A Negative Grid

Julio Conte and Arnaldo Chuster

Various references are made in Bion’s work, as well as in the work of other authors, to the existence of a Negative Grid. However, none of them carried out its systematic construction. This article is an attempt to construct it, following the original model of Bion’s Grid.It is, however, an investigation in psychoanalysis, which is immediately recognized as possibly being a mistaken attempt, as it takes the positive model as a parameter, if we can so call the original Grid developed by Bion.

The initial premise of the Negative Grid is to evaluate psychic development based on the creation of Lies. In view of this it seemed to us that its principal personality, instead of Oedipus, could be better characterized by Hamlet, for the illustrative possibilities, which Shakespeare’s character permits. A Negative Grid, therefore, would be a systemized exposition regarding the question of Lies and its consequences, illustrated by Shakespeare’s dramatic character.

Our first question is: can the Negative Grid, like the original, be used to cogitate and develop hypotheses after sessions? If the answer is affirmative, it can be supposed that such a procedure will help the development of psychoanalytical intuition about the negative aspects of patients (2). In this way, it should preferably serve as an instrument to cogitate hypotheses, which increase the reasoning in the area of influence of beta elements. The present expectation in the construction of an instrument such as this is to help the productive imagination of the psychoanalyst, contributing to the survival of the analytical link in those situations where prevails non-digested facts, bizarre objects, excessive projective identification, transformation in hallucinosis, hallucinations, beta element versions of the oedipical myth, and so on.

The beta elements in Bion’s Grid are closed in column A, in contrast with the alpha elements which are in column B but opened for the other columns in the sequence: C, E, F, G and H. Therefore, Bion’s Grid is almost like a sub-file of column B. In this way, the known model of the Grid is formed, basically, by a gradient of alpha elements, while the beta elements, and their possible derivations, remain immobilized in column A. When we conjectured about this disposition, taking our clinical experience into account, we considered that the beta elements possess different intensities, for greater or lesser degrees of discharge or projective identification occur according to the pathology focused. Thus, it was necessary to imagine the evolution of the Negative Grid only from beta elements.

(2) The Grid exhibits an idea of production. Its elements are like the gears of a machine which self-produce, a species of self-sustainment. The elements produced are basic, like a language, and in this sense confer the possibility that the scientific model from which it originated was transformed into a reference to ethical-aesthetical principles.

Such development considered, speculatively, that if Bion described the alpha elements originating a gradient, coherent with the spectral model, which he developed in his work, perhaps he thought about a gradient of beta elements. But there is no indication of this, because, in fact, Bion did not develop a negative Grid.

Our second question came from the last observation: if Bion did not developed a Negative Grid, why should we do it? The reply, if one exists, is that the simple fact of it being a non-developed idea becomes a good reason to proceed with it. The challenge of justification remains (3). Psychoanalysis, as a theoretical body in expansion, needs to develop more and more to take account of change presented by the social-historical environment. Moreover, the clinical tasks present us with challenges, and demands situations that are beyond what any Grid itself says. Any prudent psychoanalyst could say that the Grid already possesses its own negative in itself and, certainly, be right. This does not prevent us from thinking of the specificity and amplitude presented by the construction of a Grid from negative elements. The central question is repeated: don’t the beta elements form a spectrum, a gradient of clinical manifestations, in the same way as alpha elements? If this is so, then which would be the negative elements that we could describe?

To answer the last question, a negative Grid would have to imagine a kind of open doorway from column A of Bion’s Grid, in which categories A1, A2 and A6 are precipitated. For these represent the space pertinent to beta elements. We would also have to resolve the question of the K link in its negative evolution (-K), as well as the evolution of links –L and –H. The imaginative speculation (4) regarding a negative Grid also arises by virtue of the

(3) “The Grid that I have traced needs perfecting, for use by whom does this; it is merely an indication of the type of thing that could be a help”. (Bion in São Paulo and New York)

(4) “On the way to becoming a psychoanalyst, the right to permit speculation, imaginative speculation, is reserved. Perhaps there is the desire to sculpt, or paint, draw, compose music, write fiction, as a way to make room for the imagination, give it a chance to develop into something which could be scientific”. (Taming Wild Thoughts, 1997)

article, where Chuster (2002)* constructed an Oedipal Grid considering the personalities of Sophocles, in a precise and extensive form, as the major interrogator of the Grid. The reading was very productive suggesting various conjectures regarding personalities to be used in clinical articulations. Conte’s interest in the theater yielded Shakespeare’s personality: Hamlet. It also, more obviously, yielded Narcissus, which constituted a specter of Oedipus. But, this vertent was left aside, though its discard was not recommendable. Hamlet came to be considered as analogous to the position occupied by Oedipus and, in this way, to be evaluated as an emblematic myth of a Negative Grid. In addition to this, the Hamlet’s personality immediately indicated narcissism as the source of his imprisonment on the imaginary.

At the beginning of the theatrical narrative, Hamlet was advised that his father’s ghost appeared at night. Hamlet went to meet it in search of what the ghost would tell him and, in conversation with his dead father, discovered the truth. His father had been murdered by his brother and by his own wife, the uncle and mother of Hamlet, respectively. This occurs in the opening scenes. Hamlet spends the rest of the plot with this truth inside him, column 2, but can do nothing with it except fence with words and plan exposures. The truth revealed by his dead father could be considered as a definitory hypothesis (A1), which he could not admit, and he went on to successive efforts (A2-A6) to prove what he already knew. In this trajectory, the suppressed truth was becoming a maddening poison and he killed Polonio, by mistake, and later lost Ophelia. Love gave way to hate and led Ophelia to desperation. With the help of a group of mediocre actors he arranged a theatrical presentation that simulated the crime, in which he demonstrated that he knew the truth but could not assume it. In this, Hamlet once more did not act (reverting the perspective) and only assumed the truth when touched by the fatal poison of the traitor’s sword. The action is confused with the certainty that obliges him to act, at the appointed time, and is confounded with death. The poison that touches him is the minus-truth and because of this he dies, respecting the emptiness, the silence.

Which elements could be used to create both axis of a Negative Grid? On the horizontal axis we placed the evolution of –H and the vertical axis as –L. The link –K would have a descending transversal evolution, resulting from the interaction between coordinates and abscissa, beginning from cells A1, defined later, in the direction of G6 (also defined later). With this, a tri-dimensional object is formed to take account of hypocrisy (-H), Pharisaicism (-K) and Puritanism (-L) (Meltzer, 1990). It is noted that the gradient must point to psychoanalytical negative processes and the amplitude of clinical manifestations of attacks on links.

Because of this, we can include observations obtained from psychotic patients, or in the more specific sense of Bion’s work, the patients who possess a psychotic part of personality more active than the non-psychotic part.

In general, it is considered that the action of the psychotic part is due to the fragile human capacity to cope with reality. The difficulties to process the imperious prerogative of this essential element of life without reserve (inherent as much in the internal life as in the external, that imposes itself in an indiscriminate way on all human beings) depends on a function, which is developed from contact with the maternal capacity (reverie) and continues in a form that involves so many variables that, because of its complexity, can only be regarded as incognito: the alpha function, its success and its failure. However, the failure is so frequent, the hate that is excited so marked, that it appears reasonable to admit that it doesn’t only imply recognition of an inescapable circumstance – a reality to be perceived – but, very probably, represents a problem of a specie of provisional, conditional tolerance, a precarious equilibrium. The main problems taken from this observation are related to the equilibrium between the psychotic part of the personality and the non-psychotic part.

Clinical psychoanalysis confronts us with circumstances that always involve some kind of suspension of tolerance of reality and of the equilibrium obtained from the alpha function: alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, leisure, work, travel, entertainment, theory, desperation, all kind of mental states. In short, anything can be used to produce the essential element of tolerance with all kind of deadly costs to mind and body. So, it is possible to say: reality is only admitted under certain conditions and only up to a certain point: if a person abuses the contact (or vice-versa) and it shows itself to be unpleasant, to the extent of producing psychic pain, tolerance tends to be suspended. An interrupted perception, then, places the conscious to save this psychic pain. But reality insists, it always shows itself in another place. It is not possible to escape it, because it does not show itself directly, but indirectly, through infinite circumstances. It remains valid in its absence; this is the peculiar strength of reality.

Freud naturally demonstrated the presence of reality as being a principle of mental functioning in its constant opposition to the principle of pleasure. Those two principles constitute themselves as a law of conflict between opposition and conciliation, being described in one of the fundamental articles of psychoanalysis.

The conflict with reality may assume many forms. Reality may be radically refused, considered purely and simply as non-existent. The mechanisms serving such radical negation have been described in many ways. The subject could annihilate reality by annihilating himself: the formula for suicide, which appears the most efficient of all forms, even though, in spite of everything, a great number of uncertainties appear to be linked to all human acts. In the Negative Grid we would hear the principal character, Hamlet, speaking:

“Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?”

Reality can also be furnished with other inconveniences, saving a life at the price of mental ruin: the formula for psychosis, as secure as self-extermination, but which is not within the reach of everybody: it is not the psychotic who desires it. It depends, as Bion showed, on a more extensive failure of the alpha function, which promotes, in exchange for the loss of what is conventionally called psychic equilibrium, as unstable as any other mechanism in the universe, a more or less efficient protection in relation to reality: provisional separation, suppression says Freud, or forclusion in Lacan.

For Bion the investigation of this mental state had its origin in the extensive use of projective identification, which substituted the mechanism of repression, and installed a specific mental state, in which the confusion between objects permits the feeling that the pain of reality is not with the subject, but with someone else. Thus it loses the contours of what we call the non-psychotic personality, therefore rising the imprecise contours of the psychotic personality.

However, Bion showed that it is possible, without sacrificing anything very significant in personal life, nor the lucidity necessary for the exercise of daily life, not to recognize the existence of reality: a voluntarily blind attitude, symbolized by the arrogant gesture of Oedipus in piercing the eyes in order to ignore the truth. More ordinary applications of this arrogance are encountered in the use of drugs, of lies in general, and of the attitude of all illusory object which considered himself as guardian of truth.

Also, in the article “About Arrogance” (1958), Bion describes the psychotic part of the Oedipus myth through the phenomenon of arrogance, blocking the search for Knowledge. And Knowledge being the fundamental aspect of all human communication, the level of the child’s playfulness, which inhabits all of us, its paralysis ends by leading to psychosis, where space and time dehumanize and acquire an irreducible concreteness, and, why not say it, a definitive lethality. In “Transformations” (1965) one can follow how the distinct forms of space and time are organized, in accordance with the type of transformation. In the psychotic part, the transformations in hallucinosis transform the formal alternatives of the dimension time-space into paradoxes and contrasts.

Even further, Bion leads us to think that the radical refusal of reality coexists with very different forms, in which attempts are made at modification, in a form generally more flexible, thanks to a manner of conviviality between two parts of the personality, a species of middle path between pure and simple admission and expulsion, which says “yes” and “no” to reality at the same time. We are dealing with the space of emotional experience, in which we can observe what was the link that made such accord: love, hate, and the thirst for knowledge.

It is important to remark that the model of psychosis suffers substantial alteration from the concept of emotional experience. That is, it differs from the preoccupation present at the beginning of the 1950’s, with a classical and bi-dimensional kleinian model. In other words, the situation of those affected by psychosis found them initially referred to the states of oscillation between depression and excitement and, in addition to the difficulty in the psychotic field of distinguishing between passion and representation.

The clinical cases mentioned by Bion show us the problem of the fragility of the psychotic emerging in the conflict with reality, but, above all, the consequence loss of plasticity of personality resulting from the inevitable accords between psychotic and non-psychotic parts. It is necessary to emphasize that, in these accords the conflict between affections is implacable, for the sadism in the psychotic part accentuates the use of the superlative by the personality, and encounters megalomaniac expressions for the pain.

Melanie Klein perceived that in the depressive position the expression of destructive tendencies, deriving from sadism against the breast, is counterbalanced by the registration of experiences linked to the good breast. They are experiences constituted of love that the personality attributes to the object and to the love that it invests in itself. Green (1990) showed that Melanie Klein’s conclusions are in contradiction to those of Freud, in agreement with our thesis that distinct models are treated of in conceiving the unconscious. The elaboration of sorrow indicates the triumph of good objects over the bad, and the triumph of reparative tendencies of gratitude over the destructive tendencies of envy. The elaboration of mourning by Melanie Klein is linked, therefore, to the conservation of the object and not to its liquidation. The possibility to dislocate, to invest in other objects is related, according to Freud, to the liquidation of the investment in the object. With Melanie Klein, on the contrary, it is the conservation of the good object that is the condition for this elaboration. The care of the object has prevalence over the revenge that the child wants to take of it. As important as these divergences may be, the aspects, which appear to reconcile Freud and Melanie Klein, should be emphasized. The thinking converges for the ideas of the work of Freud, Mourning and Melancholy, when in melancholy, the division between object and personality, like the division between the good object and the bad object, separates objects to create a constituted and unified personality. Therefore, the emotions love and hate, however brutal they may be, do not have this fractioned, fragmented aspect, uniting erotic and destructive impulses in each fragment. Bion’s solution was to articulate the sentiments, in a triangular form, through the concept of the link to K, the thirst for knowledge, generating the concept of emotional experience.

At this point it is right to ask: if the K link has such a decisive role, how can we understand it in different circumstances?

One can say that in psychotic situations in which the selected facts lead to a depressive position, a less fragmented and fragmenting structure appears, contrary to what occurs in situations in which the selected facts have a tendency to maintain the situations in the ambit of the schizoid-paranoiac position. Yet, it is Green who explains: it would be more exact to say that, in these critical states, a decision is still possible: life or death. However, in schizophrenia it isn’t one or the other, but both at the same time. In the words of Bion, the individual is neither awake nor asleep, he moves in a world where the inanimate and the animate lose their difference.

It is also important to indicate that the elaboration of ideas regarding the psychotic part of personality preserves the relation with the mental functioning of melancholy, that is, we are dealing with a digestive model of the mind, described as processes of cannibalism. The identification with the lost object must be understood through a double process: on one side, the investments of the object that carry the mark of oral fixation cannot be expelled altogether, they are opposed to the evacuation they may be exposed to, they extend themselves over the personality. On the other hand, the personality itself responds to this extension making itself like a consenting prisoner. Also in the expression of A. Green (1970), it is as if the prison guard becomes the prisoner of the prisoner he guards. The lost object is incorporated. But the work of mourning demands the dissolution of investments of the object. What is in play in the work of mourning is the digestion of the poisons of the object – it is what explains to us the concept of reverie well and, more extensively, of alpha function.

Adopting, then, in place of Definitory Hypothesis, column 1, there is, the starting point of Lies, it is necessary to restate that we can understand voluntary falsity or not, but also all the truth may be falsified for the reassurance that prevents emotional turbulence and contact with the unknown.

In column 2 we propose the Simulacrum, which manifests itself as a poor attempt to find the truth. The simulation of questions substitutes the interrogation for, inside itself, it doesn’t support the existence of life. In the simulacrum lies are articulated in a way to fill in the voids in the truth to create an apparently rational coherence, but deprived of emotion or sustained by a bizarre logic. The simulacrum can also be a reference for the nature of many present institutions, founded on lies well known to its founders, but which the prosecutors or followers do not know (because of convenient ignorance, a process destined to avoid the discomfort of knowledge). In this way, the followers lose the notion of what is true or false, resulting in a type of ethics which we can translate as vulgar cynicism. We are also dealing with a common strategy in modern life, which consists of ensuring that the identity is not fixed. The importance of things becomes measured by the publicity and notoriety they achieve. The bigger the audience, the bigger the value of the object exposed. It is not the power of the image or the power of the voice that decides the greatness of the creation, but the efficiency of the reproductive and copying machines– factors which remain outside the control of who produces, and in the hands of a system which only thinks of material consumption as an indicator of possession of psychic comfort. But which, in truth, is to reproduce a mechanism well observed in hysteria, when it is said the hysterical person lives frustrated, and the frustration is always attributed to the other. To frustrate constantly, and with this path to offer more and more promises of consumption as a measure of satisfaction that was not previously achieved.

Within the ambit of the simulacrum we can still include the institutional questions derived from conservatism, which always ends by opposing the establishment of psychoanalysis as a science and method of investigation, in a systematic way, trying to include it as part of psychiatry or of psychology. Medicalization or psychologization, both tendencies for the simulacrum, denies that psychoanalysis is a unique order of activity in the history of mankind. It is necessary to emphasize that the discovery by Freud of the unconscious elements of mental life corresponds to its principal therapeutic essential, the collection of observations, the study of phenomena which are part of a programmed situation (the analytical setting), made it, in the 20th century, a scientific instrument that was gradually perceived as one of his most precious discoveries. However, it was always necessary to distinguish, in a way which was not very schematic, the investigation relating to the more personal details of the material studied (the therapeutic objectives) and those that contribute to the general study of the psychic instrument (theory). We are dealing with a schematic distinction, for the facts observed are the same and the psychoanalyst, in the context of the analytical situation, cannot turn away from a “listening” orientated by the “particular”; any generalization of his experience can only be made a posteriori the practice. Nevertheless, the institutions take the theory a priori the practice.

In column 3, notation is substituted for Transformations in Hallucinosis. A transformation that mixes the times and the facts by the action of excessive or pathological projective identification, causing the greater degree of distortion, which can suffer the perception of an object in the area of thinking. To demonstrate this in a general way, one can take the logic of truth which is used in all societies, but which would better be called the logic of correction. For example, the sum of two plus two is obviously four; we are dealing with a result, which is correct for everybody, a fundamental finding, concrete and arithmetical. But it is not necessarily the truth, for in the area of thinking, in the measure you break the caesuras, which is established at each instant, another possibility could be taken into account. Thus, if one gives this meaning to the term truth, one must also say that it is in and by society that it appears the truth. In the same way, one can say that it is in society and in history that the subjective and decisive subjectivity appears, the political subject of Aristotle, when he opposed individuals who simply conformed to the institutions of his society. The hallucinosis begins with the refusal to separate the logic of correction from truth as a phenomenon instituted by a determined social moment, therefore imposing a moral conclusion. The states of hallucinosis are very characteristic of processes of rivalry that include a strong component of triumphant morality. The analytical activity may be rejected by its participants and be transformed into an attempt to prove the moral superiority of the method employed, no differently, on one side the psychoanalytic technique, or on the other, the technique of the patient. This last may refuse all and any interpretation on sensing it as a mere attempt by the analyst to prove the superiority of the analysis, or to demonstrate the inferiority of the patient. In this situation it is difficult to be able to see how any benefit can be achieved. The greater or lesser presence of the cruelty of a primitive super-ego determines the difficulty to define and explain the impasse that appears in the validity of the hallucinosis.

In place of attention, and in the place of the evidence obtained from the selected fact, the negative Grid shows the Dispersion as the logical result of the activities of previous uses: Lies, Simulacrum and Hallucinosis, they all lead to the dispersion of any effort to capture a mental configuration and think. In metaphoric terms, it is like a war in which after the bombardment that demolishes the earth, destroying order and authority, the plundering of what remains begins.

In the following column, Inquiry, by virtue of the predominant selected fact, which is to accept the interrogations with fear of the answers, allowed us to think of Hamlet as more representative of the ideas we want to develop. The wise questioner, rather like a Sphinx, does not admit the answers to the questions he poses.

Column 6, Action, as an extension of omnipotence and omniscience is transformed into Certainty. The relation between certainty and action are opposed to the principles of uncertainty and incompleteness under which the analyst constantly has to take his interpretative decisions. On the contrary, action in certainty or certainty in action manifests itself as a victory of splitting.

On the vertical axis row A, the Reversion of the Alpha Function, a term which using the initial theories of Bion can also be called Attacks of Linking. Both produce incapacity to think and favor the proliferation of beta elements. Row B is used to describe the type of connection that reversion of the alpha function determines: Parasitic Link. The evolutionary result of this process is the Confusional State.

Preconception’s row is kept as in positive Grid for it is origin by means of realization of all elements of psychoanalysis.

The next row appears due to clinical observations as Degeneration, Emotional Impoverishment, and Contraction of Thinking. Then, there follow, Self-destruction, Psychosomatic or Somatopsychotic Illnesses, Physical Sickness and Suicide. Finally, the end of the end, minus G6, Death.

The Negative Grid elaboration arises from the observation of very seriously ill patients, who oscillate rigidly between idealization and contempt for the analyst. Some of them presented psychosomatic illnesses; others brought the problem of AIDS. The transferencial relation observed was permeated by questions with the expectation of obtaining arrogant replies in any way possible, thus making the emotional experience impossible. The interpretations end up being attempts to give order to material distorted by hallucinosis. The sentiments appear badly acted staging of love and markedly maintain simulacra of links marked by a species of vampirism, and deprived of affection.

In one of the clinical examples a socially very successful man, arrived at middle age with a good financial position, a respectable profession and a traditional name. However, when he spoke another man emerged. Insecure, submissive and without the strength to revert the difficulties of life. He pretended that he was someone who he wasn’t, a kind of a symptom of his family behavior. We are dealing with a concept of family, which was transformed into a simulacrum of a happy life. Tormented by ideas of failure, he avoided recognition of facts presented to him. He feared failures and his greatest was the idea of discovering that he was a fraud. His greatest fear was “that the mask would fall”. He didn’t see that it was exactly here, in the failure of his lies that he could rise and make a successful analysis. Until then, his way of life oscillated between omnipotence and impotence or, as Bion showed, between omnipotence and helplessness. He fled from this possibility avoiding the sessions with excuses of work at the last minute. He also didn’t recognize that in assuming his condition of helplessness resided the possibility of obtaining analysis. Several marriages followed one another, resulting in failure. The women in his life revealed signs of the shadows of a ruined reverie and, consequently, a precarious alpha function was always installed in every emotional link. The women appeared to protect him, however, in the same way that the Company of Actors of Hamlet’s play, a meta-theater, pretended to carry out the failure, in truth, a species of homicide.

His family history presented an authoritative father. During puberty he practiced running. He stood out in this pursuit. One day he lost a race to a boy who he was used to beating easily. Faced with this defeat, his father predicted: “This defeat erases all your victories, you have placed your life to lose”. The significance of the phrase fed transformations in hallucinosis throughout his life, especially in his relations with women. In this way this patient exemplified the conflict, which in the Negative Grid is located where Hamlet has to associate himself with Gertrude. She exercised a double complicity: with the son (L) and with the uncle (murderer –O), incorporating in this way at the same time the cruelty of the father and the complicity of the mother. Hamlet could not exercise his rivalry with the father and only the place of death was left to him, like this patient to who only to live in mortification remained. Rivalry with the father is inhibited and avoided – producing the transformations in hallucinosis – maintaining thus the atemporality of the hallucinosis. The transformation in hallucinosis is translated into rivalry with O, or better, rivalry with the internal world and the realities essential to its objects, associated to the belief that actions are more important and efficacious than words. The hierarchy of facts regarding thinking sustained his immaturity and, consequently, non-resolution, in the measure that it sustains the lie that is in rivalry with O. The Oedipical conflict transforms itself into a simulacrum. The hamletian triangle occurs to prevent contact with rivalry. In this process an Oedipical simulacrum is established, but all emotion is avoided. Determined not to face the truth, he sustains a lie in the end. He married a hysterical woman, which is the marriage of a father saint with an asexual woman. Gertrude realizes the bi-sexuality and the lobby for the ultimate truth - O - does not impose itself. To rival with O is to avoid the confrontation with the truth brought by its Oedipus.

The negative Grid presents a very diverse vicissitude of the properly stated Grid, for once all its categories find themselves saturated, therefore, one could think of a diverse graphic representation of a table. We could use a simpler system, two lines that cross perpendicularly, that is, the system of coordinates and abscises.

In synthesis, we know that Bion considered the Grid, to be used after sessions, with the intuition of developing hypotheses and the intuition of the analyst. Like a game of chess, or in a geometrical or artistic design, or in the graphic expression of a mathematical function, the test of interpretive possibility is affected, and it is hoped that with this an increase in analytical capacity will occur. The Negative Grid, apart from this function, has the objective of recuperating the thinking capacity of the analyst, who feels exposed to an intense burden of projective identification, beta elements, or who feels “blind” faced with the occurrences which consider negatives in his work.The survival of the mind of the analyst is in play. The restitution of the analytical function is in question, bombarded by the beta elements of the patient, by bizarre objects and by projective transformations of hallucinosis. With the negative Grid, we have the possibility to think about the de-structuring damage and nuances produced by the projective system of those patients with serious failures in the alpha function. We can cogitate on the diverse modalities and effects of manifestations of beta elements on the mind of the analyst.The negative Grid could be an interesting tool in recovering interpretative capacity.It reflects the analyst who is able to survive the attacks on his mind, and who is able to maintain his creativity in action, even under the crossfire of projective distortions. Apart from this, the negative Grid, to the extent that it represents the specter of clinical manifestations of beta elements, and incapacity to learn from emotional experience, is also a way to examine the extent of the psychic catastrophe, considering it from the mental debris that survive the tragedy of To BeFor as with Hamlet, the question of To Be is essential and, outside this, the rest is silence. (Hamlet’s last words before dying).

* Paper presented at the International Conference on Bion’s ideas, Los Angeles, 2002.