judgment”, a “state of mind, a state of flux”; “selfhood and being”; “a kind of truth known to us on an instinctual level beyond conscious awareness”; other descriptors appear throughout the book (pp. xii ; 2, 37). Reiner invokes poetry, religion, art, philosophy, and other vertices to evoke intimations of the concept, which she also states clearly lies beyond language and cognitive thought (see also Chapter 3 of “The Quest for Conscience and the Birth of the Mind” [Reiner 2018]). III. Be. Thomas Ogden and Judith Mitrani Two other North American contributors, Thomas Ogden and Judith Mitrani , integrate Bion’s work into their multi-dimensional approach to primitive states of mind. Ogden’s papers and books do not examine transformations per se , because his general interests are oriented towards Bion’s concepts of reverie and normal projective identification. He mentions the term rarely, using it in Bion’s basic way, for example, “Bion proposes a group of psychological functions (which together he calls ‘the alpha function”) that convert sensory impressions into a form which can be psychological recorded, organized, and remembered. These transformed sensory impressions are then available for conscious and unconscious thought” (Ogden 1992, p. 139). Like Ogden, Mitrani tends to focus on similar aspects of Bion’s work, and when using the term “transformations” employs it similarly as well. She writes that the container function involves, “Alpha-function or the metabolic or transformational capacity of the container or its ability to detoxify or render meaningful those projected aspects of the infant’s experience” (Mitrani 1996, p. 121). Years later she wrote that the mother “must bear the full effect of these projections upon her mind and body for as long as need be in order to be able to think about and to understand them, a process that Bion referred to as transformation” (Mitrani 2014, pp. 19, 68).
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