In this short communication, I want to introduce just a few bionic topics which I hope will be useful to reflect on and about the Net.

As far as I can recall, Bion has, along his writings, left us a threefold concept of links. One was that of L, H and K links (and their minus versions), which he seems to have taken from Klein's Love, Hate and Reparation, and from her early epistemophilic impulse. The second concept has to do with the Container/Contained link. And the third one with the Parasitic, Simbiotic and Comensal links, which are related to the latter.

If we want to use these concepts as tools to investigate the links we established with and through the Net, as members of this Conference, what we will be sure of is that K played an important part among them. Bion stated "that L or H may be relevant to K but that neither is by itself conducive to K" (p.47, Learning from Experience). I cannot imagine that anyone can relate to any subject/person with only a K link. Couto Marinho tells us in his paper on "Love as a Link" that L is relevant to K as it allows "the sad task of understanding". May members of a Work Group be linked only by K? May they be linked to the subject they try to work on, only with K? Can you recall what your emotions were when you first opened up the site of the International Centennial and found it? When you found you were able to read and print the papers that were to be given here these days? Didn't you Love the Internet for enabling you to establish K with the Conference matters? I have to confess that I even felt I loved Dr. Silvio Merciai, who I had never seen before, for the wonderful job he had done for us. Now, can you recall your feelings when one night at 11, let's say, you wanted to get back to the Mailing List to look up the latest contribution of Dr. X on P.I., to be able to continue with your own paper, and your computer showed "the system cannot find the file specified"? O.K. This was just a kind of psychodrama to refresh our L, H and K links with the Internet.

My question now is: is a misuse of the Net on minus L, H and K possible? Could we imagine emotional/antiemotional situations as examples? If "-K represents the link constituted by NOT understanding i.e. mis-understanding" (p.52, Learning from Experience), it has to do with an activity intended to deplete meaning and therefore Truth. A vulgarisation of knowing, an active uninterest to know. Let us suppose someone browsing through the papers of the Conference, to just see if some pornographic content is to be found since Psychoanalysis, he has heard, deals with sex.

Or suppose someone spending time on the Net, to evade his feelings towards his mind, his family, internal or external, or a towards a lost love object like in mourning? Suppose he actively denies any kind of love link (L) to the objects he is relating to within or without the Net. Pure K (Puritanism?). Is that possible or would this be -L? Now the active emptying a link of hate (H), when frustrated (being frustration source for H) when, for example finding a colleague has already written about what he himself had in mind to, and even much better than he thought he ever could, wouldn't this be a -H illustration. After all, isn't one on an automatic program instead of living human beings? Might this be hypocrisy? A third situation, which will surely ring bells to you, is the dismantlement of every link whatsoever. No LHK. No -L-H-K. NO LINK.

Dismantlement of links is typical of autism. Chris Mawson, in his communication on the Mailing List, from May 20, 1997, on "Autism & the Dying Person" asks what "structural and dynamic operations of the ego might underlie both autistic and states of terror in the dying patient". He thinks of a breakdown of the precursors of symbolic functioning, and follows on to splitting and P.I. processes, which lead to psychotic states. But then he mentions an identification with a light switch. This, I think, is exactly what happens with dismantlement of links. "Common sense", which links emotionally self to objects, is just switched off.

I would rather say that the dying patient, dying of mental death, is a victim of an unbearable terror, which had to be curtailed, switching off every single emotional link. So, no anxiety is to be seen in the horizon. The price is the loss of impulse to mental growth. As I was writing this I just remembered the quotation from the Memoir (I.38, p.178) that is also on the heading of the Scientific Program of this Conference. The dialogue getting on in "The Dream" was about decisions such as going into war obeying patriotism or risking a woman's life having a baby, both, as we know from Bion's autobiography, emotional experiences that filled him with terror. The quotation is: "Bion: Most people experience mental death if they live long enough. You don't have to live long to have that experience - all you have to do is to be mentally alive". And Alice replies: "You speak as if it were simple to be mentally alive...".

While I was thinking about my contribution to this panel, I had to announce my patients a three-week analytical break to undertake this trip. One of them, a 23 old youngster, who was separated from his mother/family at the age of two months for a severe pyloric hypertrophy which had to be operated on twice, and only could get back to them only three months later, remained ever since with a postautistic sequellae. When I informed him of the break he answered undisturbedly: "that is very practical for me, for I will have to study hard for my exams". He remained absolutely calm. When I told him he might be denying some anxiety due to the time he will not be able to communicate with me, he replied in a very peaceful tone of voice: "Really, this means nothing to me. I can only find that more or less sessions make no difference whatsoever to me". And I could feel he was unfortunately telling the truth. Most of the time he had a robotic functioning, emotionless. Numbers of exams, of weeks he had left to get ready for them, numbers corresponding to the grades he obtained at University (never very high), memorising numbers of car plates, replaced emotional experience. He was a sort of numerologist of the worst kind. I just brought this vignette to differentiate emotionality and antiemotionality from emotionlessness, linklessness. A prototypical autistic functioning, if this could be so called. Why am I mentioning this automatic functioning here? Because, following Mawson's metaphor of the switch, I wish to highlight the difference between operating computers and becoming (identifying) with them. Is it that we can get caught in the Net, like fish in a net (with a small n), into autism? (Another view of the fishing metaphor so nicely described by R.M. Young on his March 96 communication on the Mailing List, and enriched with Aldo Canevari's April 96 contribution). This is another topic I would like to introduce in this discussion.

Now I want to remind you of Du. Isn't this a very interesting character of the Memoir? What words does Du introduce himself with? "I am the future of the Past. The shape of the thing-to-come". He claims to be "Ought o'nomic", meaning he is dependent of the Autonomic Nervous System as well as representing "the deepest level of the unconscious" (Bléandonu, G., p.255) of which we know a lot about, second hand, but which actually we know very little. Du smartly distinguishes Roland's (our) "ought-o-matic/automatic" system of evading emotions (for me this is -L, -H, -K and Basic Assumption Group life) from "Oughtism/Autism" which he claims to be better than the former. And this, as I have said above, is what I understand as emotionlessness or linklessness.

In what way or ways does the Net contribute to be "the future of our Past"? Have you thought (you surely have) about Time and Space conceptions (Row E of the Grid)? What kind of realization of Time and Space on the Net is matched with the Pre-conception (Row D) to form the Conception and the Concept? Would a child raised and educated in the Net era, who by pressing some commands can get into a palace in Thailand (Yes, Bill Gates' new agency Expedia enables us to do so), a school in Singapore or the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem in a question of minutes, have the same concept of geographical dimensions of the Earth and the changes of time in different latitudes, as any one of us (especially the elder ones)? "I don't say <good> or <bad>" (Du, A Memoir of the Future, II.4). I just wish to think with you about the changes in the introjection and structure of the symbolic inner world and objects thus formed. Can't the Net be either the realization of a cesura traversal or the realization of separation denial?

Maybe this is related with Man announcing the Future "...as if to an audience in the darkness in front of him" (A Memoir... I.25), being the darkness the unknown unconscious that "casts its shadow before" (in front or behind?). So, wouldn't it be wise to examine the problem as being twofold? 1. The Net being an evolution of our Past presented, be it as our past oughtism/autism, be it the presentation of a mother idea/thought, which traversed the cesura from our pre-natal part of the self on the way to wisdom? 2. Influencing (like Du, "I don't say good or bad"), the future of mind structure. Shouldn't we trace a double direction arrow between Past and Future, like Bion did with Ps----D?

It might be useful for our discussion, I feel, to differentiate here wisdom, knowledge and intelligence. "You've got your intelligence where your wisdom should be" says Du (A Memoir...II.4). And further on (A Memoir...III.7) P.A. states that "... whatever knowledge each of us has must be augmented by wisdom." ... "Part of the problem is that intelligence, as a capacity for collecting knowledge, needs to be distinguished, isolated - ... - from wisdom". And wisdom can only be acquired by learning from experiencing emotionally real life. Which of these elements are virtues of the Net? Intelligence, as far as it has been installed by man, therefore better called artificial intelligence. Knowledge collected by (artificial) intelligence too, perhaps better called information, as it is not the result of any kind of emotional experience.

For this same reason wisdom is as absent in the Net as it is in oughtism/autism. There is, though, a chance in us users.

To end with, it came to my mind the reticulum of Elliott Jaques, quoted by Bion (Learning from Experience, p. 92) as a model for growth: "o develops by accretion to produce a series of sleeves that are conjoined. The result is a reticulum in which the meshes of the reticulum are emotions"..."The model for the growth of the o is a medium in which lie suspended the <contents>". This model applies to the Net but for the emotions. So, what kind of net is the Net? Considered from a human vertex it is an Ought-o-matic/Automatic net in which the links/meshes are autonomic of emotions and capable of containing information. It is up to us whether we get caught in this net or learn to use it with the same precautions we would take if we explored a swamp. As P.A. says at the end of the Memoir:

"Unless the human animal learns to become an expert in discrimination, he will be in imminent danger of the wrong choice"..."There is no substitute for the growth of wisdom. Wisdom or oblivion -- take your choice". Good luck to us all or "happy holocaust!" ("A Memoir...", final words).