WHAT IS THINKING - AN ATTEMPT TO AN INTEGRATIVE STUDY OF W.R. BION'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PROCESSES OF KNOWING

"Solomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance, so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion" (Bacon, 1625, Essays, 58, 'Of Vicissitude of Things')

THINKING AND THOUGHTS; PROCESSES OF KNOWING AND KNOWLEDGE

One is used to regard 'thinking' as the typical feature that differentiates humans from other living beings. Is that so? There are other animals that probably think. Thinking was at first regarded as a conscious process, and the fact that it has some unconscious features follows on being object of abhorrence (For example, Archard, 1984). The capacity to rationalize (Jones, 1937; Freud, 1911) complicates the issue, linked to a persistent tendency to regard thinking and logical reasoning as if they were synonymous. It became clear that 'thinking' is a kind of time-server to goals striking by their lack of commonsensical thought -- rationality at the service of irrationality. The growing perception of the existence of some phenomena which became known as illusions, delusions and hallucinations added another question to the whole issue of thinking. Their 'presence' became to be regarded as indicating lack of thinking but it came to be regarded as an excess of thinking as well.

Is the capacity to hallucinate a subtler and more precise factor that differentiates human beings from other living beings? Are there any relationships between thinking and emotional experiences, such as the avoidance of pain? Another factor was brought into consideration: forgetfulness, later enlightened by psycho-analysis, in many cases, as appertaining to the realm of repression, splitting and denial. More questions gushed in, in a seemingly unceasing sprouting: is thinking is a material fact, dependent on brain or neuron enzymes or some brain occurrences at a quantic level-occurrences? Is it not a material fact at all? (Planck, 1946, p. 88; Penrose, 1989, 1994). Those who do not deal with it as a material fact brough tanother whole set of questions, such as: are there any relationships between thought processes, verbal formulations and symbol formation? (Bion, 1956; Segal, 1957). Is what we call reality something that already exists or is it something we create through the use of our thinking apparatus? This is only a sample among the myriad of unanswered questions which display how cloudy and uncertain is the issue of thinking. It produced more questions than answers.

There is contention even in our human 'ardent desire for knowledge', as Kant called it (Kant, 1781, p.250). This urge was called by Melanie Klein as an 'epistemophilic instinct' (Klein, 1932, p. 153). It seems to be met through the use of one of its factors, namely, our capacity to think and thinking itself. Thinking and knowing are intertwined; one is either a function or a factor of the other. The contention was brought into awareness when we human beings realized that despite the fact that truth is the food of mind, mind hates truth, in the metaphor coined by Bion and used in many occasions (Bion, 1962b, 1970, 1975)

One may discriminate to pursue knowledge and to cope with processes of knowing. A very abridged glance at a long history that was expanded elsewhere (Sandler, 1994, 1996) can be the comparison between features of knowledge vis-à-vis features of processes of knowing.

When one aims to get knowledge, one also is involved in:

Knowledge displays a basic contradiction: it is usually regarded as final (in the innings of the doctrine or school that grows from them) and suddenly it may come to be regarded as disposable, for new 'paradigms' (Kuhn, 1983) are incessantly called forth. This created the ideas of falseability according Popper (Popper, 1963). Those paradigms or 'canons' are immanences amenable to be surpassed and incapable of conferring durability to findings which by its turn make them immune to time and space (See, for example, Bion, 1965, p. 32, when he describes features of 'O'). It lacks the 'beauty' referred by Poincaré, Keats and Penrose which appertains to the realm of transcendence, platonic forms or 'O'. It furnishes a sense of dominating and taming 'O'. Despite the heavy usage of postulates, it many times loses itself in the shrine of theories and methods, as pointed out Adorno in his famous discussion with Popper (Adorno, 1967). It creates a 'thinking' that at its best can prove its own presumptions.

One may contrast some features of processes of knowledge:

A process of knowing is ever in the move. Its movement is characterised by a constant paradox that includes what is known and what is unknown (Or PSD in Bion's quasi-mathematical notation of Klein's formulation on the two positions). 'Knowledge' thus obtained is never final and therefore there are no doctrines or schools sprouting from them. It looks for selected facts (Poincaré, quoted by Bion, for example, in 'Learning from Experience' and 'Cogitations', pp. 72 and 18 respectively) and invariances (Bion, 1965) and therefore it respects some transcendences and their dynamic equilibrium with immanences, again without splitting them. There are neither paradigms nor canons when it can be put into function. There are some transient, flashy, fleeting spotting of expressions of transcendences, or 'invariances', evolutions in 'O' (Bion, 1965).

Its main consequence is the hypothesis that thoughts exist without a thinker to think them. It is not very easy to estimate the value of such an hypothesis and it can be measured by the reactions against it; for it constitutes a blow in human omnipotence, which equals previous blows given by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. The processes of thinking and perhaps even the development of an ability to think are imposed into mind, as a developmental need, due the existence of thoughts. For example, the thoughts 'wheel', 'natural selection', 'aeroplane', 'passionate love', 'Planck's constant', 'Einstein's constant', 'relativity theory' already existed, albeit in a non-sensuous or very primitive, larvae or cystic form, 'floating in the reality as it is', much time before someone was available to think them. The clinical relevance of this hypothesis is that thoughts without a thinker also exist in the analytic room, waiting for the creative couple to think them. As far as I was able to investigate, this kind of hypothesis was seriously expanded for the first time in the history of western thinking by Wilfred R. Bion: thoughts are epistemologically previous to thinking (Bion, 1962a,b, 1963).

Psycho-analytical research, specially through the contribution of Dr. Wilfred Bion, enlightened some fact: pretensions to knowledge and abhorrence toward transient processes of knowing perhaps appertain to the realm of hallucination. In contrast, coping with processes -- necessarily incomplete -- of knowing appertains to the realm of human nature and its relationships with the real world and the real facts, namely, those Nature-dependent facts. This is necessarily incomplete; it is a transient alive fact, in perpetual motion, evolving if and when life exists. He suggested that the whole body of psycho-analysis could be a 'vast paramnesia' to 'fill the void of our ignorance' (Bion, 1976, 1977c), coming to the point of suggesting to 'stop investigations in psycho-analysis', 'but in the psyche it betrays' (Bion, 1975, p. 122); also that the insight could be linked to the perception of 'trains of thoughts already available' to the patient (Bion, 1975, p.204). 'Paramnesias', 'investigations in psycho-analysis' correspond to knowledge. 'The psyche it betrays' and 'already available trains of thoughts' correspond to processes of knowing. Also, his observations on thoughts without a thinker challenges some omnipotent, 'idealistic' ideas that mind produces thoughts and reality itself. Those observations met some sensible reactions from the establishment, already emphasized by other authors (as Green, 1992) that do not interest us now.

The 'non-explanation factor' stems from 'an ability to tolerate paradoxes' (Sandler, 1996). The tolerance of paradoxes is possible in many ways and one of them is the use of intuition coupled with the dialectical method: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Or mother, father and son/daughter, or in Bion's quasi-mathematical notation. This method was developed by some Ancient Greeks as a conversational tool. In recent times it was Hegel, after Kant and Fichte, who profited from it, not as a method of conversation, but as a method to encircle mental functioning and to develop processes of knowing. Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott developed a tolerance when facing paradoxes up to a point that the most important key-concepts in our science are formulated through the use of antithetical pairs. For example: the two principles of mental functioning (being the synthesis, the conscious awareness of reality), the life and death instincts (being the synthesis, life itself); love and hate (being the synthesis, the creative parental couple); PSD (synthesis: mental life itself); psychical reality and material reality (synthesis, human being), container/contained (in its various expressions, synthesis is mother/baby, the creative couple, analyst and analysand among others), binocular vision.

Bion expanded and developed the verbal formulation of some relationships between unconscious thought processes, dream-work and perception of reality, as well as some factors that hampers those processes. Processes of knowing are dependent of an epistemological function of the mind. This is a function that strives to near reality, the fulfilment of this goal notwithstanding (for 'O' is unknowable). Thinking processes are factors in the various expressions (manifestations) of the epistemophilic instinct which promotes the K-link. Those manifestations, or phenomenic expressions, are themselves, by their turn, functions. Hence we have the psycho-analytic function of the mind as one of those manifestations, the mathematical function of the mind, the artistic function of the mind. Those functions strive to near 'O' or to express fleeting glimpses of partial aspects of 'O'.

KNOWING, THINKING, AND PSYCHO-ANAYSIS

Freud, Klein and Bion furthered the apprehension of some thought processes and some modes of thinking and not-thinking that sets them forth -- or back (the field of minus K according Bion). Dr. Bion was able to reunite the most outstanding contributions stemming from the Rennaissance, Enlightenment and Romantic period with Psycho-analytsis toward the development of knowledge of "facts as they really are" (Bion oftently quotes this Samuel Johnson's phrase) and the study of the vicissitudes, obstacles and difficulties created by this same human being in order to do not know what "facts really are" -- various kinds of transformations, such as rigid, projective and in hallucinosis (Bion, 1965). Knowing and thinking are inseparable of perception of reality and its vicissitudes.

In the wake of the unearthing of 'classics' that occurred during the Renaissance and thereafter, in the tardy British Renaissance of Shakespeare, and in the curious blend of romantic thrusts and classical influence as it appeared in Goethe's and Nietzsche´s efforts, Freud was able to unbury the relevance of the Oedipal triangle -- in itself and antithetical pair followed by synthesis. Also, he was able to formulate, perhaps for the first time in the Western Thinking, the existence of a principle, that for the lack of a better name, he called 'Reality Principle'. Hobbes and Locke, as well as Kant, neared it without ever touching it in an effective way; Bacon also neared it through science; but all of them seemed to remain clinged to the "Pleasure/Pain Principle'.

The perception/realization of the Reality Principle was doomed to remain stubbornly outside the reach of Science. For the goofy infancy of Science still insisted in being 'positive', that is, pleasure-seeking, satisfaction-fulfilling. The 'no-breast' aspect of science was and is continuously denied. 'I Think', 'I Know', 'I discovered', 'The solution' seemed to be preferable 'I think that I think', 'I am and I also am not' (to put up with a paradox), 'I know and I do not know', 'I think and I hallucinate'. Poets such as Shakespeare and Goethe were able to grasp it and to convey it into poetical form; musicians such as Bach and Beethoven, into musical form. The problem that remained with artistical (and philosophical) forms are their unsuitability to a broadened practical use. Freud's medical interest conferred practical use to the perception of the existence of the two principles of mental functioning to the care of individuals. Using his observations on World War I, the same war Dr. Bion experienced in its most deadly form, Freud was able to improve his previous formulation of the principle (Freud, 1920).

The end of it all, the reality of death, the existence of what Sir Arthur Eddington called 'the arrow of time' (Eddington, 1933) helped Melanie Klein to further enlighten death instincts and life instincts. Through Klein's developments of Freud's observations we became more prepared to face, during an actual analytical session, how those instincts come to compose the ethos of thought processes and also the ethos of absence of thought processes. Starting from Klein, Bion was able to study disorders of thought, or the epistemological errors at their inception, when they are in a most primitive, inchoate forms. Perhaps as any practising psycho-analyst, Freud, Klein and Bion used some of their personal life experiences or emotional experiences to nourish either their search and their findings, thus endowing their research -- processes of thinking and knowing -- of living features. In brief, they used their capacity to think, the ´nous´, the mind thinking about itself as Aristotle first called it, in order to tool their research. Freud´s perceptions were coupled with an undaunted honesty toward perceiving his relationship with his mother; Klein´s perceptions were linked of her experiences with sons and daughter; Bion´s contributions were linked to his life experiences as a teacher, a war tank officer, a father; in brief, his experiences into the realm of non-comprehension and mindless states. Is it possible to separate 'thinking' from common sense and life itself as it is, or 'facts as they really are'?

Early attacks against psycho-analysis used the argument of an 'undue' extension of observations made on ill people to 'healthy' ou 'normal' people. What critics did not realize was that psycho-analysis, perhaps intuitively and not in an explicit manner, always described the No-breast. It allows the inception of thought processes through the experience of 'No'. When one experiences what 'No' is all about, one may realize -- in himself -- the evolving 'Yes'. Psycho-analysis describes the names of our lies, through the formulation of names such as 'transference', 'narcissism', among many others. Perception of those lies may be a way to the person become 'what he or she is in reality' as Nietzsche, Freud and Bion insisted many times. Are 'transference' and 'projective identification' epistemological errors linked to the lack of concern toward truth and reality? (Bion, 1960, p. 125; circa 1960, p. 247).

Is it possible to get an inner, vivid and experienced apprehension of processes of thinking starting from the vertex of their absence? In analytical practice, this means the possibility to hallucinate during a session of analysis and to experience expressions of the psychotic personality, specially those appertaining to PS and the lack of ability to experience PSD). This is the 'stamping ground for the wild asses' referred by Bion in 'A Memoir of the Future' (Bion, 1975, p. 9). Conscious awareness of no-reality created by human mind, 'to turn the unconscious, conscious' in its highest pitch, the field of -K or ' minus', 'negative' broadly speaking, yields to the evolving experience (being, transformation in 'O') of reality.

We propose to consider some states where thinking and as a matter of consequence, perception of reality seems to be almost absent: the obtrusion of moral values, transference phenomena, allegiance to the Pleasure/Pain Principle to the point of being enslaved to it, denials of the movement between PS and D (the part). Starting from Bion´s contribution, after Keats (truth is beauty, beautiful truth) we consider that reality and truth are fully interchangeable terms, real synonyms. We are not considering truth from a moral vertex, but from cognitive vertex instead. Let us focus 'transference' and 'projective identification' starting from the 'truth'(or 'reality') vertex.

TRANSFERENCE AND PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION: MINDLESSNESS?

Transference phenomena stem from the compulsion to repetition -- and if it is repetitive, it is dead, for only death itself abolishes movement. Patients attribute to some people the same feelings, ideas, desires and perhaps realistic ideas that were due to significant figures of their historical past, long gone and now appertaining to the realm of memory and hallucination. Freud himself was able to explicitly state the hallucinatory character of transference (for example, Freud, 1912). Patients under 'transference' are not able to deal with reality, to face it, even the most elementary of the realities, as for example that the analyst is not their father. The person cannot think and discriminate; probably it was not a mere coincidence that Bion proposed to regard transference as a rigid transformation -- the rigor mortis of thought processes?

Projective identification as observed by Klein, being an unconscious omnipotent phantasy that makes its 'owner' to believe that he has the power to split out and thereafter to expel undesired ideas, wishes, feelings, thoughts or whatever it be. Once felt as appertaining to the outside, external milieu, this phantasy completes its cycle with the omnipotent feeling that such undesired feelings and ideas ought be 'inoculated' into someone else (primarily Mother). Projective identification perhaps may be regarded as another type of epistemological error too. Either transference or projective identification -- when they occur in adulthood -- are expressions of lack of thought processes or mindlessness. In Bion's terms, the field of minus K and the transformations in hallucinosis. Freud and Klein were acutelly aware of the hallucinated and 'phantastic nature' of transference and projective identification (Freud, 1912, p. 108; Klein, 1946, p. 298)

Love toward truth, or Plato's, Bacon's, Hume's, Kant's attempts can be seen in Freud's, Klein's, Winnicott's and Bion's works through their commonsensical dealing with some natural realities. Let's single one to illustrate the issue -- the breast.

'Breast' is a ´real reality´. In order to perceive it, the baby cannot insist either on as 'naively realistic' approach, splitting and denying its immaterial character, or in a 'naively idealistic' approach. The individual repeats the fumbling infancy of epistemology (and perhaps epistemology itself, still divided in the following dilemma, also repeats the fumbling psychotic infancy of any individual mind):

I) The baby may fall in what in philosophy is regarded as the ´naive realism´, that is, one relies exclusively in the sensuous apparatus and then one concludes that what was apprehended through this comparatively short-ranged method is reality itself. In Freud´s terms, the baby splits out psychic reality from material reality and privileges the later; it corresponds to the enforced splitting described by Bion in chapters 5 and 6 of ´Learning from Experience´. This approach means that the baby will be too leaned towards the sensuously apprehensible aspects of the breast. Psychic reality turns to lose its psychic features and is replaced by a state of mind which is neither awake nor asleep, neither alive nor dead -- thoughts are reified and turned into concrete entities. Development is hampered; adults who followed this path come to be a kind of mosaic of psychotic and neurotic aspects, without integration and coherence between fragmented aspects. Things-in-themselves cannot cohere in the extent 'they' constitute closed, isolated 'worlds'. They cannot be "link-able" objects. Bion coined dozens of metaphors which in my view help us the achievement of this kind of perceptions he had, as for example, ´the mind is too heavy a load that the sensuous beast cannot carry´ (Bion, 1975, p. 45). Greedy politicians, consummerism and pseudo-science best exemplified by positivism or neo-positivism are some of its offshoots in the 'adult' world; concrete, sensuously apprehensible pseudo facts replace, albeit tremporarily, psychic reality.

II) In the later case, one (a baby or a philosopher) insists in dealing with the breast as it was a bunch of projections. Intolerance of frustration means that such a baby tries to introduce its pre-conceived breast into the real breast, transforming it, in his mind, into a non-reality that can reach a point of no-return (a special kind of Tp which constitutes a deformation, as described by Bion in p. 12 of 'Transformations'. This kind of baby, as the hallucinated ´adult´, refuses to deal with the real breast. He or she does not allow reality to be as it really is, but tries to make sure it will be what he or she desires it to be. He or she cannot introject the real breast, for enviously and greedily hating it, trying to be superior to the breast. I shall not dwell on the vicissitudes of mother-baby relationship taking for granted the reader's acquaintance with Mrs. Klein's descriptions on the issue. It is linked to some specific unconscious phantasies such as the confusion between a breast and a penis. This phantasy can express itself in later ages through homosexual phantasies and hate directed towards the reality of the existence of Mother as the nourishing entity of the mind.

Hallucination prevails in either case. In (II) one privileges mind´s products, overvalues one's own faeces in a paranoid-schizoid fashion, dealing with them as if they were thoughts and reality itself. The person inflicts to himself a pseudo-mental life which grows, inflationarily, cancer-like, but cannot develop for it has no limiting factor (the No-breast, frustration) as well as it has no marriage with this limiting factor, reality itself. We will return to this point in the following sessions. In (I) the baby and the adult produces a manic overvaluating of concrete properties. In both cases, the baby cannot put up with the paradox first described by Dr.Winnicott (Winnicott, 1969): that the breast was created by him as well as it already exists. In this subjectivistic approach, 'naive idealism', the baby thinks he or she created the breast and denies it already existed; in the first case the baby stifles its mental life. The non-sensuous spectrum of psychic reality is almost extinguished accordingly. The baby feels that what exists is the external breast and nothing more than it. The expressions of those vicissitudes of development of thinking appear in later ages in many guises. For example, the naive idealism that mistakes the products of the mind with reality creates the belief on the existence of geniuses; its most extreme forms take the guise of mysticism. It also created the idea that the world or reality itself does not exist at all beyond what we see. The naive realism expresses itself in greedy tycoons and politicians, and also in sheer delinquency -- lack of concern toward life, people and truth. In Science, it produced the 'positivism'. This lack of concern to life expresses itself through dismissal or contempt toward Motherhood, Fatherhood and lack of interest in symbiotic relationships, collaborative links with oneself and with other people.

SOME EXTENSIONS MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH BION´S CONTRIBUTIONS

Bion proposed an analogic model which seems to me useful when one endeavours to improve one's apprehension of thinking processes, namely, the functioning of the digestive apparatus. This model allowed for some synthetic metaphors which convey the functioning of the mental apparatus used to think, such as 'truth is the food of mind´. His research lent to some insights in what concerns to the transformation of concrete sensuously apprehensible stimuli into non-concrete, immaterial, psychic facts (this is the operation of 'alpha-function'; Bion, 1962a, b) in the same way that concrete food is transformed into immaterial energy (ATP-adenosine tri-phosphate, where matter and energy meets in the human body).

Bion's improved insights seem to me allow the analogic use the mammal's reproduction system in order to approximate to what ´thinking´ is, adjoining it to the already existent model of the digestive system. I propose to join his concept of container/contained, in the sense of the exercising of masculinity and femininity and the basic creative act, namely, the parental couple and its intercourse, into the framework of alpha-function model and the digestive apparatus model in order to enable us to have some glimpses of the thought processes and the processes of knowing -- as they appear during an actual analytic session. Does it exist a psychic ability to be intuitively introduced, without confusing a breast with a penis? Should this same ability exist without confusing a vagina with a mouth? Should it be an useful model to our apprehension of the processes of thinking? Does the spermatozoid is a material reality which has a counterpart in psychic reality that can be called a 'thought without a thinker', waiting for a thinker who will think it -- then the ovum is a material reality that has as its psychic reality counterpart the thinker who will think the spermatozoid? In this primeval, inchoate area, one cannot separate matter from energy, psychic from material. I propose to regard as non-separate facts, made separate by effects of rational discourse and splitting processes in the mind: psychic and material, father, mother and the reproduction system. Should be ´the thought´ thus ´created´, a counterpart of sons and daughters? This implies that it is being symbolically, creatively produced, a product of a creative pair. In contrast, we have a mind that disregards truth and reality and hallucinates a ´homo-´ capacity which alone, idealistically or subjectivistically, or in psycho-analytic terms, autistically 'produces' thoughts (naive idealism). The counterpart in 'O' (ultimately unknowable) of what we call ´Nature´, ´reproduction´, the ´creative act´ always involves a creative pair and its 'product'. A new being is born, which is paradoxically new and not new.

SOME LINKS BETWEEN THE 'DIGESTIVE AND REPRODUCTION SYSTEMS MODEL' AND THE THINKING PROCESSES

The digestive system produces nourishment (energy) out from food (matter). In the same sense, Bion proposed to regard the mental apparatus as having an ability to produce 'alpha-elements' that are useful to thought processes and specially to dream-work, either during the night or during the day (Bion, 1962a, b). The latter is a most effective form of knowing. The digestive system produces 'useful' energy and 'useless' faeces -- something that must be put aside (waste), not useful as nourishment in its original form. The digestive system is a highly developed and effective system that ensures an useful splitting between blood (living, perpetual movement, energy, manifestation of life instincts) and faeces (dead, immovable, expression of death instincts). This splitting must occur from the point of view (vertex) of the living body. Social groups also share this point of view: they learned to do this very same splitting when they began to separate the water that could be used to drink from the water that could not be used to this purpose. Anyway, we are not stating that faeces are waste per se, or 'absolute waste'. We are not dealing here with absolute truths, for faeces, once expelled, may collaborate with the life cycle, albeit in a transformed way, in the sense that Freud described the fusion of death and life instincts. Bion's model allows us to compare hallucinations to faeces, and the capacity to hallucinate with some of the functions performed by the mental apparatus in the same sense that the production of faeces is a function of the digestive apparatus. Hence we may consider that the human capacity to hallucinate differs from its products, namely, hallucinations, in the same sense that faeces differ from the human capacity to digest food.

Scientific models and verbal formulations are evolutions in K; they do not evolve to ´O´ by themselves, for they need the thinking individual to do this. ´O´ in unreachable if one stops at the model that strives to convey aspects of it. I suppose that there is a need to maintain in a state of fitness the firm grip to the fact that only for purposes of discursive talk, to the building of scientific models, in order to communicate among ourselves in a given area of knowledge, we 'can' split the production of energy, ATP and glycogen, or some more minute products, still unknown, perhaps occurring at a quantic level, from the production of faeces. This is one of the aspects of human thinking: unable to grasp 'O' in its entirety, the very act of to think splits reality in order to apprehend it. In reality, the production of faeces and the production of glycogen and ATP is simultaneous: a basic real life paradox or antithesis which demands tolerance. In the same sense, material reality is a different form of existence as compared with psychical reality, yet it is in fact inseparable from it in the domain of the unknowable and the unreachable ´O´. Faeces (material) are a different form of existence if compared to ATP, living energy (immaterial) in its more elementary form hitherto know. The validity of the digestive model to the functioning of mind already was perceived by early psycho-analysts, in what concerns to the oral-cannibalistic stage; the love, life instincts manifestations appertaining to the noble art of cooking, hospitality, need no expansion here.

The capacity to hallucinate goes on, hand in hand with the capacity to think, all the time, day and night. Much like a hand or a coin which have two faces and one may reach their ´coin-ness´ or ´hand-ness´ nature observing any one of the faces. The simultaneous observation of the two faces is impossible to the sensuous eye. Therefore thoughts could be compared to ATP; hallucinations, to faeces. Both share the ´digestive´ ethos, the purposive function. Shakespeare makes this very clear in his plays: take for example the murdered king's ghost at Elsinore in Hamlet's opening scene; or the witches in Macbeth´s story: all convey some truths and they are at first pure hallucination, offering a chance to a process of knowing that can lead to in-cursionsex-cursions intoout of truth.

If the pre-conception of a breast does not find a realization, it is doomed to remain pure hallucination. The same outcome will happen to be when if the baby hallucinates it found an exacting matching realization.

Thus the human capacity to hallucinate may be discerned from hallucination, its final product. From the raw material coming from outer milieu through the senses, we simultaneously create thoughts and produce hallucinations. To create is here regarded as linked to a creative couple; to produce is a 'homo-', solitude-ridden act. I propose to regard the capacity to hallucinate as having a relevance to thinking in the same sense that Counterpoints have relevance to musical language. With the due respect to the established musical concept of Counterpoint, one would not be too far off from the mark if one states that Counterpoints are living, movement-dependent facts in music. More than simple accords, which can be accessed in a static, given moment and can be more easily read in the musical score, counterpoints flow longitudinally across the score. For example, in a score to the piano, counterpoints 'make' a living, matching pair with the melodic theme given by ht eright hand. They are 'endowed', so to say, of a 'life of their own' in the 'hands'(or mouth or mind) of a creative pair, namely, a seasoned composer coupled with a seasoned player. The matching pair as an invariance pervades the experience, in the counterpoint itself, in the composer/interpreter, a creative couple flows in the music itself and in the listener; Counterpoint was and always is a novel polyphonic musical experience. The capacity to produce faeces is a counterpoint to the capacity to produce glycogen and ATP, energy to the body; ditto, for the capacity to hallucinate and the capacity to think and to dream. A basic difference between real thoughts and hallucinations is that the latter, like faeces, are purely individual productions which do not require a pair; its 'dead' quality stems from its 'homo-' quality. They are all the same -- faeces. The person can claim ownership and authorship on their faeces as well as on their hallucinations; little children usually do this. Thoughts are a particular form of apprehension and transformation of something that already exists -- thoughts without a thinker claim for a thinker to 'marry' with them. Thoughts, unlike hallucinations, demand a link; in this case, with reality itself. It's both an individual transformation and something that already existed, appertaining to the realm of Platonic forms or 'O'. Authoritarian views, conclusions, are closed, homo-, sterile, solitude-ridden events. Open works, prose and poetry that allow a 'talk', a 'dialogic' text with the reader/onlooker are hetero-, pairing-promoting events.

TALKING AND A CREATIVE COUPLE

The analyst talks something, the patient talks something. In the classical sense, there is attention to what is talked and what is said; this sense may be amended by en epistemological observation that takes into consideration something more than the content of what is talked. One may observe what is happening when the two members of the analytic couple talk each other -- the emotional experience that casts specific links - hte uses and functions of what is being said.

What is happening and links may be the clue to furthering the insertion of the reproduction system model into a broader framework that includes alpha-function and the digestive system model. What the patient talks may be considered as a masculine thrust. Hence, besides the content of what is said, which should be regarded as the psychic counterpart of food (the digestive model) we should observe that there is occurring an active, perhaps potent intruding as well. Further links between 'food' and 'gametes' is that gametes are a kind of food to the continuation of life and both are vital to life; perhaps expressions of life in their own way.

Clinical experience allows for the hypothesis of using the digestive apparatus model and the reproduction system model in a binocular way. The binocular vision according Bion, or 'dual track' posture according Grostetin is another manifestation of an 'internal creative couple', a perennial interplay of the good objects. During an actual session of analysis, the analyst will pay attention either to content or to the function of what is being said, felt and done. Any separation is artificial and leads to an impoverishment of the possibility to profit from the material. This inability may happen during the infancy, and the baby will not use the two models. I am proposing a description of a state of mind where the two basic facts of life -- nourishment and reproduction -- have psychic counterparts which function simultaneously and have expressions in the area of thinking and knowing, including the very earliest method to know something, the basis of introjective and projective identifications. One may try not to separate them and one may also try not hastily to blend them to the point of such an intermingled confusion that form the basis of some unconscious phantasies. For example, the confusion between a penis and a breast. The food to mind is simultaneously the food to life -- sperm -- and the analyst, irrespective of his or her physical sex, may exert at least to some extent his or her feminine qualities in order to be 'drilled' or 'introduced' by what the patient says. To do this, his or her analysis must be extensive enough, up to the point of working through feminine and masculine aspects. I suspect that this is one of the many manifestations of the bisexuality of the human being observed by Freud (Freud, 1905) which must be dealt with must be dealt with during an analytic session. This conscious awareness of it demands to be developed up to a point that a male analyst will not fear excessively his femininity and a female analyst will not fear excessively her masculinity. To be introduced by the patient's talk is to exercise a feminine function; to furnish a view or an interpretation is to exercise masculine potency. An insight is a 'son'. The same happens when a patient is able to talk and hear. Or with anybody in a real talk, even in social intercourse, by the way.

Thoughts without a thinker, reality itself will be allowed to be 'introduced' -- and the thinker will think them, in the same sense the ovum 'thinks' a spermatozoid. In a given moment the patient says something. Intuition -- feminine intuition -- and the ability to care -- perhaps a most synthetic way love manifests itself -- are put into play. The analyst may say something after this true insemination. In order to say this something he or she intuited through the use of his or her femininity, he or she must exert now his or her masculine traits. For to say something that is constitutes an active accomplishment, an action in the environment, and an attempt to introduce into the 'patient´s universe'. This something will by its turn inseminate the patient who is able to minimally use his very same feminine and masculine qualities. What is said finishes there -- words are acoustic movements in the air that cease to exist a few seconds later they were uttered -- they are transient as life itself (Freud, 1918). A new being is born -- the intercourse between the two members of the pair. Perhaps this is one among the factors that determine the impossibility of reproducing an analytic experience in printed form -- it is ´livable´, so to say -- much like a little child which grows and disappears as a little child.

One cannot be too glued to PS if one is bound to cope with reality as it is -- to allow 'inoculation' by reality itself. A very silent patient who confused a penis with a breast 'saw' a special helmet in his head, with a sliding roof, that could be put into function each time the analyst, obviously seated behind him, uttered a word. He felt the analytic intercourse as a homosexual attack and transformed his hallucinated experience into a visual image, the ´anti-analyst helmet´. When the helmet was being 'seen' by this patient, before its putting into words, it was pure hallucination. After telling the image to the analyst, who was inseminated by it, a session was amenable to be dreamt, and hallucination (faeces) turned to be a shared dream -- the verbal formulation: 'anti-analyst helmet', the session itself. The analyst's alpha function digested part of the patient´s hitherto beta element (the visual image of an incomprehensible strange helmet) that made some scattered facts coherent -- homosexual fears, the session of analysis itself, and so on).

This insight was transient - in the way to more developments. It serves to be communicated in a paper, but it was not useful to analysis anymore. In the same way, fathers and mothers, when they had a sibship, may be regarded as a kind of fertilizer in the way to death; the new beings, the infancy and childhood is what matters at all.

THINKING AND COPING WITH REALITY

Thinking encompasses unconscious processes; nothing can be conscious if it was not turned unconscious. This is Dr. Bion's amendment to Freud's theory of unconscious. His now classical examples appear in ´Learning from Experience´ and ´Cogitations´: the learning of walking and the constant conjunctions involved in the learning of words such as Dad. No K-link can evolve without the obtruding of H-link and L-links. (Bion, 1962, 1963)

The inception of thinking occurs in the extent one is able to cope with the No-breast. No-breast is experimented if there is a minimum ability to tolerate the frustration and the pain that things are what they are and not what one wishes they should be. The breast is the prototype of this truth. This is also the prototype of hate toward reality, depending of greed, envy and intolerance of frustration. Moral codes are born here, for one attempts to impose what one feels it must be instead of coping with and dealing with what it is, being the very imposition of feelings thae person makes on himself and on others (or omnipotence of thinking as described by Freud in 'Totem and Taboo') a manifestation of PS) Why the universe should adapt itself to our feelings and demands, asks Bion in 'A Memoir'? In the same sense, years before, he noticed that some patients become 'baffled' when events follow the 'laws of Natural Science' and not the laws of this person's 'mental functioning' (Bion, 1956). What a baby receives may be very far from what he needs, what he wishes or what must be minimally good (´good enough´). Maturity perhaps is the ability to face this truth -- and the truth is: the breast never is what one demands it should be or expects it to be, even if those expectations may prove to be reasonable. Presence of memory and desire hampers thinking since its inception.

SENSE OF TRUTH

Is there a possibility of the development of processes of thinking outside the already known schemata of evasion or modification of reality? I suspect that if there is such an alternative, it is linked to the attaining a sense of truth (Bion, 1962a, p. 119): to stand the paradox that the object that is loved and the object that is hated is the one and same object. To get -- a continuous getting, 'being', spanning during the whole life cycle of an individua-- a real inner object that is matchingly loved and hated, the inner creative pair going on, alive in the mind, furnishes strenghth to the 'intrusion into' the reality, without evasion or simple attempts to adolescent modification of it. Is it a feasible task, in the end run, to evade from an internal object? Is it possible to modify it? Or there is a possibility to know it, with all the pain involved in facing its limitations, in order to be what one in truth is? 'To know one's proper station in life' may be a commonsensical thought that goes farther than its political use. In other words, profitting from another Bion's formulation, 'to be at-one' with one's own object is the basis for its 'at-one-ment' in the PSD sense.

Thinking is furthered when the sense of truth allows one to do not befall on occupying the paranoid-schizoid position wholly and therefore one is able to do not cling tenaciously to judgmental values of "right" or "wrong". {Right or wrong} is the outcome of one who loses the sense of truth. One tries somewhat desperately to replace real thinking for rational or imitative (delusion) rules {Right or wrong} when one cannot perceive that truth and false appertain to the realm of reality and hallucination.

The tolerance of the first paradigmatic paradox furnished by the real object that is at once loved and hated allows for a model to the human being. To have some allowance to be introduced by reality as it is -- by facts as they are. One cannot know its ultimate truth, but one can intuit some truthful aspects of real life, expressions of ´O´. Gradually one is able to build up faith that reality itself exists despite its ultimate unknowability. Therefore one may intuit when it is existing, unknowable as it is. This is the first "thought without a thinker" presented to the new-born, and thereafter a continuous exercise one is called to do. This continuous exercise is expressed by the part of PSD -- or by the 'refiner's fire' metaphor (Bion, 1975, p.46), a kind of 'warfare' from where 'there is no release' as Bion would add later in the same Trilogy. As a Brazilian poet was able to put into words, 'love is eternal while it last through'.

THE ANALYTIC COUPLE AND THE PROCESS OF THINKING

The K-link and the digestive/reproductive model:

As in the container/contained relationship, the nest of all emotional experiences, thinking is an emotional experience whose counterpart in reality is the basic creative couple, the sexual parental couple. The analytic couple provides an opportunity to experience links and emotional experiences. In what concerns to thinking, we may consider the parts to be related: a) the patient with the analyst; b) the patient with him(her) self or internal reality and c) the patient with common sense (external reality), paving the way to his or her commonsensical apprehension of reality. A), b) and c) above can be linked in at least two ways:

Genetically speaking, K-link as described by Bion (Bion, 1962b, 1963) at the intrapsychic level stems from one's daily and nightly dream-work, primitive projective identification and introjective identification as methods of communication with mother and formation of objects, allowing for pre-conceptions (protophantasies in the sense described by Freud) mating with frustrating realizations (Bion, 1962a); in brief, our realistic perceptions of the internal and external reality. The K-link would be achieved at its more developed condition under a symbiotic relationship. There is a real relationship and a real, evolving (life-instinct) inroad into the unknown; a sibship or real thoughts appear.

The parasitic and comensal relationships lead to pseudo-thinking, to transformations in hallucinosis and/or to rational constructs; in philosophical terms, idealism/subjectivism from the former and rationalism/positivism, concrete ´thinking´ from the later. K link cannot install itself in the parasitic and in the comensal relationships, there is a ´homo-' intercourse, or no intercourse at all. The person cannot hear the other person (usually one has no regard to the 'otherness'); the person cannot even hear him(herself). There's an unreal, static, ever-repeating, false, imitative (Philips, 1989) pseudo-relationship, producing psychomas, wasteful and destructive as cancers in the physical realm are.

In analysis, there is no concrete, sensuously acted-out sexual intercourse; in fact, not counting the setting and two concrete persons with their humane needs, limitations and other features (including L and H, murderous and its obverse acts), there is nothing concretely regarded that can even ocur but that must be object of concern. To have concern to presence of another person in the room expresses itself through real talking. If the digestive-reproduction model is valid, we may observe symbiotic, comensal and parasitic links when observe the talk and its functions in a particular case. There occurs 'talking', 'hearing' and 'listening'; also their opposites appertaining to the field of minus K: no-talking disguised as talking as a manifestation and medium of projective identification (Bion, 1956, 1957), not-hearing, not-listening. 'Hearing' is here regarded as a purely sensuous act; to listen may be regarded as encompassing the former as well as words, feelings, emotions and the appearance of the most basic needs -- instinctual needs. The activity of 'listening' and the link is not only with the onlooker, but it also has to do with the person who talks: it is an intrapsychic relationship between the person and him(her)self.

The person who is really up to talk will be able, to some extent, to be intuitively introduced, "femininely" introduced by his or her own needs. Thinking processes either starting from ichoate states as well as being able to entertain second thoughts, cogitations, reflections, regard to truth are inner, mostly unconscious 'talks' of a person with him(her)self. In this level, I propose not to regard thinking processes as either purely material or purely immaterial fact; there is no such a thing except in the realm of our limited possibilities of apprehension of real facts. For example, people are who cannot even know that they must drink some given quantities of liquids; in the end run they produce kidney stones; one cannot say they were able to talk with themselves and think. People are who cannot listen to other forms of this inner voice that indicates that one's needs and possibilities, not only one's desires and idealizations. One may search for one's own abilities, know them, must work, or must look for a mate, or must take care of a sibship. During analysis, an occurrence which is both common as it is overlooked, is that patients utter words but cannot hear what they say. Many times no interpretation is needed at all, but only a helping aid to invite the person to hear what he or she is saying. For example, a person says, ´Oh, I came here because the physician sent me -- he said, you have nothing at all, go and look for a psychiatrist. Among those people, many of them cannot hear that they are pointing to their depression or sense of helplessness on not having themselves at their disposal. In truth, they ´have nothing´, for they cannot count with their true self. What happens, that a person cannot hear what he or she says and thus produces a split between him and himself? A common finding is the idea that pain may be avoided.

Sometimes, in thinking processes which are not ´homo-', thus providing a counterpart of the symbiotic relationship in the area of thought, the person can ´marry' with reality itself. If the person is an artist, he or she can marry with a certain media. The paradigmatic situation of the baby with the breast is a ´hetero-´ relationship. In this case the baby yields to being introduced by nourishment. 'Nourishment' is another area where psychic reality and material reality are married and yet they are not intermingled, preserving their own 'identities', in a paradox that cannot be resolved outside the realm of splitting,m denial and projective identification, as seen in the earlier quoted fallacies of the 'realism'and 'idealism', also reviewed by Bion in Chapter V of 'Learning from Experience'. Nourishment and Thinking, like Music and Life, like a real analysis, are ever renewed, ever-new experience, each time they occurs. To think is life-like experience -- it has no memory and no desire. One may live the moment; may perceive the moment; and try to profit from it after realizing it; in the extent it is possible.

SUMMARY

1. There is a "de-sense-fying" of raw sensuous data that comprises reality. Milk becomes breast, an alpha element whose O is "nourishment", the real counterpart of a concept; In Bion´s terms, alpha-function as a function of thought processes. Alpha-function is a "de-sense-fying" function of the mind, turning sensuous impressions, whatever they are as well as feelings (internal sensuous impressions) into alpha-elements, are useful to think either consciously or unconsciously. Raw sense data must be allowed to be introduced into; the transductive function of alpha-function may be compared to physical transducers such as microphones, which transform acoustic impulses into electrical impulses; the 'electrons' may correspond, specially in their 'valence capability', to Bion Talamo's analogy of alpha-elements as 'Lego' building blocks (Bion Talamo, 1995). Mother's sexual apparatus transform the raw concrete data coming from the spermatozoids into some kind of energy during its symbiotic relationship with the ovum, in the same sense that the digestive apparatus can transform the raw material coming from the external world into energy, ATP.

2. Dream-work is a factor in thinking and in the apprehensions of reality; it allows for the differentiation between psychic reality and sensuosuly apprehensible pseudo-realities.

3. Thinking is considered as a term having some counterparts in reality, a method used to the apprehension of reality when this apprehension goes beyond the use of our sensory apparatus.

4. The prototype of real thinking may be seen through the aid of a twofold model: it is a basic creative situation, namely, it is the psychical counterpart of the parental intercourse, and of the basic intercourse between mouth and breast. Thinking is born when the baby can apprehend what a breast and what nourishment are all about. Its first mo(ve)ment, like an overture, happens to be when the baby can think in the absence of the object, that is, when it experiments the No-breast. The adagio, a second mo(ve)ment, when the baby is able to apprehend breast and nourishment as separate entities which are the one and same entity, without splitting them. In other words, not splitting material reality from psychic reality and not confusing them either. - much like a real marriage where the partners are reunited but are able to preserve their individualities in a paradox that demands tolerance. In this sense, "Thinking" might be regarded as mind's counterpart of an emotional experience of recognizing the supreme creativity of the parental couple as well as the caring and loving attitude and action of the nourishing breast.

5. Either the reproductive system or the digestive system have counterparts in psychic reality and therefore they might be used as models to the processes of thinking and knowing. Knowing may be compared with having a sibship. An artist must match with its media, or to perform a kind of marriage, in order to produce its 'sons' and 'daughters', the work of art, a 'new being' in the world of onlookers who will (or will not) marry with it and so on, so thinking and thought processes, in the way to knowing, must marry with reality itself; new products, that already existed before but nevertheless are new in their forms. Sons and daughters may be born and may die, but ´sons´ and ´daughters´ as such follow on existing as Nature's ever-going processes. 'Thinking' may progress like this too.

6. One is able to accept one's own femininity, being introduced by breast and reality itself as nourishment; one is able to accept one's own masculinity, being able to potently with prodigally to act into this reality in order to perform a 'marriage with reality'. I suspect that this was formerly regarded as 'modification in reality' by Freud and Bion. As a result, Oedipus, the son, is born -- the son is 'A Thought'. It is New and it is also Not-New. It was not created by a hallucinated mind, but by a mind which was able to introduce and to be introduced by a Natural Reality -- 'O'. 'Oedipus' is one of its expressions. Some tools used in this process are to project and to be introjected; the Myths are used as expressions of a racial truth that can be transformed by each individual according his emotional experiences. In this sense Thinking may be regarded as Mind's perennial presentation (to itself) of the parental creative couple and its outcome, the sibship.

7. The analytic couple which is able to think also gives expression to this original creative couple, for the analyst is inseminated by each patient's free associations and back.

8. Thinking allows a marriage of the person with his or her inner reality, instinctual needs and real possibilities and limitations - the person as he or she really is. With the aid of thinking processes one is able to reach some partial knowledge of who he or she is in reality. As Bion puts in the Trilogy, an analysis presents the person to himself; this person is the only being with whom he (or she) will have to live until the end of his (her) life, and perhaps it will be of his (her) interest to know who this person is.

9. Moral judgements and rational constructs, as well as logical deductive and inductive reasoning, are outside the realm of thought, at least in what concerns to psycho-analysis and in any area which interests itself to research into the unknown..

10. To know, to think, to live and to love are inseparable facts, made separate for failures in thinking.

'My grand daughter, aged seven, put into words what so many of us felt after Wilfred's death -- 'I didn't realize I knew Grandpa so well'. His love, wisdom, affectionate humour, sympathetic concern permeated our lives. I believe we shall continue to feel, sometimes with surprise, that we didn't realize we knew him so well' (Francesca Bion, 1981)

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