A brief survey on the difference between fantasy and imagination in the light of Bion’s psychoanalyt

Arnaldo Chuster, M.D. [1]

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

[1] Training and Supervising Analyst of Rio de Janeiro State Psychoanalytical Association (Rio-4). Teacher, Consultant and Researcher of the W.Bion Institute of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Doctor in Psychiatry and Medical Psychology.

This text will follow some ideas contained in the concept of psychoanalytic object as W. R. Bion conceived it and initially expressed through the quasi-mathematical formula in Learning from Experience (1962) as {ψ(ξ)(±U)(M)} meaning: preconception ψ(ξ) seeks a realization to create a conception in the developmental spectrum narcissism ⇔ social-ism (±U) under the sponsorship of the inherent complexity (M) of a biological structure.

One can graphically represent this as:

This concept is a corollary of the propositions contained in Bion’s theory of Thinking (1960) that had one of its turning points in 1957/1958, when in the article On Arrogance Bion suggested a new reading of the Oedipus complex, putting central emphasis on the problem of the discovery of truth. Owing to this emphasis Bion understood psychoanalysis as an activity sponsored by a tragic ethics: the truth is unreachable but the psychoanalyst is interested in the risks of such investigation. For that reason all we can do is to create, and the most creative aspect in human beings is their capacity to produce thoughts, something that happens all the time of a life. Therefore a Theory of Thinking (1960) is a natural path for someone like Bion who thought about psychoanalysis under the edge of a tragic ethics. In other words, as one can never reach the truth we have two options: we can try to imagine how it would be like if we could reach it, or simply let our unconscious fantasy formulate for us how it would be like.

In this paper I will focus on these two options, trying to think about the link between fantasy and imagination, or better, on transience between fantasy and imagination, which also means a transition from functioning with memory and desire (fantasy) to the functioning without memory and desire (imagination).

My main point is to think about the origins of imagination, considering it as one of the main sources for interpreting the manifestations of the unconscious, therefore for the development of the mind. The purpose is to focus on some applications in psychoanalytical practice, which is to remind us that we should get very well acquainted with the transitive characteristic of the free-association and the interpretation through the differences between the ideas that come from fantasy activity or ideas that arise from the use of imagination. This characteristic is fundamental to the analytical process and, in my view, such wide-ranging emphasis on the latter is one of the main differences between Bion and other authors.

The psychoanalytic object is Bion’s object of psychoanalysis. The object of psychoanalysis can be defined in its widest sense as the end and purpose of analysis, the final product of the theoretical model, the paradigm by which all the findings from psychoanalytical practice should be checked, as well as the developments one might need to realize in the models by means of new interpretations.

The psychoanalytic object has application in three domains where it can be felt, thus observed and interpreted: senses (body), myths (theories) and passions (feelings) - (It is a three-dimensional object, therefore always representing Oedipal configuration).

To Bion the function that the analyst needs in order to feel, observe and integrate in his interpretations those three quoted domains is the psychoanalytic function of personality, which means the analytical Oedipus, the Oedipal configuration capable of integrating the three domains. Otherwise, if there is any failure of this function, usually caused by the activity of memory and desire, the analyst will have split perceptions of the domains; therefore the interpretations can be of another kind such as:

Myths ⇒ intellectualization or indoctrination

Passions ⇒ acting-out

Body ⇒ alienation

In other words, the analyst must place himself in the session in a mental state without memory, desire and the need for comprehension, which is the mental state most able to receive the applications of the psychoanalytic object. For this he needs to rely on his psychoanalytic function of personality. That is, the abilities between analysts vary greatly, and in each analyst from one situation to another. The psychoanalytical ability is not stable, because it depends on the interaction of the Oedipal configuration and its evolution in all kind of situations. What can improve this ability, besides a personal analysis, as complete as possible, (although one cannot, a priori, define what complete may be) is: 1) the capacity to reach and tolerate the point of maximum difference possible in relation to the patient, due to a mental state as free as possible of memory, desire and the need for comprehension, 2) the associative exercise with the myth of Oedipus (Chuster, 2002, 2003) to develop the intuition and the capacity to decide an adequate version (language of achievement, Bion, 1970) to be used in the history that unfolds in the analytical process.

In Bion the object of psychoanalysis is different from Freud, to whom the object is the superego, and also distinguished from Melanie Klein, to whom the object is the internal objects, and different from Lacan, to whom the object is the chain Real-Symbolic-Imaginary. Those theoretical differences will be briefly reviewed in this text. Shortly, each theoretical model represents the author’s specific theory of unconscious.

As we know, the difference between fantasy and imagination was not a question to Freud. He talks most of the time only about phantasie. In his writings the concept is based on the idea of an unconscious orientated exclusively to a certain kind of psychic product: the derivatives of the drives (pulsions). The concept is completed by establishing the relationship between the unconscious and the subject as object of desire, translated by the term Wunschphantasie, or the fantasy of desire. We know that for Freud desire has its origin and its model in the movement of satisfaction: “the first desire (wünschen) seems to be a hallucinatory cathexis of the satisfaction memory”. From this follows the questions of the playing of the desire, the repression, till the structural developments of the Oedipus complex, which has as its heir the superego, the final product and object of Freudian practice. Melanie Klein tried to maintain herself faithful to Freud’s theory. When she developed her ideas about the concreteness of psychic reality, she applied it to the superego, therefore bringing the oedipical situation to more primitive phases of development. Initially she tried to develop the maternal aspect of superego, working through the concept of the ideal of ego, but she left this aside and started explaining the internal objects (maternal and paternal), her version of the Freudian superego and, to her, the object of psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein also does not deal with the problem of the difference between Fantasy and Imagination. In her writings the concept of unconscious fantasy acquired a very precise meaning as the most primitive representation of the unconscious drives. Her theory is fully centralized in the developments of projective identification, the basic unconscious fantasy and the common hallucinatory source of all phenomena and also of repetition. As Freud, Melanie Klein understood dreams as symbolic productions and used them to localize and clarify the quality of the internal objects. She also made an attempt to define, in a more precise way; the transition that Karl Abraham already has named as partial objects to total objects. An attempt, which one cannot say, was successful. Nevertheless, she described the basic psychological movements: the transition between the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. In doing that it seemed initially that she would coincide the positions with the partial and total objects. But this does not happen. The positions are not internal objects but functions of the mind in charge of the transience between mental states. Lacan, even though disagreeing with all attempts to describe something as a total object, does agree with Melanie Klein about the primitiveness of Fantasy: “One realizes that it is in the pre-genital levels that one should recognize the function of Oedipus. This is what analysis is about.... accordingly, there are many Oedipal experiences in analysis. The Oedipus is the frame which rules the game...” (Ato Psicanalítico, p. 28). The chain Symbolic-Imaginary-Real composes the psychoanalytical game of Lacan theory and he follows the subject on the path formed by this chain, from emptiness to the symbolic productions inside the symptoms, therefore, he also needed dreams in the same way as Freud and Klein. Bion proceeded where Melanie Klein stopped. He investigated the maternal roots of the superego through the formation of the ideal of the ego. While trying to understand this most primitive root of all, he described the mother’s reverie, a psychological mechanism originating from the capability to dream and, in a certain way, coincident with it. In a successful reverie the mother receives the projective identifications of the baby [1] and returns them properly. In its turn, the baby introjects those “digested” projective identifications; identifies himself with them, giving them his own personal characteristics. Later Bion named this function of alpha function for epistemological reasons, according to the need to investigate it in other fields beyond the mother’s circle. Such theoretical development allowed Bion to use dreams in a wider approach than Freud, Klein and Lacan. To him it is not just a question of symbolic fabrication, but the dream as a link in itself as the ultimate aim of the analytical work: the function of dreams is more important than their contents, because it is the dream’s function of container which organizes and creates the unconscious mental space. From this standpoint, for Bion, to think is to dream, the fundamental mechanism of the mind’s work, and it is on such aspects that he concentrates his work. Although it is implicit in the last statement, it is important to highlight that in Bion all references to “thinking” are different to the term reasoning, which is something automatic or logical. Frequently the expressions are confused. For Bion, “thinking” is the psychic movement that makes feelings and thoughts work at the same time creating the human link. It is the essential link. The question of “creative thinking” is always related to Bion’s preconception theory, first element of the psychoanalytical object. Therefore this is also a paper about the realization of the preconception mainly in the area of imagination. When does the realization starts, which transforms a preconception into a conception that could be called an imaginative conjecture and not a fantasy? As we will see it is an uncertain moment, which starts in a “different environment”, very primitive and under the sponsorship of complexity (one may metaphorically call it embryonic mind as Bion did). In this paper, it is emphasized that the modus operandi of pre-conception in the embryonic environment (also a metaphor about the origins of intuition) is not projective identification (unconscious fantasy), but a complexity of the biological structure, which I am calling radical imagination. It is also seen that the first difficulty in working with this concept is in the word “imagination” itself, which is commonly related to images. This is elaborated imagination. I am referring to images that are not visual. They are essentially auditive, olfactive, and kinetic – they are especially related to the rhythm of the mother’s heart, the rhythm of the baby’s heart, the day-to-day rhythm introduced by the rhythm of the intestines, the rhythm of the bladder, and also the oscillation of amniotic fluidexpressing the day-to-day routine of the mother and, with this, society around her - the possibilities are infinite. And when the rhythm and the oscillation appear in this “pre-subjective” world – which is like a void and formless infinite, or a compact, dense mass like a black hole, a species of explosion occurs which digs a hole, opens a space, creates a kind of a “psychic window” (which can also be compared to a cylinder or to a three-dimensional frame) whose frames are made of time. Time that begins to organize a pre-view of the world in that incipient and inaccessible world, a certain kind of preparation to receive the other world that is to come. The walls of these cylinders or the frame of these windows [2] prepare themselves to be saturated by the reality, which awaits them in the future world. They develop in preparation to cope with certain situations, and can develop adequately or inadequately (this last possibility can later in life appear or be developed as a pathology: for instance, migraine, autoimmune illness, rhinitis, or more brutally as autism). Bion’s model is here completely prospective and temporal. The mind of the fetus develops in the “prevision” of having to cope with certain situations that will appear in the gaseous medium, but in a certain way have already arrived as a memory of the future. Expanding a little further and synthetically: when I speak of radical imagination this is something that comes before the distinction of an object. Radical imagination is naturally activated by olfactive impressions and the acoustical and kinesthetic rhythms. That is, there are “pre-objects” in the intra-uterine environment that are olfactory, auditive, kinetic, which are much more important than visual objects. It is a theory about the inaccessible state of mind where all the questions inherent in the creation of meaning during psychoanalytic work can be applied. It is radical (a root of all concepts) because it creates ex nihilo. It does not create “images” in the visual sense, but pure forms [3], which can become images in the general sense (thus, for example, an acoustic image). When we move to the elaborated stages of creative imagination, or the imagination, which the majority of people understand as being imagination par excellence I should give as an example the imagination of the musical composer. Mozart, for example, used to say that he composed the music in his mind and, when it was finished, he wrote it down just once, from beginning to end. Beethoven, when became totally deaf, used to imagine the music in his mind and write it down without needing to hear it. Einstein revealed that the theory of Relativity was the consequence of his musings about riding a beam of light through the universe. And if we take something wider, such as social imagination, it is not difficult to see that we are not dealing with the creation of images in society: laws, rules of behavior, and in summary, the mind itself, is not visible, audible, etc. There is nothing sensory in these objects. But there was an original moment when those ideas were felt in another way. We can follow how those ideas have their evolution in Bion’s model of the mind since his earliest papers on group dynamics in the late 40’s, when he describes a protomental system. In the 60’s appears the theory of thinking where the preconception plays a major role in the creation of thoughts. The “pre” emphasizes an inaccessible source of tension for the preconception. In the 70’s Bion speaks about the embryonic mind in almost every article and distinguishes three mental states: inaccessible, unconscious, conscious. At first sight, such distinction causes perplexity, and even confusion, until we understand that Bion is reserving the term “unconscious” only to Freud’s descriptions, and suggests, with the term “inaccessible” that the human unconscious goes beyond what had been described up to then. In other words, the so called Freudian unconscious is part of something wider, and will always be wider for a fundamental reason: it is always in expansion. In this way its “appearance” is always creative, which means that it does not repeat itself; there is a temporal difference and a difference in identity in each conception. An amount of uncertainty and instability is always present because such model conveys a spectrum of possibilities of meanings, changing constantly. In practical terms, those ideas brought a change in the way of interpreting, that is, interpretations turn out to be more descriptive of what is happening, making questions to provoke thinking instead of pointing out meanings in order to organize vision within disorder. It is thinking that conducts the psychoanalytical process, being able to give an alternative to what was seen, to see another vertex that cannot be seen. In a general way, the common function of interpreting, that is, the effect of offering a description that might create a meaning, which enlightens something that was enigmatic it is not taken as something that always modify what is initially seen – it is long before the interpreter, which modifies the observed object with his presence – but, to the extent that it indicates a certain way of seeing, the interpretation, if it is accepted, can modify the organization of vision and in sequence the individual or the group. Fundamental to this process is the selected fact for interpretation, as the vision established depends on this. The selected fact is chosen by the psychoanalytic function of the personality, which means that it is being selected by the oedipical configuration of the analyst. Every analyst will have “predilections” for certain vertices, or for certain vertices common to a group, or to a “psychoanalytic society”. However, whatever the interpretation produced, for both the analyst and the patient, it comes too late in relation to the expansion of the unconscious. We are always behind the expansion. Even if the interpretation supplies a new form, an uncertainty remains, for the unconscious is expanding beyond us. The following quotation from Bion (1975) is appropriate here: “The Likehood of meeting old friends in Hell makes the prospect less frightening than the prospect of Heaven, for which life on Earth does not prepare us adequately. But this also applies to decisions that are taken repeatedly. One may deplore an unhappy decision; how terrible it would be if we had never taken unhappy decisions or made unhappy interpretations! In analysis, we have to become accustomed to coping with the recuperation of an unhappy decision and with the use of the wrong decision. In the light of these observations, don’t even think about a cure”. So, what can we interpret? At this point I will quote the following excerpt from the story “The Crimes of Morgue Street” by Edgar Allan Poe: “The analytical power must not be confused with a simple ability, for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is, not rarely, notably incapable of analyzing.... Between ingenuity and analytical capacity there is a difference of character analogous to that between fantasy and imagination. It is verifiable that, in fact, the ingenious man is always fanciful, whilst the really imaginative man never ceases to be analytical”. If we only use reasoning, it would be inappropriate to regard as an authority in the matter the famous writer of stories of fear and terror, who died in 1849, without ever hearing anything about psychoanalysis, a term used for the first time by Freud in 1896. But if we follow what thinking tells us, we see that fear and terror (caused by fantasies, apparitions, spirits from another world, etc.) have everything to do with the unconscious and, in order to show that this perception is not simply the privilege of psychoanalysts, I will quote from an interview given to the press by Freud in 1926: “(Psychoanalysis) also received much from literature and philosophy. Nietzsche was one of the first psychoanalysts. It is surprising how far his intuition foresaw the new discoveries. Nobody perceived the dual motives of human conduct more profoundly, and the influence of the principle of pleasure in predominating indefinitely. Zaratustra says: Pain cries: Go away! But pleasure wants pure eternity, eternity indefinitely”. The psychoanalyst is a participant in the process of helping the analysand to create a new history, for that he has to practice his intuition and his imaginative conjectures. Freud distinguished a “proto-analyst” in the intuition of Nietzsche. Bion emphasized intuition, in a general way, as the “proto-analyst” of all psychoanalysts. This intuition will seek a concept that becomes operational [4] through the use of rational and imaginative conjectures. For example, when we are listening to a certain type of seriously disturbed patient, we become enveloped by a kind of thick and obscure mist that makes our field darken, some objects are only vaguely perceived, and others appear to have no connection with each other. John Milton, writer and poet, called this “oedipical gloom”. We are dealing with a situation in which every question turns back on itself: What is happening with the patient? Is it the same as is happening to the analyst? We hope that the analyst, at least, manages to see the situation and to tolerate it, and can establish a good description of the unconscious if he is able to capture what the patient rhythms are trying to transmit. The description given by Lacan of this aspect is emblematic: “When I prepared this little talk to you, it was very early in the morning. I could see Baltimore through the window and it was a very interesting moment because it was quite daylight and a neon sign indicated to me every minute the change of time, and naturally there was heavy traffic, and I remarked to myself that exactly all that I could see, except for some trees in the distance, was the result of thoughts, actively thinking thoughts, where the function played by the subjects was not completely obvious. In any case the so-called Dasein, as a definition of the subject, was there in this rather intermittent and fading spectator. The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning”. In psychoanalytic communication, Unconscious to Unconscious, we could suddenly be faced with something like of a black hole, and sometimes we cannot find the actual “unconscious”, but a “conscious” that is unable to operate. As we are both humans, something makes us suppose that in consequence of such a thing a disaster could occur. It is here that the analyst can surprise himself making imaginative conjectures instead of using memories, desires or the need to comprehension. Should the rising conjectures surprise him or should he feel constrained by them? Or should he take the risk and go further, it doesn’t matter how “strange” or “dislocated” it may be - what is important is to let them flow for some time, feel their transitive characteristics until it is possible to analyze the meaning [5]*. That must happens spontaneously. Before I proceed with some clinical material in order to illustrate the previous ideas I will summarize the differences I intend to emphasize: Fantasy occurs in simple involvement with fact, or when the analyst is only involved with or by the fact, often without realizing it. When this occurs he is involved by memory, desire or the need for knowledge. Imagination is the reaction to fact, on the part of the analyst who refuses to get involved with the fact apart from observation of it, and not less than it is. This is working without memory and desire. In other words, fantasy arises in the analyst when he identifies with the analytical object without observing it. In this way, fantasy is based on a passive emotional attitude in which the analyst “repeats” previous experiences, the patient representing the analyst’s internal objects. They are neurotic remnants of conflicts conveyed by the patient. In imagination there is autonomy in relation to his own conflicts that corresponds to a large degree, or exclusively, to reaction to the intensity and quality of the patient’s projective identification. In this case, the emphasis is placed on the patient and not on the analyst. Fantasy is reaction to the patient; imagination is action regarding the material of the patient. Therefore, fantasy produces just thoughts while imagination is the path to thinking all kinds of thoughts no matter how wild they are. For Lacan, fantasy is the way by which the relationship between desire and object is effected and, more exactly, the place where the object is constituted. Fantasy sustains desire and offers to it some objects. But that is not what it maintains, because it erects a wall between the subject and the threat of what is real, the rhythmic throbbing of death. For Bion, fantasy is the natural consequence of a repetition, which doesn’t offer much of a new chance. Imagination is that what allows this new chance, therefore, a non-repetition. In imagination there is an offer of new objects, which means that a new level can be reached within the spectrum narcissism⇔social-ism, for which the subject has to organize himself in a new way. Some Clinical material This patient whom I shall name Simon, 55 years old, a physician, phoned me asking for a first consultation. He left a message on my answering machine saying that I was well recommended by his daughter’s psychoanalyst (who happens to be a member of one of my study groups on Bion’s ideas). But this was not my first association. What came to my mind was the fact that I had known him since adolescence and had met him on many occasions, so I thought that he might be making some kind of mistake in seeking a consultation with me. I found myself immediately invaded by many memories, because we both used to go to the same places during summer holidays on the late 60´s. In fact, he went often to my cousin’s house in a small town in the mountains near Rio, a place where I was a guest and where many teenagers used to gather before going out together. It came to my mind that in a way I used to admire him because he was the only guy at that time that seemed to be mature enough to have what seemed to be a serious relationship with a very nice girlfriend. Later, once in a while I heard about him, because he also entered Medical School, but not the same School I was in. We graduated in the same year, and have shared many common friends and colleagues since then. I also met him three or four times at the house of a cousin of my wife at children’s birthday parties. And I remember talking with him in a group on such occasions. He was invited to those parties because he was a neighbor and apparently a friend of my wife’s cousin and he seemed to me very socialized and kind. When I called him back I was still thinking that he was making some kind of mistake, therefore I decided to mention to him that he might have forgotten that we had known each other for a long time, in case that could bother him in some way. He seemed really surprised when I told him this and he asked me if we had known each other from the Gym? At first, memory and desire kept pushing me in order to clarify our previous connection since adolescence, but I decided not to do it and wait to see what would happen. This could be considered an attempt or an example of a reaction against memory and desires, although it does not exclude what one may call scientific curiosity. He came to my office with no apparent signs of anxiety or any signs of recognizing me from somewhere else. I tried to listen to his story. He told me that he had been in analysis with Dr.J, from 17 to 28 years of age because of a depressive character. He stopped this analysis because he got married, but six month after, he started analysis with Dr.V remaining for 10 years. Then he stopped this analysis. Two years later, because of the same complaints by his wife about his cold and distant behavior at home, he experienced for six months a behavior-cognitive therapy with a psychologist. At this moment of his speech he said: ...and I must tell you right now, dude: I left all those three therapies exactly the same, with no changes at all. What came to my mind was an obvious question: Why a person who has all this time in analysis with no results at all should be here talking to an analyst? What I can call as being my imagination answered me: All this is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...and I added...to another idiot. Why should I have to be an idiot or should Simon be an idiot? My reaction was: sound is sound, but in my situation it is obvious that I was evaluating it as a noise. Could Shakespeare, from whom I took that quotation, help my imagination to work this out? What kind of play is taking place in my office? Macbeth? Of course I was feeling very uncomfortable with Simon’s report. At that moment, maybe my prejudice in favor of psychoanalysis made me tell him something that can be considered an awfully inadequate interpretation. But I learned with Bion not to bother about that because one never gives any other kind. I considered before saying what I said, as a matter of rational conjecture, that most people become used to the idea that someone will “cure” them. But doctors at least should know it is a mythology. Nevertheless, something is making this patient who happens to be a doctor, think that perhaps he can hope that a new psychoanalysis will solve the problems which have never been solved by others, and which he has had to keep within himself. At the same time he doesn’t want to be disillusioned again, although I can imagine that he is used to being disillusioned with psychoanalysis – and he doesn’t even want to believe that psychoanalysis might help. What are his beliefs? I suggested to him that we might consider the fact that he had never told anything to his previous analysts. So, what he had been doing so far could be just a waste of time. Similarly, I could not find any evidence that this was not happening again with me. He evidently seemed to be very angry about my interpretation. So, in order to prove I was wrong, he talked about some benefit his previous analysis could have had, because in one way or another it helped him keep his marriage. His ex-wife had always complained about him as being a secluded and bitter personality. That complaint which started before marriage, increased after the honeymoon. She became progressively depressed and, after the birth of the first daughter, also went through analysis. He told me that she was hoping that while in analysis he might be “cured”. But all that happened was that analysis helped her in being a successful doctor. As I knew this from hearsay of many common colleagues, I once more found myself fighting against memories until the moment that my imagination started working and brought about some typically surprising and dream-like vague images with associations: many years ago, I met Simon’s first girlfriend while she was a resident in psychiatry at the University Hospital. I was a supervisor in psychotherapy as a part of my master’s degree in Psychiatry. Although we had never been introduced to each other in the past, she instantly remembered me from my cousin’s house and we had a brief conversation about it. When I mentioned her relationship with Simon, she told me that it was a big relief to get rid of him.... ”I blossomed after breaking it up, now I am happy...he made me feel ill”. On that occasion I thought that maybe this was just an ex-girlfriend talking. But at that moment with Simon I realized that those ideas were coming to my mind for a different reason. This is a man who can’t get married to psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts. He pretends to be devoted and capable of marriage and wants to give such impression to a psychoanalyst. I formulated a question to myself: could those women be a symbolic reference of Simon’s unconscious? Were those women containers of what he could not contain? At this point my inquiries met with what can be called evidence for my hypothesis. Simon started talking about his ex-wife again and told me that the real reason he was with me at that moment was the fact that not only his wife but also their two daughters said they were greatly relieved when he left the home. His wife told him that she was dying while living with him but after he left she blossomed. He also had to leave the office he used to share with her. Then he tried to explain to me that he did not really like being a doctor like his father, a very well known physician. He was doing a burocratic job, as far as he understood it, although his office always had a full schedule. But that didn’t matter as much as the fact that his wife was reborn after divorcing him and one of the daughters was cured of her asthma. Why is that so? He made this question much as a kind of complaint to life and told me: I don’t mean to be a Hardy Har Har [6], but I tried to do everything they want me to do. I have always been a good husband and father; I have never been interested in going out or doing things outside the family’s interest. I sold the only thing I really like in my life in the name of such interest: a small farm where I used to grow orchids… It came to my mind that the association hyena-orchid could be the key to what I can imagine is Simon’s resentments against his ex-wife; therefore I could think he was at a kind of turning point between either revenge or forgiveness. This is a kind of imagination on a different level to the first associations; it is much more like an interpretation waiting for evidence. Then Simon told me: I was 10 yrs old when I grew my first orchid. I crushed my father’s Cuban cigars to feed the soil and it worked nicely. But my father was really upset with me. He told me that I was on the way to becoming a useless guy… and he looked at me very seriously and said: and don’t tell me those cigars were my father’s penises because I am sick and tired of hearing that nonsense for many years. Again, Simon was telling me how exasperating it was to hear about his inner child, but what came to my imagination was a general idea of a predator, because in a way, both species, the orchids and the hyenas, are predators. It is also remarkable that orkhis in Latin means testicle, and the flowers are bisexual. I had also said to myself that orchids are parasitic plants [7]. So it came to my imagination to say a very hard thing, at least at that moment. I thought that I might be facing a potential serial killer and this was why people felt so bad while living next to him. The resistance I felt to say that gave me an indication that this was the thing I should say, and I did it. I noticed he became very pale with my interpretation and became silent for some time. Then he said that he had never thought about that before. And I added: you never thought that this could be thought before you thought of it first? Should I take your phrase as an expression of regret for coming here? He replied instantly: I don’ t get it. I don’t get your points here. I may think about everything you told me. I told him that he could give himself some time to think on everything we had spoken about and, if he wanted to talk to me again, I would agree. When he left I had the feeling that he would never return again, but that could be a desire not to see him in analysis. After 5 months he phoned me asking for a new consultation. He came and told me that he was now informed that we had met many times before, but he was sorry to say again that he had never seen me before. But I should not feel badly because of that because he didn’t remember his patients either. He always had to consult the files before consulting a patient and it didn’t matter if he had seen the patient just a week before. Should I not feel bad? How should I proceed? Should he tell me how do I have to proceed or should I be free as possible to have my own judgment? As long as he compared me with his patients did that mean I could be telling about myself more than about him? I call this the undecidable principle of observation; a point where you cannot say what is from the patient or from the analyst, because “O” is there. He is a smart predator of psychoanalysts and his following report was what could be considered an attempt to satisfy the analyst’s need for comprehension, or an attempt to bring the analyst inside his hunting territory. He told me a story about a girl friend he met three months ago. After dating her for some weeks, she became very frightened about him and she broke up the relationship. She said that he is a straight nice guy, but she felt sad at his side because he has a black cloud over him. As this story confirmed my terrible interpretation about him he decided to come back to see me. It was a logical thing to do, he said. It sounds as if the important thing here is the threat of violence; it becomes dangerous to live with him. But this is already known. So I had to move from my vertex and to stay in an empty point until I could describe his love for rationality in the same way someone could love his religion. I could imagine that one can not get along well if there is a belief that first, order must come, second, as a consequence of order, growth came naturally, then he could decide to love someone as if it was a matter of a conscious alternative. That description made him very angry again and he made a reply, which a psychoanalyst could consider very significant because he compared me with his deceased mother. I am not sure if with the mother or just with the deceased object, but I took it as an authorization to analyze him, as he was recognizing that before him came another generation, a very important link for emotions. Simon brought back the talk about Hardy, the hyena of the cartoon, which happens to have a black cloud over its head, and he tried to make a joke; he said that like one of these animals he was in a position of attacking only weak prey, and still laughing even though eating shit and having sex relations only once a year. Should I be the weak prey while he is “preying” in my office? I said he was reporting to me his refusal to occupy a place in analysis, in the same way he refused to occupy the masculine role in the relationship with women. He resigns the male role, with a sacrifice of his qualities, to act as if he was at the side of women. He became silent for some moments then he associated with the part in Homer’s Odyssey where Ulysses is hiding between the mermaids…I made him notice that the mermaids are characters without sex, with a fish tail covering the lower part of the body, but for a man that means no testicle, no orchids, an useless hard-y on…but a lot of seduction. My interpretation tried to bring about his refusal to listen to the bisexual voice coming from the orchids. Is it possible to speak of someone having an orchid as his god? With such refusal he resigned to real existence as a person. The voice is also deeply predatory and full of derision but it is also creative. I could observe how he expresses himself with emotions every time he is listening to such voice. What kind of creation could it be? I don’t know, but it cannot do any harm while it could be worked trough. I think the trouble is that as soon as he wants the feminine role, he becomes afraid of it and wants the masculine role; when he has the masculine role, he is afraid of that and wants the feminine role – and this goes on and on. In short, he wants some assistance from the analyst, but doesn’t know how to get it, because he thinks he knows everything about analysis and because he is afraid of me, whatever I am. In so far as he mentions I look like his mother, there is the fear of needing to have a relationship with me, or with the mother’s breast. But then he is anxious about the intercourse; the breast would penetrate his mouth. As psychoanalysts we need to have courage to deal with questions about intimacy if we really mean to properly answer to the suffering of the people who seek for our professional help. The serial killer’s interpretation is a kind of Language of Achievement (Bion, 1970) that allowed Simon to keep contact with the many symbolic murders he perpetrated in his life without knowing it. Such interpretation was at the same time unbelievable and efficient, because each one of us authorizes our own existence to the fact that there was a dead father in the previous generation who was devoted to a dead mother. Both are ghosts demanding gratitude, but if one has a lot of envy in the realization it is impossible to mate an adequate conception for gratitude. Preconceptions will always find the inadequate realization to mate a conception if they are under the edge of envy or greed. In a somewhat technical way one could say that when the baby is born it kills off the father and takes possession of the mother’s breast, which is the father’s property. Those feelings are ordinarily made more bearable if the father and mother are happily married and the atmosphere in the family is flatly contradictory to this frightful story. But suppose there are no reassuring father and mother, but a distant father, busy with his work, and a mother who is unhappy and in bad humor for having a baby taking her away from another activities. The only chance Simon has now is to see something different to this unfortunate picture of the world, and he can have it only if he can face his inner world, however terrifying and however intolerable. Another way to say this I found in Roger Money-Kyrle’s theory of the three unavoidable truths which Simon must face: we are alive because there must be a good breast in the past, we are living in the present because a father and a mother engaged in some creative sex relations, and everybody is going to die in the future. Some transient conclusions In this paper I tried to expand what I think Bion’s theory of preconception is. To me it contains the idea of a creative essence of the human mind. I called this essence radical imagination, borrowing the term from the philosophical work of Cornelius Castoriadis. It is radical because it is the root of a basic flow that later, after birth, became an unceasing stream of images, memories, desires, fears, mental states, from where all things come. One cannot do anything to oppose it; “something” will always be created. Sometimes one can understand a meaning in this flow but most of the time one cannot. There is no logical thinking, except occasionally. The elements are not connected to each other by logic, as our rational thinking would like, links are just a psycho-logical need, trying to deal with a kind of almost chaotic state – therefore, a state of creation. In a clinical case like Simon’s one can discuss how to work through the almost chaotic state. In order to do this it is necessary to work in a mental state without memories, desires and the need for comprehension. Sometimes we can do something for the patient because our common imagination is able to contain elements of our radical imagination. Only imagination can create a new form of communication with such a patient, who happens to be one of those people whose words one can never believe. This is not because they are liars, but because they hide all the time and while doing this they become a self-deceiving person. The psychoanalytical work I am trying to perform with Simon is still very tough because it means defiance against all aspects of his personality and character. From the operational point of view of transference I am conducting an investigation about the reliability of his mental functions. In doing this I discovered his low capacity to observe and to pay attention to humans, his incapacity to think and to have feelings, and finally his incapacity for love and sexual love. In this process an intense femininity came out, an underlying homosexuality and his incapacity to love a woman. I could not have discovered this if I have had insisted on seeing him as a known person, who had occasionally taken part in my personal life - that was just my fantasy. I tried and I am still trying to face those discoveries as facts originated in some point of the development. I think that something happened before adolescence, maybe in latency that created a stereotype on which his social behavior was based. Since latency, a period of life when he didn’t really know what he would like to be, everybody expected him to be a great doctor like his father. After that he managed to be socially successful just because he seems to be like his father. But being alike is very unsatisfactory. Simon told me that he used to have a wish to give up medicine and become a botanist, but couldn’t defy his father, or at least what he thought his father would feel and think about it: infuriated and frustrated, maybe that would kill him. He became a kind of servant of his father, someone who attended the father’s desires with the sacrifice of his own life. He used to describe his father as a cruel and superficial man, ruled by fashion, and his mother as someone who was never capable of being sincere. This description was at first moment a shock to me and I fought against my memories, because I had my own thoughts (my fantasy), based on external experience and hearsay that his father was a brilliant doctor and a warm person and his mother was also a very nice person. It is very hard for any psychoanalyst to deal with a patient who puts you under the shadow of an insidious and constant disdain. But we can understand it as a symptom of a major disorder of thinking, and see how he will do everything to make it very difficult to think clearly near him. I think that one of the things that mainly intrigued Simon when he came to see me was that he could not understand my “psychoanalytical method” because it did not coincide with any of his beliefs about psychoanalysis. He could not discover what was going on and became really confused with his beliefs about psychoanalysis. From this point of view every analysis brings with it two important questions: when to begin analysis and how to stabilize it? Anyone with intelligence and reasonable culture has ideas or beliefs about the psychoanalytical method, but those ideas can produce in the first days, weeks, months and even years a false transference. It is a kind of system that must be dismantled in order to work with the real transference. If we manage to effect this deconstruction then we may see a change from well-established prejudices to preconceptions seeking new realizations. Simon is a kind of a patient whose emotional life is imprisoned. His personality was constructed in the expectation of fulfilling others’ expectations and to be just like his father. Both of his parents seemed to support this fantasy and so the culture around him. As a consequence he became immature, a kind of an 8-year- old boy acting as if he was an adult. In this situation it is required to use our imagination about children’s behavior. It may help a lot if we have a real experience as fathers or mothers, because that can make it easier to have a negative capability – the expression that Bion borrowed form Keats, when the poet was trying to explain to his brother why Shakespeare was so capable of writing about human characters: a capacity to tolerate mysteries, half-truths and uncertainties without an irritating search for fact and reason. REFERENCES Bion, W.R. (1958) On Arrogance In Second Thoughts, London, Heinemann, 1967, p.86-92.

_________ (1960) A Theory of Thinking In Second Thoughts, London, Heinemann, 1967,p.110-119.

_________ (1962) Learning from Experience, London, Heinemann.

_________ (1963) Elements of Psychoanalysis, London, Heinemann.

_________ (1965) Transformations: Change from Learning to Growth, London, Heinemann.

_________ (1967) Notes on Memory and Desire, Psychoanal.Forum2: 271-280

_________ (1970) Attention and Interpretation, London, Tavistock.

_________ (1971) Two papers: The Grid and Caesura, Imago, Rio de Janeiro.

_________ (1973) Bion’s Brazilian Lectures, Imago, Rio de Janeiro.

_________ (1975) A Memoir of the Future-Book1-Imago, Rio de Janeiro.

_________ (1987) Clinical Seminars and Four Papers, Abington, Fleetwood Press.

_________ (1992) Cogitations, Karnac Books, London.

_________ (1997) Taming Wild Thoughts, Karnac Books, London.

Chuster, A (1989) Um Resgate da Originalidade, Degrau, Rio de Janeiro.

_________ (1996) Diálogos Psicanalíticos sobre W.R.Bion, TipoeGrafia, Rio de Janeiro.

_________ (1998) Bion cria de fato uma nova psicanálise? RevSPPA,vol V.-3

_________ (1999) W.R.Bion-Novas Leituras, vol.I, Co. De Freud, Rio de Janeiro.

_________ (2002) An Oedipal Grid, paper presented at the International Conference on the work of W.R.Bion, Los Angeles, California.

_________ (2003) W.R.Bion-Novas Leituras, vol.II, Co.De Freud, Rio de Janeiro.

_________ (2004) Intimacy and development, paper presented at the International Conference on the work of W.R.Bion, São Paulo.

Freud, S.(1926) Interview to The Press, George Viereck.

Lacan, J. (1994) Le Seminaire, livre IV, La relation d’object, Seuil, Paris.

Meltzer, D.(1997) Meltzer in São Paulo, casa do psicólogo, São Paulo.

Poe, E. (1892) Histórias de Terror, Clube do Livro, Rio de Janeiro, 1972.

[1] Bion understands them primarily as communications of the baby’s needs and not as a mechanism of defense. [2] Such “cylinders” or “psychic windows” also constitute the framework of levels that constitute the spectrum of pre-conception realizations, which is, the levels of the spectrum narcissism⇔social-ism, that is, the levels of belief, thinking, learning from experience, the creation of social-history. Therefore, having crossed the caesura of birth we have thoughts that organize themselves on the walls of these cylinders, which can have a greater or lesser diameter in accordance with the movement PsÛD facing a selected fact. [3] As those forms are created inside a twin fold system, for natural and economic reasons, they always have a three-dimensional form or triangular links. [4] Kant’s quotation: “Intuition without concept is blind, a concept without intuition is empty”. * “speculative imagination, however ridiculous, neurotic, or psychotic, can be a step on the path to what in the end will be seen as scientific, psychoanalytical formulations”. (Bion, W.R. Taming Wild Thoughts, 1997). [6] Hanna Barberas’ cartoon character: a Hyena, which was always complaining. [7] But this is not correct. They just use other plants as a support without taking out anything.