James Grotstein on The Transcendent Position

BION'S "TRANSFORMATION IN 'O'" AND

THE CONCEPT OF THE "TRANSCENDENT POSITION" 

by James S. Grotstein

(presentation downloaded from: http://www.sicap.it/merciai/bion/papers/grots.htm )

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 of intuitionistic and subjective science [Transformations in "O" (Ultimate Truth, Absolute Reality)], constitute an objective and numinous psychoanalytic epistemology.

Bion was preoccupied with the concept of ultimate reality and absolute truth and reoriented psychoanalytic metapsychology into a theory of thinking and meta-thinking about emotions. 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 not preconscious -- 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--its absolute dependence on sense data. Applying his concept of reversible 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 the abandonment 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.

In this contribution I emphasize my understanding of Bion as the intuitionistic epistemologist, the "emotional mathematician" (Bion, 1965), the "mystical scientist" (Bion, 1970), the intrepid voyager into the deep and formless infinite, "O." I suggest that a "Transcendent Position" is implied by Bion's conception of "O," the latter of which overarches "nameless dread," beta elements, the "thing-in-themselves," the noumenon, "absolute truth," "ultimate reality," and "reverence and awe." 

Curator of The Psychoanalytic Muse Interviewed by "Speaking of Jung"

Dr. Mark Winborn at Bollingen, the lake
retreat of C.G. Jung in Switzerland

Dr. Mark Winborn was recently interviewed by Laura London of the “Speaking of Jung Podcast.” The interview has been uploaded to her website and can be listened to or downloaded here:

http://www.speakingofjung.com/…/10/26/episode-6-mark-winborn

It’s 55 minutes long and revolves around the general theme of “What is Jungian Analysis?” but it covers a wide territory contrasting Jungian with psychoanalytic perspectives, medications, treatment effectiveness, the therapeutic relationship, choosing an analyst, etc.

Lina Balestriere - Working in the Field of Psychosis

Psychosis questions the very foundations of the concepts on which analysts rely to represent psychic functioning. More than any other pathology, it undermines the pillars of analytical thinking, reveals the intimate core of conceptual thought, dismantles the shared scaffolding of theoretical construction and questions ultimate convictions about the foundations and functioning of the psychic apparatus. What becomes of representation if it disintegrates, becomes a thing, or indeed an empty sound? What becomes of the trace if emptiness, nothingness, paralysis, blankness occupy such a large place in the psychic life of the subject? And then what becomes of a subject or, in Freudian terms, an ego when not only that sense of identity but also more fundamentally that sense of existing, in a relationship, in relation to others, fi rmly grounded on land, which upholds all people, is simply not sustainable? What becomes of anxiety if it reaches the borders of non-existence, if the annihilation process deforms perception, of one’s body, oneself, of others? What then of the encounter, what of the transference, that major process, the decisive lever for psychoanalytic work, at once repetition and a possible exit from repetition, if that encounter perpetually takes place beneath the sword of Damocles, of the inescapable, of powerlessness, annihilation, of that which never happened, or happened too often, of uncontrollable anxiety or persecutory emptiness? To advance into these zones with the concepts we make our own leaves us anxious and distraught. We fear then that these, our beams of light amidst obscurity, to cite a Freudian metaphor, will lose substance before such radical questioning. Once divested of their robes, of their elaborate scaffolding, what will remain? The vertigo of doubt is inescapable. After all, there is no guarantee they have their own existence, in the sense that their relevance might hold for that core of the real which conceptual abstraction attempts to capture. It is undoubtedly not fortuitous that for a long time analysts, and Freud fi rst and foremost, cast doubt upon the psychotic’s capacity for transference. The young science had to preserve itself from too radical a questioning. It was no doubt easier to think the psychotic incapable of transference than to have to submit to the risk of doubt and so risk ruining those convictions acquired in the field of the neuroses.

Nor is it fortuitous that a theory of the psychoses nearly always introduces new concepts: I am thinking of Aulagnier’s pictogram, of Bion’s β-elements, of Lacan’s foreclusion of the Name-of-the-Father, to cite only those theorizations which find a new currency for the problematics of representation. But the force of those theories spares no psychoanalyst confronted with psychosis from asking the essential question. What remains when the building totters and cracks, what of the living core that resists and has our conviction prevail, the raw material, grain of sand from the real, around which can coalesce the pearl of the concept? There is no set answer. Things come to light in singular fashion, for each practitioner, thanks to salutary, vertiginous experience and the collapse of certainties. (pp. 407-408)

Lina Balestriere (2007): The Work of the Analyst in the Field of Psychosis, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 88, pp. 407-421.