BION'S "TRANSFORMATION IN 'O'" AND
THE CONCEPT OF THE "TRANSCENDENT POSITION"
by James S. Grotstein
INTRODUCTION
Bion, who was to become the awesome explorer of the "deep and formless infinite" of the psyche, first immersed himself in the theories of Freud and Klein and then gradually developed a revolutionary metapsychological metatheory for psychoanalysis. Bion incurred the criticism of his colleagues by daring to investigate faith, spirituality, religion, mysticism, metaphysics, and fetal mental life. His concepts of transformations in L(ove), H(ate), and K(nowledge), as well as ofintuitionisticandsubjective science[Transformations in "0" (Ultimate Truth, Absolute Reality)], constitute an objectiveandnuminous psychoanalytic epistemology.
Bion was preoccupied with the concept of ultimate reality and absolute truth and reoriented psychoanalytic metapsychology into a theory ofthinkingandmeta-thinking aboutemotions. He distinguished the "thoughts-without-a-thinker" from the mind that had to develop in order to think them. I believe that his concept of"intuitionistic thinking"also presumes the presence of a more profound aspect of that mind: Not only did a mind develop to harvest the "thoughts without a thinker," but another aspect of the mind had to originate these "unthought thoughts." I believe that Bion came to a realization that true "thinking" ("dream work alpha" along the dimensions of "L, H, and K") is an unconscious -- if notpreconscious -- act and that what we normally term "thinking" (application of the ordinate and abscissa of the "Grid") is really"after-thinking."
By realigning psychoanalysis with metaphysics and ontology (existentialism), Bion perforated the mystique of ontic "objectivity" implicit to logical-positivistic, deterministic science and revealed its own unsuspected mythology--itsabsolute dependence on sense data. Applying his concept ofreversible perspective,he found myths, both collective and personal, to be themselves "scientific deductive systems" in their own right (Bion, 1992). Mostly, Bion founded a new mystical science of psychoanalysis, a numinous discipline based on theabandonment of memory, desire, and understanding. To Bion, mysticism is "seeing things as they truly are -- without disguise" (personal communication). He was preoccupied with the question of how we know what we know.
BION'S EPISTEMOLOGICAL ODYSSEY INTO THE "DEEP AND FORMLESS INFINITE"
"0" is perhaps Bion's most far-reaching conception. It designates an ineffable, inscrutable, and constantly evolving domain that intimates an aesthetic completeness and coherence. He refers to it by different terms, "Absolute Truth," "Ultimate Reality," or "reverence and awe." When preternaturally personified, it is called "God." The "Keter-Ayn-Sof" of the Zohar Kabbalah translated it as "Nothing" (Scholem, 1960; Bloom, 1983), a designation Bion (1962, 1963, 1965) focused on as the "no-thing." "0" lies beyond the grasp of the external senses and is only experienced by an inwardly receptive sense organ,intuition, Bion's "seventh servant." Intuition is observation's reversible perspective, the latter requiring the senses. A transformation in "0" is attainable only by the disciplined abandonment of memory, desire, understanding, sense impressions -- and perhaps also the abandonment of ego itself. Ultimate Reality is also associated with Bion's "beta elements," Kant's "things-in-themselves," Lacan's "Register of the Real," primal chaos (today we would say "complexity"), and yet, paradoxically, primal harmony and serenity, depending on the maturity of our capacity to be "at-one" with it. The Greeks called it "Ananake"(Necessity).Milton (1667) alluded to it as "the deep and formless infinite" and "the Void," and Blake (1789-1794; Frye, 1947) referred to it as "fearful symmetry" and "frightful fiend." I have dealt with this area of numinousness as the "background presence of primary identification" (Grotstein, 1978, 1979) and as the "Black Hole" (1990a, 1990b).
The concept of "O," beginning with "thoughts without a thinker," the "things-in-themselves," "beta elements," "memoirs of the future," and "inherent preconceptions" transcended both Freud's Unconscious and its constant conjunction with infantile sexuality and Klein's concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Bion replaced Freud's concepts of the id, the unconscious, and the "seething cauldron" with an epistemic function that harkens back to the creative role of the unconscious in the construction of dreams and jokes (Freud, 1900, 1905). Bion revealed the ineffable matrix, the container beyond the container of our existence, the eternally unsaturated Void, one that undermines every deterministic certainty with a mocking transcending doubt.
Bion's conception of the "container/contained" (1959) transformed Klein's intrapsychic psychology into an interpersonal or intersubjective one. At the same time, Bion elevated the concept of the death instinct into the infant's fear of dying, which the containing mother must in turn suffer in order to detoxify it in her reverie function (dreamwork alpha). When he described the mother's need to "translate" her infant's dire messages into meaning, he entered the field of epistemology. He described how normal thinking begins as the projective identification by the infant of its "fear of dying" into the mother, whose reverie helps her to bear, absorb, and "translate" her infant's fears into meaning. Bion's "Theory of Thinking" (1962) went further in the direction of epistemology. Starting with Klein's (1928) concept of the epistemophilic instinct and grafting onto it his concepts of L (love), H (hate), and K (knowledge)relatedness, he had "second thoughts" about his formulations regarding the psychotic's difficulty in thinking (Bion, 1967). His new approach was characterized by a change from a strictly Kleinian emphasis on the intrapsychic destruction of the breast to a destructiveness directed interpersonallyandintrapsychically against the L, H, and Krelatedness(links) to the object (de Bianchedi, 1995). In his next series of contributions, Bion established an evolving theorem of epistemological concepts that included: (a) alpha function, (b) alpha elements, (c) beta elements, (d) constant conjunctions, (e) invariants, (f) reversible perspectives, (g) the grid, (h) "common sense," (i) correlation, and (j) the vertices. His theories innovatively portrayed how the normal person thinks and processes the data of emotional experiences as psychological facts ("K") in contrast to how the psychotic person "thinks" ("-K"). The concept of the vertices allowed Bion to describe how many different points of view were needed to establish a consensus for an ultimate portrayal of Truth. InCogitationsBion cites many scholars to demonstrate the limitations of science and concludes that psychoanalysis is an emotional, numinous, and mathematical science.
WithTransformations (1965)Bion made his next epistemological foray, describing Truth as "O," a domain extraterritorial to the reality that we all, except for Lacan (1966) had taken for granted. He also adumbrated the concept of themystic, whom he analogized with the hero and/or messiah, ideas that he was to develop at greater length in his later works (Bion, 1965, 1970, 11992). Bion left behind the preconceptions of the psychoanalytic establishment and ventured inward in a soul-searching, mystic journey. I have come to believe that this journey led him to transcend the positivistic certainty of psychoanalytic ontic determinism and "messianically" return it to its proper home in numinous parallax and doubt, where the mystic and relativistic "science of man" truly resides. Bion thus forged a psychoanalytic metatheory based on an epistemology of elements, functions, and transformations relating to the mental and emotional processing of Truth and ultimately on the fundamental universality of "O."
"Common sense" comprises the congruence of the individual senses and the coordination of that congruence with the consensus of others to arrive at K, which is then abstracted into its basic common denominators -- and then reconstructed into new meanings via intuition. "Catastrophic change" is the ineluctable event that catalyzes these changes with the inexorable occurrence of "emotional turbulence" (Bion, 1970, 1992). Once Bion formulated the transformations in "L,", "H," and "K" in their positive and negative forms and transformations in "O," he entered into a new metaphysical domain, the only passport to which was the abandonment of emotional and sensual L, H, and K. In this domain one must "feel" by intuiting rather than by sensing. Nevertheless Bion (1965, 1970, 1992) strongly suggests that "common sense," the final arbiter of K and ultimately of "O," represents the conflation, not only of the external senses, both of the individual and of the consensual Other, but also the verdict of the inner sense organ, intuition.
Ultimate Reality, that which is beyond the senses, beyond our imagination, and beyond our conception, belongs to the category of a meta-conceptualization that includes Ultimate Unknowable Truth, chaos, the thing-in-itself, and the so-called "beta elements." It also includes Plato's Theory of Eternal Forms and Bion's "thoughts without a thinker," by which he means "inherent preconceptions" or "memoirs of the future," those inherent entities that search for confirming realizations in conjured moieties, emptied of pre-existing meaning and anticipated in their natural future. "Thoughts without a thinker" derive from "O." They are the "unborns," the "intimations of immortality" that we seemingly experience as located within our inner cosmos, but they are placeless, unlocatable. They cannot be found because they can never be the object; they can only enhance our sense of subjectivity.
"0" overarches Heaven and Hell ("nameless dread") in its paradoxical sweep. It is what itisand therefore is beyond knowing. One may either experience "0" as ultimate dread or as beatific serenity, depending on the vertex of emotional maturity and preparedness from which one approaches it. I believe that we are born into "0" (or the "Real," in Lacan's [1966] terminology) and are hopefully rescued under the beneficent canopy of the organizing and mediating "filters" of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (sequentially, alternately, and in parallel). Randomness (chaos) is, with mother's reverie, transformed into phantasies and then into symbolic meaning in the depressive position. The libidinal and death instincts serve to signify, express, and mediate the infant's distress about its experiences of randomness."0" is inchoate and occurs before the paranoid-schizoid position -- and awaits our transcendence beyond the depressive position so that we may be rejoined -- for a moment -- with it. Bion's concept of "0" seems to be circular. It is within us, around us, and beyond us -- as well as before us and after us; we temporally proceed from it, through it, and toward it. T.S. Eliot's (1943) "The end is where we start from..." says it well. "0" as our mystically directed trajectory fulfills Plato's conception, "That which is always becoming" -- but never really attained. It is like Marlowe's description of Tamburlaine's Samarkand, "always on the horizon, ever distant, always receding." Bion introduced us to a cosmic domain that spatially, temporally, philosophically, and existentially existed beyond our sensual capacity to comprehend, although psychotics and mystics have always known of its existence.
For Bion, we become "0" through a transubjective mystical realization, a resonance or "communion in 'O'." The object slides under the mystic signifier in order to prepare us for a transient glimpse of fleeting, ineffable Truth. This process constitutescontemplation without an object to contemplate. It is a totally intra-subjective, meditative transformation. Enjoining us to abandon the objects of sensation -- abandon memory, desire, and understanding -- Bion reaffirmed the rationale for sensory deprivation in psychoanalytic technique (so that we may look inward). He also joined the ancient tradition of the mystics, such as Meister Eckhart (Fox, 1980, 1981), Ibn 'Arabi (Sells, 1994), Isaac Luria (Sells, 1994), and the early Christian and Hebrew mystics, particularly the Gnostics (Pagels, 1979), who had discovered that, through asceticism and self-abnegation, one could look inward and find the immanent and incarnate God. Bion discovered for psychoanalysis the technique ofintuitiontaken in its literal sense, "looking inward," by foreswearing the glimpse of the external object. "'O' is a dark spot that must be illuminated by blindness," he stated (Bion, 1970, p. 88). Bion liberally translated a letter by Freud to Lou Andreas Salomé (1966) as: "The analyst must cast a beam of intense darkness into the interior of the patient's associations so that some object that has hitherto been obscured in the light can now glow in that darkness" (Bion, personal communication). He discovered that awareness of the transcending and transcendent awesomeness of our inner world -- that which we have called the Unconscious -- when released from its positivistic strictures is, as the mystics have long believed, the inner presence of the "Immanent or Incarnate God," one who is in direct connection with the ineffable and inscrutable "Godhead." It is the Subject of subjects; the unconscious is never meant to be -- nor can it ever be -- the object. In brief, Bion, standing on Freud's and Klein's shoulders, transcended instinctual drive, ego, and object-relations theory and helped us find our mysterious way to "Intra-Subjectivity" by daring to rejoin us to that branch of epistemology, metaphysics, that has lurked in the shadow of psychoanalytic respectability. He formulated aunified field theoryor metatheory for psychoanalysis, in which "0" served as the unifying element that allowed for the continuation of the individual's personal unconscious in the cosmic vastness of ultimate "O."
THE TRUTH AND "0"
Bion contrasted "truth" and its opposite, thelie. Bion believed that truth is as necessary for mental growth as food is for physical growth, and the lie is the negative validation of the truth that needs to be disavowed. Bion believed that the truth spoke for itself and therefore required no thinker, whereas the liar did require a thinker. Bion seems to emphasize the importance of the pre-conceptions of the unconscious as the yet unconfirmed intimations of truths that need to be realized by contact with their anticipated "memoir"-counterparts from the future. The ego, in seeking to disguise, repress, or alter the unconscious, becomes disingenuous and dissembles the truth. The lie (-K), in Bion's thinking, is a negative faith that replaces the faith that either never appeared sufficiently or which defaulted because of the loss of innocence. I understand Bion here as alluding to the profound demoralization which occurrs after a catastrophic change and a failure of proper transformation from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. This demoralization is also a failure, I believe, of the holding environment as well as the containing environment, i.e., the background presence of primary identification (Grotstein, 1981). This state presupposes that the infant has prematurely plummeted into the Real ("0") before being baptized by the blessed protection of the covenant of parental imagination and conception. This now hapless one is predisposed to a cataclysmic "orphandom of the Real" ("0") and is impelled to swear a new allegiance to the dark (and only) savior, -K. Bion (1977) describes this phenomenon as the postnatal persistence of fetal existence in which the fetus has become prematurely aware of pain and then closed off, forfeiting its developmental and maturational future.