Arnaldo Chuster's Paper

THE MYTH OF SATAN: AN AESTHETIC VIEW OF BION’S CONCEPT OF "TRANSFORMATION IN O"

by Arnaldo Chuster , M.D.

The complete version of my paper is metonymic. It opens to many standpoints.But I will try to adjust it for the allowed time of presentation focusing on the specific situation that I had in mind when I wrote it. It is the state of mind described by analysands as a mixture of terror, loss of known identifications, increase in sensitivity ( to pain, pleasure, and responsibility), insecurity about future life, and painful doubts about waist of time in the past, as one finds oneself moving toward what seems most undesirable, uncontrollable, and denied in oneself – something that " urge to exist". This "state of affairs" (sometimes acompanied by some kind of dreams in which one falls into an abyss, or the ground disappears under one’s feet) leads to the belief that analysis is having a "worsening"effect ( a hypothesis that may be reinforced by complaints from family members and coworkers). However, this "worsening"effect is the way to "cure" ( lacking a more adequate term). Bion talked many times about this situation: I am thinking here mainly on Bion’s concept of "Transformation in O" {Transformations (1965), Emotional Turbulence (1977) and Clinical Seminars (1987).

I made a comparison of this state of mind with one of the most tragic and eloquent myths in human history: the myth of Satan, the one embodied in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, relying specifically on some psychoanalytic concepts put forth by W.R. Bion ( In a sense, I was also thinking about the links between Bion,Milton and Satan. I believe that one of this links is man’s struggle for modernity, a standpoint that can be fully reinforced in literature).

Milton described this struggle in the mythic tradition of Icarus contained by Satan, as he takes flight, applies his wings, his ingenuity, and his subtlety to a single cause: the search for autonomy. He no longer acknowledges God’s right to limit his aesthetic experience of conquering the space of dreams. That is why the Almighty sees him as a destroyed, fallen angel, the very symbol of hubrys.To dream is to think, to go beyond the métron, beyond oneself, toward the enigma. As in the case of Oedipus, Satan’s curiosity is treated as arrogance ( Bion, 1957), and he is accused of being criminal, lustful, and megalomaniac. Nevertheless, he will not back away, and he pays the necessary price in order to experience pleasure and freedom:he is driven out of Eden. He criticized the Establishment.

Having lost Paradise, Satan is constantly falling in a new world, and, as much he falls into an infinite, empty, formless space, as much he falls into himself.

In another analogy with our patients, while Satan is falling he is posessed by two painful feelings, which point to the sharp vulnerability of his being, now separated from God: he feels all alone and at the same time dependent. From now on, the new consciousness is increasingly filled with doubts and uncertainties. But the darkness that comes with them is not only the exclusion from heavenly glory: it is also a scientific principle and a function of life itself - everything moves, everything becomes precarious, nothing is solid any more. The only certainty is death, and the search for certainty is, metaphorically, a death wish.

Satan denounces those who aspire to death because they fear to live, for life is a fall,a trajectory full of surprises and accidents. Also, the fall is passion, and passion is what invests life with meaning, making relationships more intimate. It differs from the blind love required by God and refused by Satan; that is Satan becomes aware of the banality of daybreak, of the sundown, of the color of the sky. And it is when the phenomenom is most unjustified that he is most philosophical; for every situation said to be banal always points back to the original vigor of silence that allows observation of what is most difficult: the obvious.

At this point Satan is Lucifer, the light of morning. In order to face darkness, he takes on the mythic tradition of Prometheus. He is also subject of curiosity and again as Oedipus, his curiosity is punished with exile and physical suffering, invoking the elements of mourning and melancholia, subversion and irony, harmony and disharmony, the same elements that one can observe at the analytic process.

In metaphoric words, analytical cure is a fall, in the sense that the earlier state can never be reconstituted. But, for all its deconstructive nature, for all the losses and objects that can never be completely restored, the fall is poietic - it is also a form a creation. What is created is precisely the advent of a new subject, never given, but painstakingly attained, in the course of a struggle for greater inner freedom.

William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell affirms that the reason why Milton wrote Paradise Lost was the fact that he was both a real poet and "of Devil’s party without knowing it". Observe how the artistic and literary vision illustrated by Blake’s statement sees the process of creation associated with the fall of the knowledge. I think that one can point out here another aesthetic aspect of Bion’s concept of "transformation in O": it is not knowledege that make us change, but the enigma that invade us. The subject of "transformation in O" is what embodies this enigma - as in dreams, in myths, and in poems. He is a subject who speaks another language, and for this reason needs another voice. It should be understood, thus, that he is not exactly a speaking object: rather, he is spoken; not a dreaming subject, but one who is dreamed of. I think this is a way of describing aesthetically the transition from "knowing about one self " to "being oneself" -Bion( 1965, 1970, 1987 )

The condition of this situation is, to Bion, the emotional experience, represented in writing as the triangle K, L, H, ( thirst for knowledge, love, hate). This concept sustains also the mythico-literary view of analytical discourse allowing a different understanding, as it establishes, on the side of the analyst, a mental state I will label the psychoanalytical poietic self. I have found in Holderlin an analogue for this Self, in a quotation where the poet stresses the infinite vertex of language in "the triple nature of the poietic self, by means of which it becomes possible to transcend the operation of transition from a determinate infinity to a more general infinity". This description, I believe coincides with the definition of myth given by Bion in Elements of psychoanalysis (1963), as a basic form of preconception and a stage at which the individual’s private knowledge (determinate infinity) is comunicated to the group ( general infinity ).This definition shows the preconception as the source of all communication of the experience of the unconscious to the social group through the individual.

In short, the psychoanalytical poietic self is one which possesses the analytical function, since its limits is "O"( the void and formless infinite) and it operates with the uninhibited use of imagination freeing intuition to search for new interpretations. Bion(1970,1975) formulated the conditions that must prevail if the analyst is to function as such. He suggests that this is possible by means of furthering and deepening the state of sensorial deprivation, working as free as possible of memory, desire and the need for comprehension.

The definition of the psychoanalytical poietic self may be completed by Wordsworth’s comparison of imagination to the birth of a child who disappears in the adult, but who may be retrieved by contemplation of nature and human society. There is a double movement in this retrieval: the way to maturity is also a return to childhood - this can’t happen without turbulence since the subject is falling in himself.

To reword the statement so as to adapt to my own purposes, I would say that analytical act occurs only within the scope of the double movement of restoration and evolution of the Self ( Bion, 1970), when it becomes possible to create spaces for reflections, in which the potentialities of the subject’s future allow him or her, if only for a moment, to have the emotional experience alluded to in Keat’s lines:

Then I felt like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken

This can occur only if attention is given to the impulse to inhibit, which Bion (1970) describes as being essentially the envy of good objects that produce growth. This inhibition is always a inhibition of the capacity for imagination, and these objects are those that can be articulated by the language of achievement, paving the way to Transformation in O .

The practice of psychoanalysis is an activity founded on myths. Its discovery comes from Freud’s use of the Oedipus myth. His use brought to light a number of elements that had been neglected by other fields of knowledge, and furthered, within the socio-historical process, the ethical goal of helping people to become autonomous, more capable of reflecting and of making responsible choices. All of mankind, though exactly how much cannot be measured, has benefited from psychoanalysis, which as a practical-poietical activity may be said to be the other voice of modernity. This concept can be well represented by many aspects of Bion’s concept of "transformation in O".But these ideas I haven’t time to present now. It can be readed on the complete version of my paper, where I intended also to discuss the intrinsicaly modern nature of psychoanalysis. Milton’s caractherization of Satan, from a socio-historical vertex is surprising poetic antecipation of modernity, with is caracteristics of critique ( of religion, morals, law, and politics), revolution ( as an instrument for social change but mainly in kantian sense as change of method) and the discovery of double infinity (cosmic and psychical). Through this aesthectic standpoint I was thinking how much the psychoanalytical process allows the analysand to fine-tune to modernity, defined as the incresase in critical and reflexive ability to make responsible choices, increase in autonomy, and adequate working-through of the confrontation between finitude and infinity, by means of lessening the envious inhibition of growth-producing good objects?

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Arnaldo Chuster