Arnaldo Chuster's Paper

FACING WHAT CAN NEVER BE REACHED

by Arnaldo Chuster, M.D.

Training and teaching Analyst of Rio de Janeiro Psychoanalytical Society, member of Pro-Ethics Group

I would like to begin this paper reminding some ideas that Bion exposed in a conference in Brasilia, 1975. He started the conference speaking about those peculiar ideas that seemed to disappear and developed later at some particular date. In this conference Bion was thinking about Brasilia, the city.

" The remarkable thing is that that idea appears to be able to transform itself into action. I have heard it said that another poet, Shakespeare, is the person who was really responsible for giving his people the idea of what they might become. How do these poets come to formulate ideas in a way which make them fertile? "

" Somebody must be able to sow a mental seed which is capable of germination. That is why the poets, philosophers and matematicians are so important; they make possible for an idea to become an action"

For my own purposes I will change the idea of Brasilia, the city, a single place, for the world wide idea of Internet.I would like to think that we are here in this room at this point that Bion spoke about in the following quotation:

"To come now to something more immediate and practical: it doesn’t matter very much what members of a panel think, but it is important if it starts sprouts of thought all over the place. This sounds simple, but in my experience it is not; in my experience these ideas can be stamped out before they have had a chance to develop. It would be nice to think that groups of people will form and devote themselves to the development of some idea which have heard expressed during one of the meetings."

To a psychoanalyst Internet is a challenge. This challenge means to think about a specific reality: the unconscious realizing as Internet. Two questions could be our guide to a dialogue: What does Internet has to offer to psychoanalysis and what psychoanalysis has to offer through Internet?

As a psychoanalyst I can observe analysands, on transference, expressing themselves through some material about Internet. I can imagine that they are feeling the analytical link as a special flow of thoughts, feelings and ideas. On this unceasing flow one can observe and feel, on every moment, a significative gap between reality and personality. Bion, in Transformations (1965) called it "inacessibility to O". This gap represents the very strangeness and the challenge of mankind’s history: reality can never be reached. Its impact is always oblique. Reality only shows itself up as a realization. Reality is a lack, it is an emptiness inside a realization. Only realizations can be reached.

The subject of " inacessibility to O" is the subject of Transformations.It is a subject that has as his limit "O" and here we have something that can never be reached. So, all we can do is to imagine. In another words Bion gives us his version of human imagination’s history. He rebuilds in psychoanalysis the same discovering movements so well said in Aristotle quotation : "Soul never thinks without phantasy". Blake’s quotation in "Proverbs of Hell" also fits very well to the text: "What is now proved was once imagin’d "

I think now of a patient that got married and like in Yeats’s poem "Salomon and the witch", talking about "Thou love has a spider’s eye..." , told me with despair: "I had before got married a Pentium 200 girlfriend, now I have in the same woman a 1.0 wife...almost all softwares are not running anymore..." At the beginning I didn’t know if he was joking or seriously talking, but somehow I could feel his anxiety to get rid of something.I suggest that he was complaining of something he can never reach, something that he could only dream. Then he told me his last night dream: "an empty eye, a blind eye, was looking at him...he was very frightened of it and tryed to put an eye of glass on it but he could not do it".

He associated the glass of eye with the computer, that can fix every image..then became obvious that.he could not obtained the same solution with his wife, he had to deal with many feelings, many unknown feelings on the new situation of marriage...and that was also his situation in analysis...

The same things about reality can be said about Truth. Truth can never be reached, but it is there as an Origin.... some kind of a Origin lost forever.All we can do it is to imagine about it.

Impelled by the oblique impact of this Origin human beings build their lifes in a permanent search for a meaning to this Origin. We can observe this search in a wide spectrum with two poles that Bion named narcisism and social-ism.

To realize and while realizing human beings buid a history of realizations troughout this spectrum. Internet is one of these realizations. We can use it to share meanings with lots of people, but we can use it also as a form of alienation, or a form of obtaining pleasure by means of referring everything to oneself. Therefore facing Internet means to feel a gap between reality and realization, means to face something - an another side- one can never reach.

To make history mankind is made by history. One can’t deny that Internet changes history and makes history, but in what measure will change mankind? I can imagine here Bion asking: is there some one here that would put this on a poem, or a picture, or a formula? Is there someone here that would feel a memory of the future?

The strenght and the way of living of a culture are defined by integration and difference inside the movement of the very vigour of unconscious reality. History is the link that humankind suffers between reality and realization. Our times are marked by Internet upbringing and its growing presence amongst people all over the world. Therefore Internet is one of those distinguished realizations that rise from times to times.

Historical experience is always a jump in the unknown and is also a kind of adventure. It is like a bridge we can cross feeling insecurity, anxiety, fear, but we can feel also all dare, adventure and mistery.

XX century, that is almost reaching the end, is a morning century- it wake us up to many realizations.In this end Mankind is a being in transition.In its limit we can see Internet as a landmark. I think here on the words of Nietzsche in Zaratustra: "Great things in men appears while they are a bridge and not a dead end. Kind things in men appears while they are a stair and a road"

and going back to Bion:

" A mathematician is able to prove a lot of things. Newton, for example, told Halley that it was obvious how the movement of the planets was governed. When Halley asked; " can you prove it?", Newton replied, "Give two or three days and I certainly will" the ‘poet’ Newton made the discovery; the ‘mathematician’ Newton proved it.

We don’t seem able to be able to grow and develop to order, but we can find plenty of ways by which we prove that what we do is right - it is acurious aspect of the creative human being. One would like to achieve the kind of thought which might make it possible not to be deceived in that way. So even those few people who are disposed to explore the possibilities of psychoanalysis have a great deal to do; it can not be assumed that is a subject which has been settled, that it stopped at Freud in the way tha waves of the ocean mught stop at the feet of Canute. The world of reality does not conform to the capacities of human beings; that is why it is so important that scientists and others- all of us- shhould have some respect for reality, and should not allow ourselves to distort our view of it"