I
Since the beginning of humanity, the observations made by human beings are expressed in three fundamental areas: art, science and religion, all trying to describe and understand the phenomena of human nature and nature in general. In these three areas, there have always been individuals who stood out for their ability to see what most people cannot. Countless times, they simply saw the obvious, but inside the words of such view came what apparently very few people can have: a memoir of the future. They turn on the light, which is the most simply example of a catastrophic change.
In religion, these individuals are called mystics and, in the arts and science, geniuses. This last designation is a kind of recognition that we should not separate science from art, or, at least, we should place them in a symmetrical relationship. However, in any circumstance, they produce emotional turbulence (Bion, 1976) as an effect of their ideas on the social body.
Sometimes the effect is recognizable as a welcome epistemological shift in history; other times those shifts might take many years and maybe generations to be accepted or recognizable.
What does this emotional turbulence mean? Why does it occur?
Leonardo da Vinci quoted by Bion (1976), made drawings of spiral hair representing this turbulence during periods that Bion (1976) marked as moments of decision/creation. Those are undoubtedly moments of change from a state of mind to another. He was turning on the light. Leonardo a much-disciplined man try to circumscribe his drawings putting them inside a circle, or a field.
Milton in Paradise Lost, wrote the Invocation of Light mentioning the view of turbulence by the eyes of the character Satan as the void and formless infinite.
In the examples cited, the authors did not know what they were exactly searching for.
There were sketches of creative ideas, internal movements in search of an author. Most of the time, they needed interpreters.
For instance, Paul Klee, the Austrian artist drew his famous Angelus Novus from the sketches of an alleged attempt to make a political cartoon of the German Kaiser. He did not know what his drawing meant to say. An angel with fear in his wide-open eyes. His friend Walter Benjamin, who received as a gift the drawing, could describe the image as the Angel of History. He said the angel is falling down from Heaven; he is falling down with his back to the future. His eyes can see Heaven becoming each moment more and more distant. All he can see is a trail of losses and deaths. He tries to come back but there is a strong wind blowing and pushing him away from Heaven. This wind, said Benjamin, is History.
Michelangelo at his mature age realized from forgotten ideas of his youth, which he could not do anything about, that he wanted to sculpt the statue of David.
Milton sought to make a social and political criticism disguised as a biblical text. Still, his description of an uncreated and inaccessible essence, conquered from the void and formless infinite, inspired by virulent poetic electricity, interpretations in great epics such as Cervantes, Camões, Shakespeare. Milton's political criticism turned into great poetry and generated epic creations in several languages. Coincidentally, lost paradise can be the metaphor of the embryonic mind, the one that gives birth to the human.
In the Bible, Moses had his brother Aaron as an interpreter. Freud suspected that for this reason, Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian. In Bhagavad Gita, the god Krishna speaks to Arjuna through his human avatar: a coachman. At the crossroads where Oedipus and Laio face each other, the latter needs Polifonte, the coachman, to defend him; however, he ends up directly suffering what Laio suffers indirectly: death by accident. In myths, indirect ways are mostly cruel.
In Greco-Roman mythology, we have Automedonte, who went to the Trojan War as a coachman, who dealt with Xanthus and Balium (horses that were a gift from the gods to Peleus at his wedding). He was the translator of Achilles' will in combat.
Jesus needed a group of apostles. Each interpreting in his way what the God living as a human being would have said.
Isaac Luria, the Kabbalistic mystic, did not write because he felt that the writing did not contain his emotions (emotional turbulence) but was transcribed by his listeners. Today we can see in Luria's ideas consistent sketches of quantum physics applied to astronomy. Did he travel to the future of science? He believed that he had frequent interviews with the prophet Elijah, by whom he was initiated into sublime doctrines. Luria stated that, while sleeping, his soul rose to heaven and talked to great masters.
The amazing Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, born in 1853, made studies of turbulence that we see in some of his paintings. Among them is "Starry Night" (1889), light and clouds flow in spirals that seem to move on the canvas, like the turbulence in nature, particularly in fluids and certain gases. Did he foresee the image of a star obtained by the Hubble space telescope in 2004, with swirls of dust and gas in turbulent motion? Alternatively, is it our imagination that seeks these relationships?
Meister Eckhart was one of the most fruitful thinkers of medieval philosophy and is considered a great exponent of Neoplatonism and mysticism. Well known for his eloquent and improvised sermons and the use of paradoxes, Eckhart´s unusual language demanded interpreters. However, this quickly caused errors of interpretation. At the end of life, the inquisition took him to trial.
The examples are countless. We can all invoke images, personal experiences or characters of the most diverse natures, which express ideas of emotional turbulence and their consequent translation by the social body and ourselves. Nevertheless, usually, the psychoanalyst modestly focuses on the clinic.
II
The concept of turbulence is a concept of Mathematics and Physics that presents all the issues covered by the theory of complexity. For example, fluids should be easy to understand, as they are common facts - water, drafts, fluids in general - governed by physical laws written almost two centuries ago. However, when a storm falls, it is currently impossible to predict what will happen.
This impossibility is due to turbulence, a problem that causes physicists and mathematicians many issues. On the physical side, turbulence happens when a smooth flow of fluid begins.
To divide into more minor swirls and vortices. These swirls break into smaller reels generating smaller and smaller spirals, an unpredictable cascade that dissipates the original smooth flow. These vortices affect each other, making it impossible to accurately predict what will happen to any specific particle in the fluid you are measuring. On a large scale, the energy gradually dissipates and with an appearance of order. On a small scale, chaos is absurdly significant. There is nothing to do but face the phenomenon through complexity.
In mathematics, turbulence seemed, at first, to be more straightforward. Navier-Stokes equations describe fluid flows since the early 19th century. They consider the fluid properties, such as its density and viscosity, along with any forces acting on it. For all practical purposes - and as long as not asking the equations to predict in a turbulent fluid - we know that they work. However, “for practical purposes” is the same as a test. These are often fallacious conclusions.
Navier-Stokes equations describe fluid flows, taking into account viscosity, speed, pressure and density. However, because of the turbulence in fluids, proving that equations always make sense is one of the most challenging physics and mathematics problems.
What is there to prove? On the one hand, the Navier-Stokes[2] equations have always behaved well. Given the fluid’s initial state, mathematicians want to confirm that the equations will never lead to a meaningless result. Imagine a scenario where all of these eddies and vortices conspire to concentrate all their energy at a given point in the fluid. Doing so accelerates the flow at that point to an infinite speed. It is unlikely but mathematically possible. In current practice, the scenario is impossible. But, how to call what is mathematically proven impossible? Here is the complexity that we have to face, waiting for the future and being part of it as we continue to observe in a state of a negative capacity.
III
An important example of this described complexity shows that ideas span centuries, maintain their vitality, and acquire a new version.
The question that we can develop from the ideas of Bion (1970) is about the capacity of the social body to establish relations with the ideas of the mystics/geniuses and ultimately to contain or support them. The question concerns the observer.
This dialogue aims to establish relations of identity and difference between mystics/geniuses and the social body that make sense for analytical work. It is a matter of considering how in the analytical clinic, the counsellor approaches the role of a “mystic/genius”, perceiving and interpreting facts that he cannot transcribe on paper but that the patients can describe in their lives.
In analytical practice, we are the anonymous interpreters of many perceptions of no lesser literary and artistic value. In this anonymity of powerful ideas, which took place in the humble context of a counsellor/patient relationship, interpretations put the unconscious at stake, seeking to demystify the mystic and depose the genius. One follows here the Latin saying: Sapere Aude (dare to know). In other words, not taking any authority in psychoanalysis to inhibit our thoughts.
What establishes the relationship between the social body and the mystical / genius individuals is what is usually called culture. In this sense, culture works as a caesura between the mystic/genius and the group. The mystics/geniuses derive from the group, but at the same time, they stand out from the group as not being part of common sense. Later on, I shall specifically discuss psychoanalytic culture and the relationship with new psychoanalytic ideas.
The statements aim to think about a favorable or a hostile method for the ideas formulated by the mystic/genius. In this way, we can look for specific cultures in our experience that exemplify the confusion between science and religion and their politicization or publication.
There are religious cultures that propose the exclusion of art. There are very strict religious cultures that do not allow any dialogue of ideas and cultures that politicize science and only accept domesticated art. In general, we psychoanalysts are used to coexistence, to a certain extent, with the discussion about the ideas of the mystic/genius, starting with Freud’s work.
Plato once proposed the exclusion of art in Education, but it remains in force in current Education. Plato said that poetry should be excluded from education because it would pollute young people’s minds. Thus didacticism came up based on the idea that it is the walls of cities that educate citizens and, from them, the invisible walls of institutions and the limiting walls of education arise. Didacticism generated conservatism (maintaining the same curriculum), and this developed romanticism, that is, ideals of education that are impossible to attain. The impossibility brought about an administrative caste that we know by the name of governing Elite or Establishment. In it, priests can play a prominent role. For example, in Newton's day, the Bishop of Berkeley was in charge of the Academy of Sciences.
Fortunately, Plato himself told us about Socrates, who instead had his school outside the city walls and believed that the essential thing in a man's education was to become skilled in poetry. Socrates said that he was like his mother, a midwife, and gave birth to ideas. Therefore, even today, if we want to learn, we need to leave the walls and go back to discuss. The movement must be continuous, going from inside to outside and from outside to inside.
III
The possibilities for cultural expressions are plentiful, but thanks to Bion (1970), we can study the relationship between the three activities, science, and art, religion, derived from the oedipal configurations described commensal, symbiotic and parasitic. There are three general types of culture, three distinct types of container/content relationship, and three types of oedipal configuration.
Every culture certainly implies a differentiated practice governed by a system and a differentiated complex of relations of meaning, explicit and implicit, concretized in thinking, acting and feeling. In short, there is always an emotional experience, actions resulting from it, and the production of knowledge.
We can privilege the apex of the emotional experience taking Freud's idea of Oedipus as a gateway for human beings into Culture as an investigative guide. In other words, how the oedipal configuration is structured determines the way of thinking, acting, and feeling of an individual in Culture or Culture is an addition of the interaction between individuals who adopt practices of thinking and working to remain united.
The change from one oedipal configuration to another is a catastrophic change, although the expression has been mistaken in some psychoanalytic environments for disaster. It is not a disaster, but the meaning contained in Greek tragedy of Oedipus, as a trigger for investigations of the unconscious, like those made by Freud to discover psychoanalysis. There is unparalleled exemplarity in the oedipal tragedy. It is an example of what we think, represent, imagine, dream about parents, riddles, knowledge, power, environment, in short, everything that makes up human culture. However, above all, as we follow this line, we will always be discovering and rediscovering psychoanalysis.
The catastrophe has meaning when we change the way of thinking; it makes us deal with the ruins of what was present in the previous configuration. To this end, we cannot carry a truth-suitability to understand ruin_ as it is done with disaster_ nor is it a matter of abandoning the facts as a simple past but trying to combine them with a true expression. The phrase “there is much more continuity between one mean and another. Between one configuration and another will directly investigate the observer who tries to see the facts as they appear. Knowing that it interferes with them, and even if nothing is done, accepts its incompleteness.
I do not deny the difficulty of a debate between these two truths. There is always a lot of turbulence, and it always increases with the detailing. Hence, instead of dialectics, I prefer the term complexity, which exempts me from ideological pressure to have results, a tension that can always falsify them.
Complexity allows me to avoid both the oppressive coercion of identity’ logic and the libertine license of the sense of difference. Any dialectics can always produce false pacification, accepting simply by accepting that identity must be received, and that difference must be taken. This gracious speech has generated what nowadays is named as a politically correct speech. In other words, to be politically correct I must exclude certain expressions from my vocabulary because I need to respect differences and because I need to be equal to everyone. However, as I can never be equal unless ethically, I end up pretending that I am not different, but at the same time knowing that I am, therefore, I try to believe that I am right and contributing to social harmony while others who don´t follow what I pretend to think are wrong.
Here we put in practice a possible phrase attributed to Nietzsche that said the Elite is constantly inventing habits and words in which it ended up believing.
There is no limit to hypocrisy (-H) in human history. As an example, I can import models from other cultures, because I think they are better than mine are. At the very least, it would be a cultural provincialism. Still, it is more of a severe modern meltdown: I renounce my culture to value something I do not know from emotional experience, but because simply looking from a distance, moved by envy and other aspects that come from my inability to create, I conclude that the neighbor’s grass looks greener.
When it comes to Oedipus, there is no possible pacification. It is a never-ending turbulence derived from the fact we are humans. In revealing that Freud opened a whole period of thought. Bion expanded Freud’s ideas by emphasizing semantic innovations, infinite possibilities, a new world proposition while raising a new understanding of the self.
When we take, for example, the mystic’s language, we should not simply say that it is merely poetic. It is poetic, of course, it is plenty of wild thoughts, but Bion showed that implicit in Milton is precisely the nomination of "O", or what the mystic calls "God".
Milton was referring to the void and formless infinite. Kant called it a thing in itself, or a scientist might call it an ultimate reality, and the artist called absolute reality. They all fit Buber's description (quoted by Bion) that the man in his mother's womb knows the universe and forgets it at birth. What is such forgotten reality?
Mystics/geniuses are those who do not forget it. Melanie Klein did not forget anything about being a baby; she managed to remember everything through her theory. Winnicott remembered very well of him being a tiny child playing with a pillow. Einstein transformed into a physics revolution his playful childhood imagination with riding a beam of light through the universe.
All literary sorts, from narrative to folktale, from poetry to fiction, constitute an evolving of "O". This specificity does not abolish any of the poem’s characteristics text, art, or science.
Then, what for focusing on “O”?
It adds, first, the notion that there is the circulation (work in progress) of an original arch-referent that at the same time generates the texts and at the same time escapes it. How “O” reaches a text or a speech, or a human expression can be investigated by the mutation of meaning essential to define as a type of transformation (Bion, 1965).
It is undoubtedly tempting to associate this meaning mutation exclusively with the role of what we can call expressions-limit (the unknowable, the absolute Truth, the original preconception, the trance, and the elements of psychoanalysis). According to its words, the expressions-limit that Bion uses undoubtedly has the virtue of drawing attention to language specificity, but they do not constitute it entirely. It would be not a virtue but an addiction if we considered it so. As a vehicle of thought and feelings, the words only work in the middle of an essentially analogue metaphorical language, generated by the descriptive, prescriptive, prophetic, and finally parabolic name of “O”. This expressions-limit come to qualify, modify, rectify this analogue language and bring the digital, symbolic language in its place.
One can show it in the following way: artistic narratives, religious prophecies, and scientific laws are not at the level of the concept but at the scheme’s level. Following Kant’s ideas about the schema, they are procedures, methods for providing images, not to the idea, not even to the Idea - as in the Theory of Aesthetic Ideas - but to what he qualify as essence. In an epistemological language, schemes are rules for producing the priest’s figures, the scientist, the artist, the judge, the father, the husband, the mother, and the servant and so forth.
These models are not just transformations as a pure expression of “O" but are expressed by models to adapt a particular group to a specific culture. That is why they remain very diverse, heterogeneous, and incapable of constituting a system of their own. Besides, no approach is not conceptual. Here we can understand why the primary trend is anthropomorphic representation, of the idol represented in science by the genius, in part by the charismatic artist, in religion by the mystic. In the clinic, it would mean believing in the patient’s appearance, believing in his speech of authority on a specific subject.
For example, suppose a Federal Supreme Court judge, enters your office. There is a risk that you will think that he is a mature man, literate, law knowledgeable. However, if we do not let ourselves be carried away by this conceptual anthropomorphism of image, what would we see? Could we see a resentful little boy begging for justice because his mother had a new baby? Suddenly, such man can be very angry because the psychoanalyst is having a new patient. Would he prevent interpretations by only talking about law and court problems?
We might receive a well-succeeded medical doctor complaining he is not feeling comfortable anymore in his office. Could we see someone who has chosen medicine because he wanted to kill people? Or because he is frustrated of not being a hero?
The psychoanalyst is always in trouble to get out of conceptual traps, which tends to create idealization of the models. To deal with such problem I suggest replacing the dialectic model’s functioning by the ethics of complexity, removing fixed personalization and reestablishing the “O” domain. Then we can see how “O” works the scheme, current model employed by the patient, making it, moving, energizing it, spreading it, as described in Oedipus, through the family group’s characters.
"O" can be Oedipus, Laio or Jocasta, and it is all of them at the same time. Bion's suggestion is to use all the characters and passages from Sophocles' three plays. Also, look for other myths that can amplify the poietic-psychoanalytic discourse: the myth of Eden, Babel, excerpts from the Aeneid, construction of facts via assumptions of archaeological finds, the myth of Prometheus. The possibilities are endless. They must be sought in the analyst's attunement with the emotional turbulence that one can visualize in these myths.
In a way, the suggestion follows the Idea, which according to Kant, requires that not only the image is to be overcome, but also the concept, by requesting that we “think more”, thus having “O” as a reference one subverts all models, although it is supporting itself on them.
III
In the context of correlating “O” and the cultural idol, (meaning scheme translated by mystics/geniuses), we can understand the critical role of Bion’s theory consisting of limit-expressions.
In Bion, as a striking example of using limit-expressions, we have the Grid representing a functional analysis with an action and a retrospective effect to generate a future result.
In other words, a posteriori criticism turns out to create hypothesis for use in the future. Thus the Grid, made entirely of limit-expressions, becomes a modifier of the interpretive models used in psychoanalysis.
Following such Bion's guideline, we will never reduce language by believing in the simple transformation, for example, of poetic language into religious language, as an unsuspecting view might understand. Note that Milton would never be so simplistic. There is always a set of models that generate transformations; models that work as knowledge generating changes in K, the paradox causing what can be seen as the transformation in rigid motion, the hyperbole forging the projective transformation and the negative meanings generating the transformation in hallucinosis.
On the other hand, we cannot fail to follow how this path of poetics reaches the social-historical setting, how it affects groups and, consequently, politics in public action (making ideas shared).
It is part of the poetics to "redo" or "reparation" (using Klein’s term) the world according to a vertex that is found in the poem, model, or metaphor. In this sense, the application of Klein's hermeneutics is the final moment of understanding. However, with Bion, we can use another language according to another paradigm, one that considers Uncertainty and Indeterminism, that is, to understand oneself to transform oneself, which does not go through the intellect or the language, as we know it. It is no longer a question of hermeneutics but of putting the word into practice, where understanding the inner world and changing it are fundamentally the same thing.
While in Klein’s universe, the force and logic of limit-expressions take on an extreme symbolic character, as exists in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, to Bion these expressions do not recommend any type of conduct. Still, it is about exercising psychoanalysis only at the core of the emotional experience. In order to do it is required a general suspension of memory, desire and need for understanding, in benefit of what can be called interpretative symmetry where the limit- experiences of life are.
Indeed, although one might observe an outward harmony between these limit-experiences and limit-expressions they necessarily translate into catastrophic changes. All of them have in common to involve an overcoming of ethics and public-action at the expense of a positive role, albeit always precarious and provisional in analogue “models” (interpretations that refer to everything that happens in the session to the analyst, and make him an excavator of the transference and not a supportive operator). This overcoming cannot be achieved without the starting point being the negative capacity (Bion, 1970), which in Keats is more the poet’s attitude than poetry itself - a fact that is also valid for the psychoanalyst.
Suppose we can understand this fundamental difference in Bion. In that case, we can endorse an ethical and public-action as they rule the anticipation of humanity, freed and resurrected with the help of symmetry in the analytical constructions. That means, for example, not mentioning omnipotence without mentioning helplessness.
Meltzer recognized Bion’s humanistic vision, but we should not confuse it with some demagogic fuss aligned with the politically correct. In all dimensions of Culture, we have resources of language, myths and dreams, which allow us to visualize the humanism of the Oedipal mind functioning without necessarily falling into the trap of presenting a disguised and insinuating ideological vision on how to act, think or feel. When this suggestion happens, a psychoanalytic fraud satisfies the counsellors’ romantic universe, fulfils the pleasure of his hallucination, when he finds that it carries a humanistic and universal truth, and as if some ideology were on the side of the Good and others were not.
Models derived from Oedipus, which can be presented as myth of Babel, Eden, the death of Palinurus, Prometheus, Medea, Antigone, etc., are not political but insofar as they are poetic.
IV
I shall now discuss the symbiotic culture, in which the term culture is a synonym for something suitable for all the things we practice. Many that we practice without genuinely believing in them are acts performed that are not taken seriously but produce emotional experiences capable of giving real value to those experiences. This configuration, the relationship between parts year going in opposite directions as in a thug of war or something related.
Santa Claus is an excellent example of this contradiction. Christian adults do not believe in it, but they encourage their children to see and wait for the mythical Santa Claus, creating a euphoric reality. They justify this theatre of joy as something that part of the "lifestyle"; maintains a "tradition". This cultural attitude does not care about the disappointment and suffering that the child will have when discovering that all is false and that the child no longer will have the same confidence in his parents.
The commensal relationship that existed in the family group will suffer a catastrophe. At the end of the day, the child's conclusion may also be that the parents lie and that lying is part of the culture. These situations generate the child's perception of not sharing everything with the parents. It can be small things, but it can also be serious situations, such as sexual abuse, bullying and drug supply.
In this sense, a traditional family would be any family that practices actions that it does not believe in, and its members suffer the effects of this hypocrisy. Let us consider hypocrisy here as the bond minus H (-H), an excellent way for hate theories to develop.
Following this investigation line, we can think of the meaning of style and tradition as based on creating and maintaining lies, and the reason may be simply by pure pleasure, which takes shape in consumerism.
Naturally, the next step will be to consider that anyone who does not follow the style or tradition is wrong or mistaken. The term "killjoy" is applied to this. In the same way that it involves, in those who raise objections by the principle of reality, the one called "boring”.
Borderless hedonism means following the motto: seeking pleasure at all costs, damn reality—a sort of moral. Later on, I will talk about this again when considering the types of morals derived from hidden representations. For example, Santa Claus, which is that of Jesus / God. The God who emerges at Christmas follows the moral that sacrifices itself to bring pleasure to children.
V
I will now talk about the characteristics of the catastrophic change that occurs when the continent/content relationship changes from symbiotic to parasitic. For example, science in a poor culture of reflection always clashes with the excessive tradition that demands conformity to beliefs.
For example, fundamentalists do not believe in science. Nevertheless, many times in their cultures, soft religious individuals emerge speaking in the name of science. From time to time, any scientific idea can be tamed and transformed into belief. Truth is seduced by convenience. It is about truth-suitability.
A specific example: fundamentalists do not believe in Darwin's evolution theory. They cannot accept that the Bible is a poetic and metaphorical text. In their sense, the Bible is much more "scientific" than Darwin is. By the vertex of fundamentalism, the scientist is only the author of a huge lie. To exercise the parasitism that exhausts Darwin’s vigor, scientific ideas, fundamentalists claim that the world exists according to the Bible: it started precisely 5780 years ago, as written.
It is a type of fallacious argument that defines a term (or a concept) using the term (or the idea). Example: "The Bible is the Word of God because it says it is the Word of God."
In difficulty (or impossibility) of proving that the Bible is the Word of God, it is necessary to invoke the Bible itself as proof that the Bible is the Word of God.
Suppose we show the believers archaeological evidence that species existed millions of years ago, and are concrete evidence, research with criteria. In that case, they claim that it is an atheist set up lie to attack religion. However, note, this parasitic position occurs because there is a culture endorsing this.
If these individuals lived isolated, they would find harmony, a commonality. Still, if they are within a culture where the majority is not fundamentalist, we will have a symbiotic culture in which one party tries to dissolve the other.
We now assume the vertex of the integrity of ideas in a culture. It is about taking views seriously, without any critical distance. Fundamentalists do not see the Bible’s text as metaphorical. The other party, taking science seriously, sees the belief group as a danger. The science group can designate believers as "barbarians" and "uncivilized" and say that they threaten humanity’s progress—an accusation of parasitism.
Nevertheless, fundamentalists dare to take their belief seriously, we consider their belief to be just a fantasy, and we take what we think about them seriously. Are we being religious?
This secular hypocrisy, this way of thinking, stems from the lack of critical detachment. Any scientist who cannot realize that science requires critical distance is also a threat, as fundamentalists are.
What are the consequences of the lack of critical distance?
For example, we have many individuals who claim to be Catholic; however, they do not attend church and do not even believe in Jesus. However, if it suits them, they go to church, follow the rituals, and they will not fail to accuse the Jews of having murdered Christ.
This formula of hypocrisy and hatred appears in all religions, but it also seems in politics. Parties support corruption, take advantage of it, justify it as the norm of political culture, but are always ready to accuse fascists who denounce them.
This way, we can almost conclude that this way of thinking is at the H link and –H link (hypocrisy).
The fascists took their belief seriously, the Nazis too, and the inquisitors perhaps more than anyone. All three have points in common, which is the placing of the State above everything and everyone. They recreated God through the state. The practice of this culture has spoken-persons who speak on behalf of the State. Fascists always speak on behalf of the state. Fascist newspapers act in this direction; they consider themselves spokespeople for the State.
Both fascists and Nazis ignore the difference between the state and the government. The Nazis quickly placed science at the service of their political beliefs and justified the genocidal practice. Concentration camps came from an inspiration of genetic science, which could judge who was good enough to live genetically. Although the word concentration has been used, these fields were for extermination. They functioned like a factory that killed people.
When General Eisenhower found out about concentration camps’ existence, he ordered to film what was happening inside them as he knew that someday people would deny what was happening. He was correct.
The fundamentalist government of Iran insists that the genocide never happened to attack and deny the State of Israel’s existence, encouraging and financing terrorists in Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, Sudan, Ethiopia with which it earns a lot of money from selling weapons.
The inquisitors, the inspiring source of the Nazis and fascists, never ceased to exist; they constitute their most modern version of what we see every day in the newspapers as an ideological patrol. A patrol based on the State machinery’s political control, with its agents ready to intervene in Education and Art, Justice and Science, until these practices establish a culture of unanimity.
Note that the Inquisition aimed above all to create alibis to embezzle and corrupt. The Nazis were masters of stealing treasures from other peoples they subjugated. In the concentration camps, they came to the cruel sophistication of taking gold fillings from their victims to make ingots to sponsor the war.
VI
According to Bion (1970), the conflict between the mystic and the group appears more exaggerated and, therefore, easier to study in the account of Jesus’ story and his relationship with the group.
Exaggeration, as a method, works as a kind of magnifying glass. The term mystic is a magnifying glass for what we can call individuals who enable a historical creation, who welcome and nurture a powerful idea. A thought without a thinker, which once was thought, divides historical times, installing censorship between one before and after them.
However, the ease of exaggeration is relative since all exaggeration is hyperbole, which in Bion's (1965) terms means a projective transformation.
The projective transformation creates difficulties to follow the patients' associations of ideas, often causing the experience of something “unspoken” or something “hidden” that predominates in the discourse. It may be an explanation for our difficulty.
In reality, the difficulty arises from the vast turn that the patient is taking as if he were “stringing along” the counsellor. The exclamations "this", "that", "thing" are abundant in this type of discourse.
If I could put hyperbole in a visual image, we would imagine an individual at the Vila Olímpia shopping mall going to the Psychoanalytic Society. Instead of taking the concise path of a block and a half, he goes to Mooca and then takes several tracks until he reaches the other side.
The emotional turbulence produced by the new idea brings threatening feelings in the group that react to the mystic by demanding explanations for the unknown that is presented to them. But the first move is the compliance requirement. It stems from the persecutory feelings produced by a new idea or a new way of looking at reality.
In the typical way of many mystics, he emphatically said that his teachings conformed with the existing Establishment. According to Matthew 5:17, he would have said, "Do not think that I came to destroy, but to fulfil". Or in another version: "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to accomplish".
But why would it be necessary to make that statement? The answer is that there is a perception in the group of a disruptive force that could fall on the members.
The disruptive issue is proportional to the group's hostility towards the mystic and vice versa. However, we have the mystic and the other the group, but what does the intermediation do?
We have two factors: the historical reality and the culture that produces representations.
What are the representations of Jesus as a historical reality?
It is certainly easy to have an impression of historical reality and honesty when we consult the calendar divided between B.C. and A.C. The birth of Christ divides history, and we accept this naturally, without asking why. What few know is that this decision occurred around 600 AC by the monk Dionysus the Little, who was concerned with the date of Jesus' birth, which was then set on the 25 December 753 of Rome’s founding. Note that Rome’s foundation, which does not have a precise origin, has become a reference. However, archaeological research in the Rome area has detected a 14,000-year-old human presence, with many ceramic remains, tools and 10,000 year-old stone weapons. This evidence shows how far in time Lazio's occupation is. However, this historical reality is not taken into account.
The Church decided that December 25 would be the day of Jesus’ birth, Christmas Day would overlap the celebrations of the winter solstice and the feast of Mithra, goddess of light. Thus, the Church Christianized these pagan festivities, providing them with Christian symbolism and a new Christian language. The Christian historical reality built a new building on top of the remnants of another culture. But the remnants are there.
The chronological source relating to the year of Christ's birth is a passage from the Gospel of Lucas (2, 1-2) marking an edict by Caesar Augustus ordering the census of the entire inhabited world. This census was the first carried out when Quirino was Syria’s governor, with everyone’s enlistment, each in one’s city. At that time, it is said that Joseph left the region of Galilee, the town of Nazareth, to the area of Judea, to the city of David, called Bethlehem, to enrol in the census with Mary, his wife, who was pregnant.
From these sources and after many calculations, the monk Dionysus thought that he could establish the precise year of Herod's death since it is said that Jesus was born in the year Herod died. But he was mistaken because the sovereign indeed killed in the year 4 B.C. It is even more challenging to establish the exact time of the Quirino census, which happened, in any case, between the years 7 and 6 B.C.
The system established by Dionysus was adopted very slowly. It can be said that it only really expanded in the 9th century AC (in the reign of Charlemagne). Today, religious historians agree to consider that Jesus was born five or six years earlier than the monk's calculations propose; therefore, our millennium ended before we knew it.
Even so, the date of the birth of Christ was imposed throughout the world, regardless of the religion practised. For Muslims, the year 622 was replaced by Western-style, theoretically the first of its era.
Jews use two calendars, but they do not use Jesus as a reference for the foundation of time; they call it the Common Era. It is a convention to standardise information. But there begins one of our main questions. If there is no belief that there was a character named Jesus, why adopt the cultural measure? It is secular hypocrisy. The –H link again.
Therefore, all of our “when” are linked to the Church’s convention and the wrong calculation of a medieval monk, and even more, derived from founding hypocrisy.
As a historical reality imposed on the world, the character Jesus brought a victory for the Roman empire, no longer in terms of territories but in humanity’s culture. Through culture, Jesus is eternalised, with the sine qua non-condition that he is a God and, therefore, a spokesman for immortality. Only a God is immortal, and if he dies in his human body, he resurrects as an idea, as an eternal culture.
However, the question remains: why was it decided to establish this huge change that brings us the false idea that a fundamental shift in the social-historical reality has occurred?
As far as documents are concerned, there is no record of an extraordinary event at that time when the birth of Jesus took place, and history continued to flow; the Romans continued to dominate the world and taking their cultural legacy wherever they could go.
It is not very difficult to see that powerful civilisations force history to be told before and after it, for all the changes it has produced. But it is also not difficult to see that when one civilisation decays and another takes its place, there is a tendency to falsify history and diminish the strength of the previous one’s legacy.
The Hebrews adopted Egyptian customs, especially those of the Egyptian elite, but they never recognise that this was done. The elite Egyptian civilisation continued to exist in the Hebrews but as an unspoken.
This fact is also not unfamiliar to languages. The Portuguese language, for example, has a considerable number of Arabic words. No one ignores Latin and Greek as their origin, but it is difficult to admit that many everyday words are precisely the exact words Arabs use. So, we speak a language that we don't know we speak. But, as the Arabs were expelled from the Iberian peninsula because they did not convert into the Catholic religion, they became those who should be considered harmful and thus were excluded by the Establishment.
Something similar happened in psychoanalysis. The IPA systematically ignored Jung’s ideas after falling out with Freud. Unfortunately, due to being highly pressured, he changed what Freud called Psychoanalysis to Deep Psychology. The same was happening with Lacan's ideas. He said the same thing that mystics say: I did not come to destroy the Freudian legacy, nor the Establishment, but to add. Fortunately, many French counsellors belonging to IPA did not fail to admit the legacy and introduced it as a source of thought. However, Lacan is still very poorly taught at many IPA institutions.
Some have no one to teach, and in others, it is led by people that the Establishment considers harmless due to their little knowledge and lack of engagement with the ideas. They are seen much more like a “curious” of Lacan's work than someone who profoundly studies his work. On the other hand, in the so-called Lacanian schools, there is a psychoanalytic semi-illiteracy since Freud. So many other authors who have had an interlocution with Lacan are not studied. Without whom he would have done nothing.
I am trying to point out a kind of intellectual crucifixion that occurs when the mystic, or creative individual, does not conform to the Establishment. Although the IPA Establishment is supposed to be thought of as having advanced characteristics and managed by people who go through counselling, facts like those described occur incessantly. Editorial councils and Congress organisers are run by people interested in making arrangements and political pleasures and have no intention of discussing and privileging the debate of ideas. It makes no difference whatsoever from Nazi, Stalinist or Fascist censors.
VII
Bion says that the messianic idea can be confused with the person of the mystic. The Establishment can confuse, but the mystic can also be complicated because of the culture in which confusedly if it is unfavourable to new ideas.
As has already been pointed out many times, the terms mystic and genius are permeable; they can appear in any human activity: religion, science, art, time and place. It is better to consider it as a spectrum of possibilities, with faith at one extreme and science and art at the other. Among them are the caesuras provided by the different cultures.
What kind of culture resulted in Jesus' death by Roman methods? Note that the death penalty is not prescribed this way among Jews. Nor would a crucifixion be held on a Friday. It would only generate a more popular uprising when there were many insurgents against the Romans.
What is generally absent from the discussions is the question of the meaning of crucifixion.
There are three possible interpretations: 1) combat between good and evil, the death of Jesus as a price to pay to the Devil to redeem humanity. 2) sacrificial; Christ paid for our sins - not to the Devil - but to satisfy justice and redeem the sins of humankind. 3) good: an act of radical love to inspire man to follow him, to give his life for others as a symbol of the greatest love of all.
So we have three moral interpretations: a vulgar one, a legal one, and another romantic one—no ethics whatsoever.
Translating now the image of Jesus by the term omnipotence/helplessness, and we will see different settings of the continent relationship and content, allowing us to add a fourth interpretation that is the hidden truth in the first three, which were only a manifest way of making a moralistic agreement with the Establishment.
When it comes to a hidden truth, only an uncomfortable question can express it, thus leaving the realm of truth-adequacy contained in the first three interpretations: And if Christ death were a way, for God, his father, to pay his debt to humanity, to apologise for having provided such a poorly done job, for creating an imperfect world, full of suffering and injustice?
The father’s story offering his son sacrifice to prove his conformity to the Establishment (God) is one of the first biblical stories. Abraham would have to prove his devotion to God by sacrificing his son Isaac. At the last moment, he was stopped by God’s hand, and in place of his son, he offered a lamb.
But if we consider wars, nothing very different takes place. Children and an immense amount of civilians are sacrificed.
Stalin, who had no religion, on learning that the German Army captured his son in World War II and that the Germans wanted a prisoner exchange, declared that if his son was arrested, he was incompetent and therefore did not deserve to live.
Leonel Brizola, who pretended to be Catholic, left his family helpless. The problems that his children suffered (drugs, fraud, ideological falsehood) coldly declared that it was not his problem.
We can certainly admit that God criticised his cruelty and shifted it to symbolic. But like any believe nature, it puts the bad aspect in the lamb, and the good is in the son according to the Establishment. There is simply a delusion.
Nietzsche made the ironic comment that the ruling classes love to invent words, which they believe. It is not much different from the liar who ends up believing in his lie. So we can put the liar as being anti-mystic or anti-genius.
The liar is found in culture often in a way that is difficult to recognise, as he is usually an individual who has valuable imaginative wealth. Nelson Rodrigues called this individual a “scoundrel”, hardly recognisable, if not impossible, to be recognised.
Nietzsche, however, did not define who the ruling class was, but we can infer - for our discussion - what Bion called the Establishment. The social body that governs society, the counterpart of the domain of thought, would be pre-conception.
Pre-conception seeks an achievement that transforms it into conception. Thus we have a clash between the origins of the mystic/genius with the Establishment that has to declare itself dogmatically, make laws and rules so that the ordinary members share the advantages of the communion of mystics/geniuses.
The Establishment can fail in this task due to lack of discrimination, favouring untrue points of view, or even, by rigid adherence to the existing structure, to establish a parasitic link between the mystic and the group. Life is "clutched" from the mystic, or society or the messianic idea is broken.
We can visualise the parasitic bond through Sophocles' Antigone.
Creon, uncle of Antigone, brother of Jocasta, inherits the throne, makes a grave with all honours for Eteocles, and leaves Polynices where he fell to expose the corpse putrefaction and laceration forbidding anyone to bury him under penalty of death. Antigone, indignant, tries to convince the new king to bury him because those who died and did not have funeral rituals would be condemned to wander a hundred years on the banks of the Lethes River that led to the world of the dead, without being able to go to the other side. Not accepting this, she steals the unburied corpse that was being watched and tried to bury Polynices with her own hands but is arrested while doing so.
In Sophocles' version, Creon orders that she be buried alive. Her sister Ismene tries to defend her and offers to die in her place, something that Antigone does not accept, and Haimon, her fiancé and son of Creon, failing to save her, commits suicide. Upon knowing that his son had committed suicide, Eurydice, Creon's wife, also kills herself. In the end, everyone dies amid enormous emotional turmoil.
The result of the tragedy was the death of everyone. The family or the social body does not survive. Life was “squeezed” from all the ideas intended to make the Establishment act following the preservation of social values and the truth.
Creon invented a punishment, which also characterises a crime by creating a personal law of revenge. Like any invention, it is intended for use or strategic functioning within the relationships that compose the social body.
If I invent a word to be used as fiction, hardly anyone will believe it and understand that the strategy is to make you think of something new. It works as a prelude.
But if I invent a word to prevent thinking or degrade the meaning of a word, I transform common sense, not into fiction, but a distortion with a frightening result because I am proposing “wordicide”.
For example, the Nazis put the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” on the concentration camps’ door (work makes you free). In other words, it is a language whose strategy was genocide. Or genocide is preceded by “semicide”. In all ethnic or symbolic destruction, we always find semicide.
Psychoanalysis is no different. For example, Ego Psychology’s language, which we can compare to the world before Galileo, believed that the earth was the universe’s centre. The universe was a closed, simple system centred on the individual. Ego Psychology did the same by centring everything around the Ego as tangible and traceable and not a fiction developed by Freud. Any theory that centres the individual around an identification core in the Ego is a closed and straightforward theory—a space with few variables.
To avoid this "psychoanalysiscide", it is necessary to cultivate a mental state that the poet Keats called_ as we have already pointed out several times_ negative capacity.
Bion took advantage of the poet's idea to show that this state will help to emerge a psychoanalytically successful language (Language of Achievement, 1970), which the poet also mentions as a result of those who have this Shakespearian ability, the ability to tolerate a fault, something that we do not yet possess, the ability to accept mysteries, uncertainties, and half-truths.
The counsellor listens to different types of speech in his office. We have addresses of an ordinary descriptive character about the things of life, scientific discourse about the physical entities of the world, historical discourse about the events that occurred and or that are thought to have occurred, sociological address about the practical instances of entire societies. Still, it must take them_ with the negative capacity_ to the poetic discourse threshold.
It seems like a complicated task_, and indeed it is complicated_ as far as we can understand its complexity. When we can do that, we will be aware that we are looking for a language that celebrates itself. A kind of virtue language since it is what integrity must do. When this occurs, it becomes in a certain sense much more straightforward, as it seems to refer to totally subjective emotions, which add nothing to the description of the world. Knowledge about the world is not increased, but the space of Being can be entered.
We can say that things get complicated again because we need a tool that can keep up with this direction’s changes. One cannot talk about Being without talking about transformations. It is so since one never reaches the definitive Being.
It has already been announced that this tool is necessary when creating Hilbert space for psychoanalysis elements, which would not have been described if Bion had not worked with functions.
Suppose the consequence of negative capacity could be considered to be a poetic function of discourse. In that case, it will have a referential function at first: the psychoanalytically productive language discontinues a function of direct reference to familiar objects of perception or of indirect reference to the functions of physical science that emerges an object that has purposes in three simultaneous areas, myth, senses and passions: the psychoanalytic thing.
In this sense, it is valid to say that the productive psychoanalytic language suspends the descriptive function and does not increase objects’ knowledge. But this suspension is nothing but an adverse condition for the release of a more original referential function, which can only be called "unconscious", on the other hand, if the discourse of the descriptive function usurps the first order in everyday life, replacing it with the speech itself, that is, it becomes a substitute language.
Bion says that this substitution is in the Language that replaces the action and is not a prelude. In other words, pre-conception did not bring conceptions that maintain the value of pre-conception, a creative potential, opening in that potential the path of Being.
The poetic discourse is also in the world’s subject, but not in the objects manipulability of our daily environment. These objects are objects of memory and desire. It refers to our multiple ways of belonging to the world (what are known as symptoms) before we oppose things as "objects" facing a "subject". For this reason, in Bion, we find the proposal to suspend memory and desire, another way of talking about negative capacity.
Memory and desire make us blind to these forms of rooting and belonging that precede the relationship of subjects with objects. Memory and passion lead us to ratify, in a non-critical way, a specific concept of truth, defined by the adequacy to a relationship with things submitted to the criterion of empirical verification and falsification of objects.
The poetic discourse questions precisely these non-criticized concepts of adequacy and verification. In doing so, it questions the reduction of the referential function to the descriptive discourse and opens up the field of a non-descriptive reference of the world.
In Bion’s Grid, a category appears for the algebraic calculation. He says that this category is not part of the psychoanalytic activity but is part of a general thinking theory. The type is the last of the vertical axis.
IX
If we create an exclusively psychoanalytical Grid, we can modify it. I suggest that in category G also not psychoanalytic of the scientific deductive system, we can put the principles that I described as ethical-aesthetic, and then as an immediate consequence put the interpretative activity in category H algebraic calculation because the calculation refers to the movement and the counsellor’s decision, that is, what occurs before referring to the construction of interpretation where the counsellor addresses his result as an action. The choice of understanding is as precise as calculation, as it has to take into account specific inalienable parameters of analytical activity.
It distinguishes the analytical activity from a “poetic art” and a literary and aesthetic theory. However, there is a “poetic art” in the interpretation technique, the method of language composition, and the technology before anything else is a calculation. In other words, interpretation is not the same thing as though; it is precisely a caesura of himself: the counsellor himself and his analysis.
[1] Rodrigues, N. Frases inesquecíveis by Nelson Rodrigues. Only prophets see the obvious, Nova Fronteira, 2020, São Paulo.
[2] These are differential equations that describe fluid movement. Unlike algebraic equations, they do not seek to establish a relationship between interest variables (speed and pressure). Instead, they show connections between the rates of change or flows of these quantities. In mathematical terms, these reasons correspond to their derivatives. The Navier-Stokes equations for the simplest case of an ideal fluid with zero viscosity establish that the acceleration (the rate of change in velocity) is proportional to that derived from the internal pressure.
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