I would like to present material from analysis of a patient, which allowed me to explore the ideas of public and private as functions of a system of transformations in the field of knowledge as an emotional experience.
Bion tells us of a rudimentary consciousness in the sense described by Freud, a sensory organ for the perception of psychic qualities. This rudimentary consciousness would provide the maternal reverie with sense impressions, thus establishing a kind of contact that correlates the ability that one has to let another know something about its own sensations, with the disposition of the other to receive them.
But these impression of emotional experiences, require a function (alpha) that will transform them (among others) into necessary elements to generate the contact barrier. We understand as such the structural constellation of alpha elements that is going to separate conscious and unconscious, making the passage from one side to the other, possible for the elements organised in different manners, according to the way in which they are combined.
Thus constituted, conscious and unconscious will be the ones that are going to work, during the waking life or in dreams, with the sense of the data and not with the data themselves, as the latter cannot create memory nor are they suitable for thinking.
Publication, which is "considered... a function of thinking, that is, to make available to consciousness the sensorial data"(1967) requires the passage through the caesura of the contact barrier. This passage implies that the data from the sense organs and the emotional impressions must have been subjected to the joint action of the alpha function and the narrative.
In the latter, the sequential rhythm appeases the experience of disarray, and it has time as an articulating element. The "Once upon a time..." is the mark in every tale that ensures through the concatenation of events that even the unforeseeable is bound by words (articulated thought).
History is one of the names of knowledge into which private publication might evolve into, and Memory is the use of this knowledge thus conceived.(Bion points out that "columns 3, 4 and 5 of the grid, represent a range of attention that goes from memory and desire... to the opposite extreme of particularity.") In December l896 Freud writes the following to Fliess: " ... the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances to a re-transcription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various species of indications…".
If memory is not unique, the (his own) history will lead a person to recognise different versions stemming not only from the psychic working through task, but also from the explanatory power they hold, strengthened by its ally, causality.
If memory and history ignore all unanimous correspondence between them, truth, as the foremost emotion which participates in the recognition each person makes of oneself, will much less make correlation's with them. The relationships between memory, history and truth take form according to strength lines which are also constituted by oblivion and unknowing.
(Omitted here)
What we call knowledge is, in this case, the name we bestow on a configuration that had taken shape in the course of the analytic work stemming from products made up reciprocally by reconstructing the contact barrier. Before becoming a knowledge it was a preconception or a hypothesis that tried to explain an emotional absence which might be characterised as lacking the evocative power of the visual images, something akin to a blind intuition.
I assume that the emotional experience of the caesura of Mario's birth was interrupted in its development. If the alpha function omits in its digesting work the anxiety linked to a break, it will not be fit to furnish what that mental life requires to register it (a problem that concerns the representation in the mind of absent objects).
The lack of this representation raises (I could also say, raised) the following questions in me: did something get lost or did it never exist? And what about if it existed, but was suppressed before it became unconscious? in which case the patient would be in the position of not having to forget what cannot be remembered. Perhaps this is the setting in which his need of "feeling things that I don't even know what they are, but I am sure that they are there" appears.
The failure to confer meaning to the existential discontinuity would lead to congeal as beta elements this untransformed emotion, for it "represent the most archaic matrix from which one can suppose that thoughts arise"(1963), founding state that will require a continuum of alterations in its properties, in particular concerning its catastrophic intensity. These would be the first sense impressions of an emotional experience, scattered as they lack the capacity to be articulated, but feasible to be processed, so as not to remain in the category of thing-in-themselves with which the mind is unable to operate. When this transformation does not take place, one of the thing that happens is its evacuation through projective identification.
The catastrophic, unbearable nature of what thus remains immutable, seems to be a good enough reason to get rid of these feelings, but what happens when the emotions are indistinguishable from bodily experiences, as it supposedly occurs at the dawn of mental life? This lack of discern becomes dangerous when from this no as yet discriminated mental world in which experiences are woven, the unbearable is extricated, dragging along with it what already had been transformed.
I tend to believe that the experience of discontinuity that was neither transformed nor evacuated, remained so to say, frozen in beta elements, indestructible witness of what is beyond memory.
Bion states that a container able to desintoxicate a primitive emotion is the necessary condition for the emotion to be elucidated. In this model, primitive is an adjective that qualifies the not knowing more than its temporal placement.
When the relationship container-contained is emphasised, genetic speculation of a linear development gives up its place for us to be able to reformulate the direction the signification takes. The process of forming a relationship is not an adjustment mechanism that waits for a meaning to be given, it is in itself the basic operation of the meaning.
This patient had a chronological past empty of memories, a text of his amnesiac history but he had no impressions nor sensory data processed by the alpha function and related in a narrative texture available to have access to private communication.
Is the transformation from beta elements to alpha elements possible? Obviously I cannot answer this but I will try to make an approximation to the question.
Projective identification is, among the primitive psychic mechanisms one of the manifold and different defensive methods when mental life is confronted with a threat. Dismantling (Meltzer), destruction of internal and external reality, including the destruction of the perceptual apparatus (Bion) and the "detachment from alpha elements" when facing psychic pain in patients called "Living Fossils" by E. Bianchedi and col., are all intricate formulations of defensive modes which gives an account of clinical phenomena which demand new approaches.
In this same spirit I would add the permanence of beta elements as a monolith, a marker in a space that has no co-ordinates, with the purpose of not succumbing in the void that results from the lack of working through the protomental experiences, preserving the rest of the personality. Those in which emotions, bodily experiences and events, cannot be differentiated. Permanence does no imply organisation, even though they can be held back by the system as beta screen.
Although to our present knowledge no function is available in the mental apparatus that activates its recycling, we can speculate about their reception by the analyst when he works in an affective state of mind that is open to projective identification… good ones or bad ones" (1962).
There is another condition I would like to add. We usually see how the concept of transference interpretation is restricted to autoreferential terms. This behaviour obstructs the possibility to grasp a new phenomenon that needs to find its particular development and interpretation even though it is no registered by the patients consciousness. In other words, publication is not possible when we are dealing with phenomena related to the beta screen, which does no permit the gaining of access to what is no registered, repressed or forgotten.
When the repetitive emission of beta elements runs repetitively against an "affective state open to..." a binding together of what is scattered in minimal sense units might start, providing in this manner new psychic objects that will participate in the unconscious mental state.
Once the conditions are created to the private publication, one has to gain access to a different system of transformations so that the elements of one side of the barrier, that which is registered, can pass to the other side by means of an alteration in the editing structure.
Dr. Dario Sor has a very original way to conceive the way to cross the unconscious-conscious gap. In the first place the construction of the relationship container-contained and then the participation of the Ps-D function, in a twofold task: scattering so as to get rid of the superfluous and the subsequent understanding of what is essential.
Possibly this assembly must be lead by an emotional conjunction, in the common sense mode: "a function that is carried out by the sense organs in relation to objects in space and time" (1967)
The passing through the contact barrier in this contexts involves dealing with the delicate balance that exists between catastrophe and change.
We can assume that the text published by the patient was set up during the metamorphosis of those beta elements whose textures kept the undiscovered waiting for it to emerge from the "unknown region".
I wish to quote the following paragraph from a letter sent by this patient several years later:
"A balance has to be reached between emptiness and death. Emptiness does not mean dying, it is like something white where one becomes aware of things. Everyone seeks to live in its own balance without living the emptiness, and then it leads directly to death".
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIANCHEDI, E. et al. Asociación Libre / Disociación Libre. Los Fósiles Vivientes. XXXIX Congreso Internacional - 1995.
BION, W. (1962): Learning from Experience. London. Heinnemann.
(1963): Elements of Psychoanalysis. London. Heinnemann.
(1965): Transformations. London. Heinnemann.
(1967): Second Thoughts. London. Heinnemann.
(1970): Attention and Interpretation. London. Tavistock.
FREUD, S. (1896): Letter to Fliess, December 6, Letter 52, S.E.1,233.
MELTZER, D. (1977): El Concepto de Represión. Revista de la Sociedad Colombiana de Psicoanálisis. Vol. 2 - No 2.
SOR, D. (1995): Personal Communication.
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