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related or affective quantity, a sensation, emotion or action, is turned into a dream image, the representation of a wish or anxiety, a word, an interpretation or a meaning.
III. Cc. British Elaborations On the whole the British have largely held onto Bion’s earlier work on ‘K’ (from “Learning from Experience”) and differentiated this from the defensive ‘knowing-about’ referred to in Transformations. They combine this earlier version of ‘K’ with thinking about ‘O’ mostly from the point of view of ‘being’. In relation to the book “Transformations”, British analysts have tended to focus on the clinical illustrations (Abel-Hirsch 2019). These are highly thought of. They include the patient in whom there is a dramatic change of state in which what were bodily pains, become threatening external figures. Another illustration, and one that has had a considerable impact on British clinical work, is of the patient who is ‘acting out of rivalry’ (Bion 1965, p. 136). It illustrates ‘transformations in hallucinosis’ in which “a deep-seated and all-pervading rivalry with the aims of analysis has been awakened… He [the patient] persistently probes the analyst to elicit unhelpful responses. Bion suggests that these activities and sensations essentially are the same as hallucinations” (Taylor 2011 p.1107). Bion’s clinical illustrations are drawn on for the light they throw on the patient’s model of mind and the nature of enactment in the session. His clinical work being a resource for analysts across the British groups (Contemporary Freudian, Independent, Kleinian). The British tradition places great emphasis on the patient and analyst ‘being-in’ the session - with discipline of memory and desire - but with little reference to transformations in ‘O’. Influential in this tradition is the work of Betty Joseph (1989). It is likely that this close colleague of Bion read past Bion’s references to godhead, faith and ‘O’, but grasped the significance of Bion’s attention to ‘being’ rather than ‘knowing about’. The editor of The Complete Works of W. R. Bion, Chris Mawson , in fact links the shift in Bion’s thinking from epistemology [Learning from Experience] towards mental growth [Transformations] to discussions between Bion and Betty Joseph in the mid-1960’s (Mawson 2019 p.619). For Joseph ‘being ’involves following the way the patient’s internal object relations become expressed and played out in the present of the sessions. Bion’s view that there is a reality that is intrinsically unknowable is not present in Joseph’s work and possibly not in many Kleinian analyst’s work. However, it is present for example in the work of the British Independent analyst Michael Parsons : “The existential uncertainty of knowing that we can never be finally certain of who we are or what we are doing, has something terrible about it. It calls, in Bion’s language, for faith in the ‘O ’of psychoanalysis.” (Parsons 2005 p.32).
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