BION'S ODYSSEY TOWARDS TRANSCENDENCE

IN THEORY OF THINKING

Bion's paper, "Theory of Thinking," itself is a monumental achievement in thinking including the notion of what he would identify as messiah thoughts, i.e., thoughts which break through the basic assumptions of known and saturated meanings found in the subject's mind, and in contemporary language and the cultural belief systems. We might say that his paper is a chain of Messiah Thoughts. Critically, Bion revolutionizes major Western notions of Epistemology that held that thinking precedes thoughts. As we shall see, his idea is integrally related to another radical revision; that of the notion of the unconscious as a seething caldron.

The idea of the dreamwork is one of the most significant of Freud's insights and illuminates many crucial themes needed by twentieth century culture and the study of the mind (Flax, 1990; Felman, 1987; Kristeva, 1982, 1986; Nicholson, 1990). The belief in fixed ideas and a priori beliefs no longer served a culture that was increasingly anti-traditional and more inclined to challenge the known and familiar.

Lacan, Freud and Bion focused on the dream work process, understanding, each in their own way, the play of the mind's elements for disguise (Freud), to search for the primary object of identification (Lacan), and to bring together the two logics of the mind, the vastness of infinite logic in the unconscious and the finite logic of the mind of sensory rational and experience as well as to bring significance to a bearable pitch (Bion, 1962).

The possibility of different selves in discourse and the creation of new thoughts is emphasized in Freud's text, Interpretation of Dreams, mainly through his discussion of displacement and condensation and the creation of new forms to convey meaning. From this perspective Freud illuminates the subject's capacity for expressing and representing complex aspects of feeling and desire.

At the same time Freud thought that the underlying thrust of the dream is the wish that springs from the needs of the drives process. As you know, the instincts or drives were already described as under the rule of disruptive forces, forces antithetical to civilization and the reality principle. The two perspectives brought together leave the reader puzzled as to how the "instincts" at work in the service of discharge are able to create innovative structures of myth, dream narrative, and fresh signification (Moran,1993 ). These dream weavers seem more like great poets of psychic truth than servants of the pleasure\unpleasure principle.

Thus, we are able to think that despite Freud's meticulous attention to the reflex model and the metapsychology of the pleasure\unpleasure principle, he had also uncovered the processes of the dream work. The dream work, though couched in the language of libido in search of satisfaction, opened the gate to the concept of a dreamer who writes of psychic truth.

For Lacan, desire fueled the search for the lost object of primary identification, never to be regained. The quest is carried on through metonymy and metaphor, or displacement and condensation. Lacan was inspired by Freud's notion of the dream work and designated this aspect of his work as the true Freud. Lacan expanded the dream work to include the signifier and signified and believed that the chain of signifiers originated in great part as the subject expressing the dread of lack and finitude.

Bion's idea of the making of dreams derived from contact with inner feelings and meanings -- realizations that facilitated the birth of messiah thoughts or thoughts without a thinker. These were messages from other realms of experiencing, or transcendental signs, that were aspects of the unconscious as infinite sets or infinite messages (Matte Blanco, 1988; Grotstein, 1981, 1995a). Dream work alpha in this context carries the God language across chasm of known tangible of sensory mental life to the ineffable (Grotstein, 1981, 1995a). The messiah thought signifiers are placed in a position of revolution to the power and rule of the reigning saturated concepts which bind the burgeoning subject from the time of the birth of the individual mind or before and are set against the opening of the gates of deeper significance. In this context Bion revolutionizes epistemology. Perhaps we can appreciate that Bion's notion of messiah thoughts includes the emergence of emotional truth, experience that is fresh, startling, disruptive and catastrophic in its effects on the status quo. Messiah thoughts or thoughts without a thinker arrive from the vastness of the boundless mythic unconscious in which time, space and differentiation play no role in the birth of significance. Bion added, however, that without the emotional truth the mind withers and dies like the body deprived of food and water.

In 1962, Bion stressed that the implications of the mating of a pre-conception with a good object present or a bad object present or a situation of frustration are momentous for the birth of the subject. Within psychoanalytic theory the concept of the subject has often been sacrificed for emphases on pathology and the break down of the psychic apparatus. Winnicott's theory of the true and false self is a significant opposition to the notion of the unconscious as a seething caldron, wild, willful and disruptive. Bion's work on the unfolding of mental life speaks powerfully for the subject who in good enough circumstances develops his\her innate dream work alpha, the means to transform sense impressions, primitive feelings and anxieties into thoughts. In Bion's later work on transformations in "O" (Bion, 1965) he had arrived at further implications of the mating of messiah thoughts with a realization. He felt that at this moment a birth took place as an emotional truth of vast dimensions broke through the sluice of more limited and constricted thoughts based on the needs of everyday life and terror of the unknown.

Humans have always possessed capacities to make signs marking their presence and recording their activities, beliefs and messages to the powers of the universe. Crude stone implements that originated about 2,000,000 B.C. were the earliest signs of human existence. Little evidence for marking is known until a cultural revolution took place around 3200 B.C. during which musical instruments, the first sewing needle, the bow and arrow and the art of the French caves appeared. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform do not follow until 6,000 B.C. (Sullivan, 1991). I think that we may notice that the outward forms of thinking are slow in developing. However, we would not want to think that the apparatus for representing and symbolizing was not present in some form. Signs proliferate and become more abstract through the millennium till writing makes its marks on culture and mind. Changes of this sort yield a map of increasing capacities of representation and signification and also call to our attention the hazardous route to thinking, symbolization and representation the subject must travel. Or to put the problem in other words, to release the objects of sensory experience and to traverse what is felt to be an abyss between sensory experience and the significance of feelings engendered, suggests a monumental move towards faith in the unknown or ineffable.

I believe that Bion's "Theory of Thinking" is a personal realization for him and a watershed in his thinking. His notion of preconceptions mating with a realization links for us the innate capacity to reach towards lively mental life through intercourse with internal and external sense impressions that enrich the preconception with lived experience. Bion proposes the strangulation or murder of this intercourse is a function of an aborted or disenabled container\contained situation rather than disruptive instinctual forces (Bion, 1962).

Another aspect of the preconception's function in the birth process of the subject is that it reaches inward and backward to ancient messages in the unconscious of earlier generations and to links with transcendent universal meanings. The latter refers to Bion's transformations in "O" and to what James Grotstein calls the Transcendent position, a position attained by passing through and beyond the paranoid\schizoid and depressive positions to the ineffable experience of being (Grotstein, 1995a). In this spirit the story of Moses clarifies the release of icons. God's response to Moses' doubts and queries is, "I am what I am" (Grotstein, 1995a).

I propose that "Theory of Thinking" is part of Bion's odyssey to his own Transcendent position. In his biographical writings he shares with us his experience with demons or the bad thing present (arf-arf) and in the novels Memoir of the Future, the Past Presented, and The Dawn of Oblivion he continues his exploration and containment of the disruptive aspects of the personality in groups, culture and society as well as in the individual. The novels present the realization of the profound disasters lying in wait for the new thought babies. We might say that Bion's writing of the paper is an outgrowth of his faith in overcoming his pain and doubt and allowing the vastness of unconscious truth to evolve in his mind.

In his 1962 paper, Bion sets out his notions of thinking as developing out of the mating of a preconception with a frustration. He provides the example of the abortion of this realization, as integrally connected to the subject's birth and articulation of his/her experiences in being. At this point in his "thinking" (Bion, 1962) Bion proposes that the tragedy of stunted mental growth may be seen as forged in the refusal of the experience of frustration (mental pain). Here he also turns from theories of innate instinctual destructive forces as the source or "cause" of the failure of the subject to unfold truthfully. Bion understands the etiology of mental blight as the starvation or destruction of dream work alpha (Bion, 1992). In a beneficial outcome, the infant has an experience in which the absent breast becomes a thought and stimulates the growth of an apparatus for thinking. The incapacity to move in this direction promotes the presence of a bad object, the outcome of a failed mating which is fit only for evacuation. Thinking is confused with ridding the mind of painful bad objects and evacuation predominates over thoughtfulness and creativity.

Bion brings together here his ideas about the development of the infant's mindfulness in several ways. At first the infant has only a rudimentary consciousness of sense impressions -- there is as yet no connection to deeper sense data of the self (Bion, 1962, p. 116). In a good enough container\contained relationship the infant or patient is able to project its feelings into mother who, possessing the capacity for reverie, accepts and dreams her infant's sense data into an experience that is tolerable. Bion gives the example of the fear of dying which if not worked on by mother's dream work alpha deposits in the infant the feelings of nameless dread.

Bion's description of the breakdown of functional mental processes is described vividly through his notion that an experience of an anti-container builds up in the absence of maternal reverie:

...the infant of my model does not behave in a way that I ordinarily expect of an adult who is thinking. It behaves as if it felt that an internal object had been built up that had the characteristics of a greedy vagina-like "breast" that strips of its goodness all that the infant receives or gives leaving only degenerate objects (Bion, 1962, p. 115).

He continues that this course of development prevents the use of projective identification as a normal helpful means of communication. The infant needs to project its dread and anxiety into Mother's awareness so that she might digest, transform or dream the experience. Without mother's reverie the infant feels horrific forces coming back in a ballistic-like way. Here is the etiology of nameless dread.

At this point we see a critical crossroads: one road leads to the possibilities of dream work alpha, dreaming. phantasizing, associating and finally the means for representation of an experience in such a way that an "I" subject begins to express its experience, including meaning and significance. The other road constructed out of the failure of maternal reverie to mate with the infant's sense data or the reverse produces concrete bits fit only for evacuation. Bits of sense data before rejection by the container are designated beta elements suited for normal projective identification but those that are not able to find a home in maternal reverie are employed for violent evacuation and the failure to signify ensues replaced by action in the A6 column of the grid, evacuation dominated by avoidance of mental experience felt to be associated with annihilation anxiety. Toleration of a frustration, a breast missing, produces a thought inside in contrast to the establishment in the mind of a no-thing denuded of its significance due to the excessive use of abnormal projective identification.

Bion continues his explanation of the failure of the gathering of meaning and significance in Learning from Experience (Bion,1962). He asks what does the infant do when he/she loves the breast and what does mother supply when she loves and nurses her infant. Certainly she supplies food for survival but what does she provide for mental growth? Bion thinks out of love she provides reverie and strength supplementing the milk. If the infant for one reason or another cannot achieve appreciation of the maternal container but uses the actual milk as the sole supply of needs, a permanent split develops between emotional life and physical needs. Since the material substance cannot supply the mind with the truth of emotional experience, insatiable greed blocks the quest for psychic truth early on. I must add here, however, that prenatal experience or perhaps poor genetic inheritance may also deprive the infant of the means for appreciation and use of reverie (as well as other aspects of bonding).

Perhaps a clinical vignette will help to clarify this aspect. A seriously borderline woman was referred for treatment because she had burned out her therapist who, having become pregnant, wanted to shelter her infant from the massive projective attacks hurled by this patient. Soon after the commencement of treatment with me, I developed empathy for he former therapist. I hypothesized that Kelley, a fictitious designation, didn't use words for communication; instead, they were felt to be missile-like objects hurled at me out of hostility and helplessness. My communications to her were forced back at and into me causing me great anxiety and pain. I realized we were in the field of the anti-container and we were bereft of any means to communicate, absorb, or dream together. Earlier, Kelley had been able to dream -- or were they nightmares, failed dreams? She told me of a repetitive dream from her second year. She was a tadpole in a tank and was trying to climb out because the liquid was burning her skin. Kelley had disclosed to me that she was born with a rash all over her body. We knew that her mother was a heavy "social" drinker at the time of her pregnancy with Kelley and that Kelley was an unsoothable baby. We might want to think that even before birth this patient felt herself to be deprived of containment to the extent that pre-natally she was in the company of a toxic anti- container. I do believe that a substantial part of her gradual recovery from chaos, violent splitting and ruthless, greedy materialism has been the willingness for both of us to persevere over 8 years living in the eye of the hurricane of her mental states. Kelley is not yet well but she has developed the capacity to create and appreciate meaning and has a beginning sense of significance.

It seems to me that we have lived though many seasons of life together, in the process of developing a container\contained relationship between us and inside of her including a skin ego that serves as a buffer for her living self, (she used to break out in hives in the presence of emotional contact), a safe and soothing kangaroo pouch, a post- natal umbilicus of communication and utmostly a foreshadowing of a sense of I-ness or subjectivity are emerging.

In the latter nineteenth and the early twentieth century interest in the internal world appeared focusing on different internal voices, the alter ego or Doppelganger, the discovery of different layers of mental life, including not only the new awareness of the existence of the unconscious but the concept of decentered consciousness. Freud, who was developing these ideas, understood their emotional impact on people who had been raised to believe that humans were master in their own mind and possessed the will to carry out a reasonable or a Godly life. Freud thought his ideas were the third blow to human narcissism; the first was the Copernican revolution which radically displaced man from the center of God's universe. The second was Darwin's theory of evolution that placed man in an evolutionary line with the humblest creatures in the natural world and finally the third in which Freud proclaimed man to be a product of body/mind forces without ultimate will power to achieve character.

The implications of these realizations that peeled away the skin of illusion brought terrible awareness of the feelings of nothingness. More terrifying than the madness of the anti-container experience is the experience of non-existence, nothingness and of not mattering in which the mind of the subject perceives him/her self to have disappeared and is caught in a flickering sense of being. Bion's later thinking about madness and meaninglessness focused more on states of nonbeing (Grotstein 1990; personal communication, 1996)

As discussed, "Theory of Thinking" finds its monumentality in the illumination of the need of the early infantile mental apparatus of reverie. However, Bion proposes a two track approach to the unfolding of human mental life. One is the need for another -- the breast\container; the other the capacity to appreciate sense data of the self. The latter is integrally connected to the former. As discussed above, messages from the self include messages from the internal other, Lacan calls this the other scene; Bion understands the other stream or track as Transformation in "O."

Reaching "O" confronts the subject with the reality of infinity and the unknown. James Grotstein illuminates this experience for us in this way: he states that the infant is at risk if exposed prematurely to the Real. Hence, the paranoid schizoid position offers the infant or the patient a means to postpone a dark rendezvous and to alleviate a profound sense of helplessness. The move to the depressive position breaks down the real into manageable morsels of tragedy, grief and loss. I wish to make the point that experiences of nothingness, a void inside, a feeling of not mattering or falling forever emerge out of the failure to construct a scaffolding of meaning, caring and critically a background presence which descends both from the container\contained and the connection to the Godhead of Transcendence. The two unknowns, one benign leading to emotional aliveness, the truth of emotional depth, and the other malignant leading to a psychic death, may be confused by the analyst and or patient (mothering one and infant). In analysis the latter may be missed due to the powerful fear engendered by counter-projective identification.

In a recent discussion with James Grotstein, he called to my attention the situation of psychic death. He noted that Bion had recognized that he had lost aspects of himself in the tank battle on the Amiens\Roye Road in 1917. I think we may conjecture that Bion never stayed his efforts at finding and creating psychic truths for the purpose of reviving and expanding his own psychic life.

The notion of psychic death brings to mind Kristeva's interpretation of the concept of the abject (Kristeva, 1982). In her book, Powers of Horror, Kristeva explores experiences appearing as symbolic equations; menstrual blood equals filth and the horror of contamination (terror of maternal power over life and death). The horrors of incest and the fear of the dead all bring to mind Freud's taboos in Totem and Taboo. Kristeva adds another dimension in addition to persecutory guilt over the patricidal crime. She elaborates that abjection is an experience felt at the dawn of post-natal awareness. Kristeva believes that the infant's mind floats in a timeless, boundaryless void until pulled out of the orbit of infinity. Her notion is analogous to Bion's concept of reverie. Thus she notes that in the absence of the creation of narcissistic structures, the subject is aborted and like Narcissus falls into nothingness.

Kristeva adds that even if our infant self begins to feel secure in his\her sense of going on being, we are always haunted by the possibility of the crumbling of boundaries and the realization that the subject him\her self may be the abject -- the unborn, the unknown, and the rejected.

Several patients of mine have taught me a great deal about having lost or never gained a sense of themselves as a subject. They define themselves in their dreams and in their internal discourse as the abject. In thinking of Bion's ideas about the lack of the container relationship, I also thought about Kristeva's notion of the abject and the opposite possibilities of transcendence in "O" as the birth of subjectivity and of the unborn thought babies (Grotstein, 1995b).

One young man came to treatment out of dire necessity. He was on the verge of having a long-needed emotional breakdown, or to put it another way, he was re-experiencing the breakdowns he had suffered as an infant and child (Bion, 1962). As a young adult he was hanging on to his sanity by a slim thread. He had been in the Air Force, using that life as a container of sorts. Eventually he was discharged because of emotional difficulties. During that stretch in the Air Force he produced a son. Later another hectic, tumultuous relationship produced a daughter. I felt quite early in the treatment that these babies were efforts by "Peter" to create a lively self.

Alas, our sessions were awash in a sea of beta elements Prime. Since he believed that there was nothing to be gained from our interface, only pain and malevolent intrusiveness, hurling storms took place filled with violence and obscenity. Peter swore, he blamed, he threatened me with twisted conviction and it was most difficult to offer him the containment and reverie he required so desperately. I worked from two perspectives, the beta prime element aspects of him that tried to murder him as the growing child or mind and our linking work together and the growing subject that was starved and stymied by the lack of a container\contained structure. Mostly, he was trapped at the level of hostile omniscience and projected massively into me the responsibility for his miserable and ineffective mind. Similar to the work with Kelley, we rode out many sessions in the eye of his storms.

Recently he has begun to think and to speak with depth and have respect for our work together. I began to feel with some caution that my thinking was no longer under attack, battered by the "anticontainer" and a fetus mind attempting to break out of imprisonment. I believe we have undone many layers of resistance to the emergence of diverse streams of his subjectivity. As discussed, at the beginning of our work together he seemed to be entirely lost to the demonic forces that dominated his being. Peter clung maniacally to his omniscient control over me and believed that he lived inside of me and any hint that he might have a mind or a being sent him into long violent rages. He lived in the sphere of malignant beta prime, robbing him of any mental capacity to transform with me his negative k images and attitudes into food for the thought.

At one point a transformative dream came into the session. A large, long creature appeared, and Peter did not know what to do with it. Then he noticed that it had a mouth, and he had to keep feeding it. His little daughter was there in a jeep full of animals. He really felt that she did not need to be there while he fed this long thing.

Peter's associations were to his penis, which he had had to keep feeding with masturbation when he felt alone, empty, and hopeless. As the creature developed a mouth, he had the idea that his hand-penis relationship was somehow related to or substituted for the place of the breast nipple relationship. Peter remembered that in the dream he wanted his hand back and did not want the mouth to be a vagina. Then he recalled that his hand turned into a pincer, which he associated with the internal mother, and possessive, cruel and entrapping bonds. In the dream, he noticed that he was able to turn his pincer hand back into his normal hand by thinking. On the other hand, he was aware that he was still in the presence of the monster, which was very hard to get rid of. "Finally, the long thing began to turn into a frog." It seemed from his associations and our shared thoughts about the dream that we were in the realm of myriad projective identifications which produced many geographical and zonal confusions that in turn constructed a major confusion of nursing with excited, sensual states of mind laced with indifference and cruelty. The monster thing that turned into a frog, an embryo, and his capacity to think suggested a beginning reversal of these attitudes. Then too, R. and the animals did not belong in this scene, suggesting a further discrimination between his masturbatory fantasies and his ability to care about real, growing babies in himself and in his baby daughter. This idea was confirmed by a subsequent dream in which he carried a tiny embryo in his mouth.

I suggest that the embryo can be understood as more than a baby self, but is also a tiny germ within his mind that can stretch beyond excitement and forced presence into messiah thoughts and thoughts without a thinker.

The young woman discussed above has continued her growth. She can now make some distinctions between feeling herself to suffer abjection and tolerating the unknown or mysterious. Recently she began to design dresses. She has spoken a great deal about her enslaved creativity, experiencing herself as maimed by her parent's madness. Her sole approach to the problem was rageful blame which left her helpless to make internal growth. Suddenly (it seemed), Kelley began bringing in the most beautiful, colorful and unique samples of her work. They were made from various vintage fabrics, some were 100 year old tablecloths, others were rich tapestries. In addition, she had appliquéd other samples of tapestries or embroideries onto a rich velvet or silk fabric that made up the bodice or the skirt. A pair of Chinese birds embroidered in magnificent, colorful silk threads perched on an expanse of red velvet. A long Chinese embroidery climbed up the skirt like roses on a trellis. She called them Kelley Brennan, one-of-a-kind dresses. They attracted attention and were purchased, one for a museum, as well as specialty boutiques.

I was deeply moved. Until the birth of these stirring dresses, I had seen growth but little evidence of depth. These art works were so richly evocative of feelings and significance that I imagined them to be outgrowths of messiah thoughts and transformations in "O." In a way, Kelley spoke a truth when she described her creativity as imprisoned, although not for the reasons she thought. Endeadened, choked off, hated and excoriated much like the infant aspects of the personality, Kelley had no way of expressing her subjectivity. Together we had endured the hatred and opposition to the birth of thought without a thinker.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bion, W.R. (1962a). Theory of thinking. In Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. New York: Jason Aronson, 1967.

Bion, W.R. (1962b). Learning from Experience. In Seven Servants. New York: Jason Aronson, 1977.

Bion, W.R. (1992). Cogitations. F. Bion (Ed.). London: Karnac Books.

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Grotstein, J. (1981). Who is the dreamer who dreams the dream and who is the dreamer who understands it? In J. Grotstein (Ed.), Do I Dare Disturb the Universe: A Memorial to Wilfred R. Bion. Beverly Hills: Caesura Press.

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Grotstein, J. (1995a). Bion's transformation in "O,' 'the thing in itself,' and the 'real': Towards the concept of a transcendent position. Presented at the Panel on Bion's Contribution to Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 39th International Psychoanalytic Conference, San Francisco, California, July 31, 1995.

Grotstein, J. (1995b). Towards the concept of the transcendent position: Reflections on some of the "unborn" in Bion's "Cogitations." A contribution to the Special Issue on Understanding the Work of Wilfred Bion of the Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations, 11(2): 55-73.

Kristeva, J. (1974). Revolution in poetic language. In T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

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Matte-Blanco, I. (1988). Thinking, Feeling, and Being: Clinical Reflections on the Fundamental Antimony of Human Beings and the World. D. Tucket (Ed.). The New Library of Psychoanalysis: A Tavistock Professional Book. New York: Routledge.

Moran, F. (1993). Subject and Agency in Psychoanalysis: Which Is to Be Master? New York: New York University Press.

Nicholson, L. (1990). Feminism/Post-Modernism. L.J. Nicholson Ed. & Intro.). New York: Routledge.

Sullivan, H. (1991). Homo sapiens or homo desiderans: The role of desire in human evolution. In E. Ragland-Sullivan and M. Bracher (Eds.), Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York: Routledge.

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