Applications in the difference between fantasy and imagination
Arnaldo Chuster, M.D.
Training and Teaching Analyst of Rio de Janeiro State Psychoanalytical Association (Rio-4) filiated to International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Doctor in Psychiatry and Medical Psychology. Teacher, Consultant and Researcher of W.Bion Institute, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
The following quotations are the references, which delineate the universe of discourse in which this paper is included:
1) I shall resort to imaginative conjectures in contrast to what I would call facts. I have to do this because of my lack of knowledge. (Bion, 1979)
2) The first and most immediate of these imaginative conjectures is that the adrenal bodies do not think, but that surrounding structures develop physically and in physical anticipation of fulfilling a function we know as thinking and feeling. The embryo (or its optic pits, auditory pits, adrenals) does not think, see, hear, fight, or runaway, but the physical body develops in anticipation of having to provide the apparatus for filling the functions of thinking, seeing, hearing, running away, and so on. (Bion, 1979)
3) He taught to himself that thinking is like the wind and the creative passions. (Sofocles)
4) Imagination is more important than Knowledge. (Albert Einstein)
5) Oh Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire of being anybody’s dream behind so many eyelids. (Rainier Maria Rilke)
6) Many times we step over the obvious and keep walking without a perception that the obvious is there. Only the mystic with his amazing ability can look at it and say: there is the obvious. (Nelson Rodrigues, Brazilian writer)
My subject:
Usually when we think about the unconscious one investigates only the origins of the things and mechanisms that are already in the unconscious. The existence of the unconscious it is taken for granted as a given fact without any doubts or inquiries about its origins. In a way, this position is much alike a theological problem whenever a theologist approaches the idea of God. But as I suppose we are in a scientific area I shall move to a different standpoint: How, when and why did the unconscious originate? And what are the practical consequences and applications of these inquiries?
Before going forward I have three major philosophical problems in dealing with my subject.
1) What I will ask in this paper appears to be utterly obvious. However, Bion taught me that a justification for asking obvious things is that the obvious is so often not observed. So it is worthwhile make questions about these obvious facts, otherwise they will not become the object of inquiry on which any kind of scientific progress depends.
2) The previous statement could indicate that I am claiming for this paper a scientific status. I claim also to be writing a psychoanalytical paper, but I don’t think you are likely to agree that it merits such characterization, for I will proceed with a series of statements for which I have not a shred of factual support.
Moreover, I claim to be using the following listed Bion’s ideas:
- Alpha function and its elements (alpha and beta)
- Contact barrier and beta screen
- Psychotic and non-psychotic parts of personality
- Projective identification as the basic form of communication
- Preconception and the origins of thoughts and thinking
- Psychoanalytical object and learning from experience
- Ps⇔D and selected fact
- Transformations
- Inaccessible “O”
- Caesura
- Evidence
- Embryonic mind
- Uncertainty principle
- Language of Achievement
3) As I am using graphic models to expose some ideas I will probably regret in doing so. Such was the advice of Niels Bohr in his autobiography. He said that people tend to think that his schematics about the molecules are an exact way to represent reality. But it is just a mistake.
Now, my statements: a flight into fantasy and imagination.
There was a moment in evolution (between 4 to 2.5 millions of years ago) that a kind of Primate, 4.1 feet tall, inhabitant of the African Savannas (probably the Australopithecus), developed a refined capacity to observe his predators that simultaneously caused improvements in its Central Nervous System (or vice-versa [1]). At the same time, he developed an ability to use his vocal chords, which happened to be more extended than other species, for he was walking in two feet and stretching his neck to look at the distance in order to keep a better vigilance against the predators. Besides, such vocal chords turn out to be capable of producing many sounds, especially a kind of a sound, a primitive analogical language, which caused fear and paralyzed its predators. Moreover, he discovered the power of the noise produced by gathering in group, mainly in a state that one may call of fight and flight. However, these combined abilities caused catastrophic changes in the specie.
At first, those recent developed abilities made him feel the presence of a new constant, terrible and invisible predator: a huge tension [2] caused by the observation of signs coming from the close association between biosystems separated from each other by difference of millions of years in the evolution scale, such as the distance between the origins of the Peripheral Nervous System and the appearance of an improved Central Nervous System (a difference around 550 millions of years).
Owing to this enormous tension those systems approached to chaos, and as it happens on this kind of events, the almost chaotic system autopoietically [3] produced a solution: the space, that was naturally linear, bidimensional and concrete, current in all living species since the beginning of the evolution, folded, in order to approach the systems, but instead it produced experiences of time plus experiences of outer and inner space, and massive experiences of loss of individuality. Such constant conjunction gradually turns out to be what nowadays is called thoughts and mental space, however at the beginning its impact brought back the chaotic and catastrophic state which the system was trying to get rid. Up to now this violent archaic impact left remnants that can be detectable in some states of mind especially those known as psychotic states.
With the increasing number of these persecutory and frightening experiences (thoughts), the tension, that can be defined as constitutive, became so powerful that the folded system reached again a point close to chaos and again autopoietically produced a solution: a force of disconnection, which starts working together with the force that kept it working.
Because of the conflict between the two forces, fully described by Freud as life and death instincts, biological erosion and procreation so far following the natural cycles as in the rest of living species, turns out to be something more autonomous that abolished mostly of the animals instincts and could occur by means of time-space experiences, whenever it reaches a specific limit (the specie became capable of disconnecting itself and other members by means of a strange motivation) also influenced (and at the same time influencing) by others systems as the endocrinological and muscular systems.
In order to keep equilibrium between the opposite forces, the folded space reached firstly a twin-fold shape, which forced an interchange of objects as a matter of searching for this equilibrium. That leads the twin-fold to perform a function very much alike a digestive system, which included a rudimentary twin-fold language that is functioning until nowadays (described by Melanie Klein as projective identification). But due to a remaining open area where inside was confusing with outside, which signifies an extra source of disruptive tension approaching again the system to chaos, the system closed completely over itself acquiring a defensive cylindrical form. Therefore, the first function of digestion had also to perform a simultaneously function of closure, like a sewing machine.
In case of being successful this first function (Bion called it alpha function) creates a kind of a net, called by him of a barrier of contact, clearly separating outside from inside, but if it fails creates a kind of a tissue composed by irregular holes (which was called beta screen), which bring back the previous confusion between outside and inside.
In a general view, digested and non-digested objects compose the two basic elements for the language of the system, that is, according to Bion: the alpha and the beta elements [4]. From these two elements the cylinder can compose other elements and grow towards a negative or a positive direction, if one considers positive as social tendency, the only successful way to protect the specie.
On the external side of the cylinder, Bion’s alpha-function could be named of alpha function of the Self, working to bring inside the symbols of the group or of the culture (acquired symbols). Inside the cylinder one have the alpha function of the internal objects, which transforms the acquired symbols in autonomous symbols (peculiar to each individual).
The previous statements could be understood as an attempt to follow the concept of Bion’s psychoanalytic object (1962), firstly expressed through the quasi-mathematical formula: {ψ(ξ)(±U)(M)}, meaning: preconception ψ(ξ) seeks a realization in the developmental spectrum narcissism Û social-ism (±U) to create a conception under the sponsorship of the inherent complexity (M) of a biological organism.
One can represent this as:
Imagine now that one could make a cut in the cylinder of the narcissism ⇔ social-ism spectrum in order to describe its content. In Bion’s theory we will see four levels of realization inside it:
Let’s also imagine that those levels have a kind of a movement, an oscillation, or a pulsation, which was described by Melanie Klein as the transition between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Therefore the possibility of jumping from one level to another depends on such oscillations, and according to Bion, depends on the selected facts that promote these oscillations. He described such movement by the sign PS⇔D. An excessive PS tendency due to paranoid selected facts generates a larger level that can be larger enough to suffocate the others. For instance, a religious fundamentalist will have a configuration as:
A religious fundamentalist spends many hours every day in praying procedures, with plenty of repetition of the same symbols and doesn’t create anything. Everything is predetermined, well established. It is a speech that always refers to the same dead objects, because it aims at the next life, or, in other words, is out of this life.
Now let’s consider that this oscillation or pulsation PSÛD due to a selected fact creates inside the levels a horizon of events which can properly be called as a caesura. It is the caesura of the facts, which generate transformations that may be represented by a spectrum of two tendencies: fantasy and imagination, which I can represent by F Û I.
There are infinite caesuras. The practical aspect of this idea is to remind us that we should get very well acquainted with the transitive characteristic of the free-association and the interpretation. That also means to follow transformations all the time. I am using here the transformations described by Bion for the analytical field (1965) in order to focus on the spectrum of these two possibilities.
Those transformations inside the psychoanalytical object can be felt thus observed and interpreted in three domains: senses (body), myths (theories) and passions (feelings) – it is a three-dimensional object, always representing Oedipal configuration.
A psychoanalytical interpretation is an integration of the three domains, obtained by the analytic Oedipus, that is, the psychoanalytic function of personality [5]; otherwise if we have splitted perceptions of the domains, usually caused by the activity of memory and desire, the picture of the world or the interpretation can be of another kind such as:
Myths ---------------------- ➔ intellectualization or indoctrination
Passions ----------------- ➔ Acting-out
Body ----------------------- ➔ alienation
The psychoanalytic object is a corollary of Bion’s theory of Thinking that had one of its foremost turning points in 1958, when in the article On Arrogance Bion suggested a new reading of the Oedipus complex, putting central emphasis on the problem of the discovery of truth. Owing to this emphasis Bion understood psychoanalysis as an activity sponsored by tragic ethics: the truth is unreachable but the psychoanalyst is interested in taking the risks of such impossible investigation. For that reason all we can do is to create, and the most creative aspect in human beings is their capacity to produce thoughts, something that never stops throughout life. Therefore a theory of Thinking (1960) is a natural theoretical path for someone like Bion who thought psychoanalysis under the edge of tragic ethics. In other words, as one can never reach the truth (which Bion called “O”) we have two options: we can try to imagine what it would be like if we could reach it, or simply let our unconscious fantasy formulate for us what it would be like.
In this paper I will focus on these two options, trying to think about the link between fantasy and imagination, or better, on transience between fantasy and imagination. My main point is to think about the origins of imagination, considering it as one of the main sources for interpreting the manifestations of the unconscious, therefore for the development of the mind. The purpose is to focus on some applications in psychoanalytical practice, which is to remind us that we should get very well acquainted with the transitive characteristic of the free-association and the interpretation through the differences between the ideas that come from fantasy activity or ideas that arise from the use of imagination. This characteristic is fundamental to the analytical process and, in my view, such wide-ranging emphasis on the latter is one of the main differences between Bion and other authors.
In this paper I am also stressing the concept of imagination as the vehicle of the psychoanalytical function of personality. Therefore, I am trying to think how radical imagination transforms into usual imagination that is employed in an analytical interpretation. Therefore the term radical imagination that I am using has two meanings: in association with images in the wide sense (not only visual images) and in connection with the idea of in-action, or properly speaking, creation, therefore, closed related to the sources of transformations in psychoanalysis and transformations in O.
Before I proceed with those ideas I think that it is important to mention that Freud did not make any significant difference between fantasy and imagination. He only talks about phantasie. In his writings the concept is based on the idea of an unconscious orientated exclusively to a certain kind of psychic product: the derivatives of the drives (pulsions). The concept is completed by establishing the relationship between the unconscious and the subject as object of desire, translated by the term Wunschphantasie, or the fantasy of desire. We know that for Freud desire has its origin and its model in the movement of satisfaction: “the first desire (wünschen) seems to be an hallucinatory cathexis of the satisfaction memory”. From this follows the questions of the playing of the desire, the repression, till the structural developments of the Oedipus complex, which has as its heir the superego, the final product and object of Freudian practice.
Melanie Klein tried to remain faithful to Freud’s theory. When she developed her ideas about the concretude of psychic reality, she applied it to the superego, therefore bringing the oedipical situation to more primitive phases of development. Initially she tried to develop the maternal aspect of superego, working through the concept of the ideal of the ego, but she left aside this investigation and started explaining the internal objects (maternal and paternal), her version of the Freudian superego and, to her, the object of psychoanalysis.
Melanie Klein also does not deal with the problem of the difference between Fantasy and Imagination. In her writings the concept of unconscious fantasy acquired a very precise meaning as the most primitive representation of the unconscious drives. She centralizes her standpoint about the unconscious Fantasy upon the theoretical status of projective identification, the common hallucinatory source of all phenomena and also of repetition.
As Freud, Melanie Klein understood dreams as symbolic productions and used them to localize and clarify the quality of the internal objects. She also made an attempt to define, in a more precise way; the transition that Karl Abraham already has already named as partial objects to total objects. An attempt, which one cannot say, was successful. Nevertheless, she described the basic psychological movements: the transition between the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. When she did that it seemed that she would coincide the positions with the partial and total objects. But this does not happen. The positions are not internal objects but functions of the mind in charge of the transience between mental states.
Bion proceeded where Melanie Klein stopped. He investigated the maternal roots of the superego through the formation of the ideal of the ego. While trying to understand this most primitive root of all, he described the mother’s reverie, a kind of psychological mechanism originating from the capability to dream and, in a certain way, coincident with it. In a successful reverie the mother receives the projective identifications of the baby and returns them properly [6]. In its turn, the baby introjects those “digested” projective identifications; identifies himself with them, giving them his own personal characteristics. Such theoretical development allowed Bion to use dreams in a wider approach than Freud, Klein and Lacan. It is not just a question of symbolic fabrication, but the dream as a link in itself as the ultimate aim of the analytical work: the function of dreams is more important than their contents. From this standpoint, for Bion, to think is to dream, the fundamental mechanism of the mind’s work, and it is on such aspects that he concentrates his work.
Although it is implicit in the last statement, it is important to highlight that in Bion all references to “thinking” are different to the term reasoning, which is something automatic, logical and conscious. Frequently the expressions are confused. For Bion, “thinking” is something, which makes passions, and thoughts work together (see quotation no3) creating a link.
My main point is to focus on the origins of imagination considering it as a main source for the expansion of the unconscious, therefore for the development of the mind. But also to point out that those situations, which gave birth to the unconscious, are always active in our life, and we should get acquainted with it for practical reasons, which is our creative ability to make psychoanalytical interpretations and our capacity to think about what we are doing. For that I am using the expression radical (from root) to oppose a second level of imagination that is the common understanding of imagination (which is worked through, or reproductive, or combinative). Therefore I am using the expression radical imagination (which I borrowed from the philosophical work of Cornelius Castoriadis [7]) to emphasize the first and most basic movements of the preconception seeking a realization.
The general movement can be schematized as follows:
Expanding a little further and synthetically: when I speak of radical imagination this is something that comes before the distinction of an object. It is a theory about the inaccessible state of mind [8] where all the questions inherent in the creation of meaning during psychoanalytic work can be applied. It is radical (a root of all concepts) because it creates ex nihilo. It does not create “images” in the visual sense, but pure forms [9], which can become images in the general sense (thus, for example, an acoustic image).
Radical imagination is naturally activated by the acoustical and kinesthetic rhythms. That is, there are objects that are olfactory, auditive, kinetic, which are, in the intra-uterine environment, much more important than visual objects. If one has to speak of the elaborated stages of the imagination, or better, the imagination which occurs after birth (and which the majority of people understand as being imagination par excellence) one could give as an example the imagination of the musical composer. Mozart, for instance, used to say that he composed the music in his mind and, when it was finished, he listened to it just once, from beginning to end. When Beethoven became totally deaf, he used to imagine the music in his mind and write it down without needing to hear it. Einstein revealed that the theory of Relativity was the consequence of his musings about riding a beam of light through the universe. And if we take something wider, such as social imagination, it is not difficult to see that we are not dealing with the creation of visual images in society: laws, rules of behavior, and in summary, the mind itself, are not visible, audible, etc. There is nothing sensory in these objects.
We can follow how those ideas have its evolution in Bion’s model of the mind since his earliest papers on groups’ dynamics in the late 40’s when he describes a protomental system. In the 60’s appears the theory of thinking where the preconception plays a major role in the creation of thoughts. The “pre” emphasizes an inaccessible source of tension for the preconception. In the 70’s Bion speaks about the embryonic mind in all his articles and distinguishes three mental states: inaccessible, unconscious, conscious.
At first sight, such distinction caused perplexity, and even confusion, until we can understand that Bion is reserving the term “unconscious” only to Freud’s descriptions, and suggests, with the term “inaccessible”, that the human unconscious goes beyond what had been described up to then. In other words, the so called Freudian unconscious is part of something wider, and will always be wider for a fundamental reason: it is always in expansion. In this way its “appearance” is always creative, which means that it does not repeat itself; there is a temporal and an identity difference in each conception.
In practical terms, as a consequence of this vertex, interpretations turn out to be more descriptive of what is happening instead of pointing out meanings in order to organize vision within disorder. It is thinking that conducts the psychoanalytical process, being able to unmake what was seen. But one should consider that while another vertex in being focused there is another that cannot be seen. In Quantum Physics this is called the Principle of Uncertainty (the wave and particle cannot be observed simultaneously).
Applied to psychoanalysis, the Principle of Uncertainty does not imply a psychoanalytical mathematization, because it refers to human thinking in a general way, and relates itself to the function of interpreting, that is, with the effect of offering a description that may create a meaning that enlightens something that was enigmatic. The interpretation does not modify what is seen initially – it is long before the interpreter, which modifies the observed object with his presence – but, to the extent that it indicates a certain way of seeing, the interpretation, if it is accepted, can modify the organization of vision and in sequence the individual or the group because it create thoughts. Fundamental to this process is the selected fact for interpretation, as the vision established depends on this. The selected fact is chosen by the psychoanalytical function of the personality, which means that is being selected by the Oedipal configuration of the analyst. Every analyst will have “predilections” for certain vertices, or for certain vertices common to a group, or to a “psychoanalytical group”. Keeping in mind that such misuse can happens leads to prudence in psychoanalytical action.
However, whatever the interpretation produced, for both the analyst and the patient, it comes too late in relation to the expansion of the unconscious. When the unconscious is spoken of, we are already behind the subject. Even if the interpretation supplies a new form, the uncertainty remains.
The following quotation from Bion (1975) is appropriate here:
“The likehood of meeting old friends there makes the prospect of Hell less frightening than the prospect of Heaven, for which life on Earth has given no adequate preparation. But this also applies to decisions, which are made over and again. One may deplore an unfortunate decision; how terrible it might be if we had never taken unfortunate decisions or made unfortunate interpretations! In analysis, it is the recoveries from the unfortunate decision, the use of the mistaken decision that we have accustom ourselves to deal with. In this view of position there is no question of cure.
So, what can we interpret?
At this point I will quote the following excerpt from the story “The Crimes of Morgue Street” by Edgar Allan Poe: “The analytical power must not be confused with a simple ability, for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is, not rarely, notably incapable of analyzing.... Between ingenuity and analytical capacity there is a difference of character analogous to that between fantasy and imagination. It is verifiable that, in fact, the ingenious man is always fanciful, whilst the really imaginative man never ceases to be analytical”.
If we only use reasoning, it would be inappropriate to regard as an authority in the matter, the famous writer of stories of fear and terror, who died in 1849, without ever hearing anything about psychoanalysis, a term used for the first time by Freud in 1896. But if we follow what thinking tells us, we see that fear and terror (caused by fantasies, apparitions, spirits from another world, etc.) have everything to do with the unconscious and, in order to show that this perception is not simply the privilege of psychoanalysts, I will quote from an interview given to the press by Freud in 1926:
“(Psychoanalysis) also received much from literature and philosophy. Nietzsche was one of the first psychoanalysts. It is surprising how far his intuition foresaw the new discoveries. Nobody perceived the dual motives of human conduct more profoundly, and the influence of the principle of pleasure in predominating indefinitely. Zaratustra says: Pain cries: Go away! It is pleasure that wants pure eternity, eternity indefinitely”.
The psychoanalyst is a participant in the process of creating a new history, a new social link, by the practice of intuition that creates imaginative conjectures. Freud distinguished a “proto-analyst” in the intuition of Nietzsche. Bion emphasized intuition, in a general way, as the “proto-analyst” of all psychoanalysts. Intuition will seek a concept that becomes operational through the use of rational and imaginative conjectures.
In this paper, I am emphasizing that the modus operandi of pre-conception in the embryonic environment (a metaphor also regarding the origins of intuition) is not projective identification (unconscious fantasy), but a complexity of the biosystems, which I am calling radical imagination. It was already seen that the first difficulty in working with this concept is in the word “imagination” itself, which is commonly related to images. This is elaborated imagination. I am referring to something more complex with more derivatives, like images that are not visual. They are essentially auditive, olfactive, and kinetic – they are especially related to the rhythm of the mother’s heart, the rhythm of the baby’s heart, the day-to-day rhythm introduced by the rhythm of the intestines, the rhythm of the bladder, and also the oscillation expressing the day-to-day routine of the mother and, with this, society around her. And when the rhythm and the oscillation appear in this “pre-subjective” world – which is like a void and formless infinite, or a compact, dense mass like a black hole, a kind of explosion occurs which digs a hole, opens a space that folds over itself and creates forms, which can be compared to a cylinder or a three-dimensional frame, whose walls are made of space-time. This Space-time begins to organize that incipient and inaccessible world, a certain kind of preparation to receive the other world that is to come. The walls of the cylinder like the frame of a window prepare themselves to be saturated by reality, which awaits them in the future. They develop in preparation to cope with certain situations, and in this case can develop adequately or inadequately (which appears later in a pathology like migraine, autoimmune illness, rinitis, and in extreme situation: autism). Therefore, having crossed the caesura of birth, realization produces concepts that organize themselves on the levels inside the cylinder (the levels of belief, thinking, learning from experience, creation) , which can have a greater or lesser diameter in accordance with the movement PS⇔D facing a selected fact.
For example, when we are listening to a certain type of seriously disturbed patient, we become enveloped by a kind of thick and obscure mist that makes our field darkens, some objects are only vaguely perceived, and others appear to have no connection with each other. John Milton, writer and poet, called this “oedipical gloom”. We are dealing with a situation in which every question turns back on itself: What is happening with the patient? Is it the same as is happening to the analyst? We hope that the analyst, at least, manages to see the situation and to tolerate it, and can establish a good description of the unconscious if he is able to capture what rhythms is the patient trying to transmit. The description given by Lacan of this aspect is emblematic:
“When I prepared this little talk to you, it was very early in the morning. I could see Baltimore through the window and it was a very interesting moment because it was quite daylight and a neon sign indicated to me every minute the change of time, and naturally there was heavy traffic, and I remarked to myself that exactly all that I could see, except for some trees in the distance, was the result of thoughts, actively thinking thoughts, where the function played by the subjects was not completely obvious. In any case the so-called Dasein, as a definition of the subject, was there in this rather intermittent and fading spectator. The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning”.
In psychoanalytical communication, unconscious to unconscious, we could suddenly be faced with something like of a black hole, and sometimes we cannot find the actual “unconscious”, but a “conscious” that is unable to operate. As we are both humans, something makes us suppose that in consequence of such a thing a disaster could occur. It is here that the analyst can surprise himself using his creative imagination instead of using memories, desires or the need to comprehension. Should the rising imaginative conjectures surprise the analyst or make him feel constrained by them? Should he take the risk and go further, it doesn’t matter how “strange” or “dislocated” those conjectures may be? What is important is to let them flow for some time, feel its transitive characteristic, until it is possible to analyze some possible meaning [10].
Before presenting some clinical material in order to illustrate the previous ideas I will summarize the differences I intend to emphasize. Fantasy occurs in simple involvement with fact, or when the analyst is only involved with or by the fact, often without realizing it. Imagination is the reaction to fact, on the part of the subject who refuses to get involved with the fact apart from observation of it, and not less than it is.
In other words, fantasy arises in the analyst when he identifies with the analytical object without observing it. In this way, fantasy is based on a passive emotional attitude in which the analyst “repeats” previous experiences, the patient representing the analyst’s internal objects. They are neurotic remnants of conflicts conveyed by the patient.
In imagination there is autonomy in relation to his own conflicts that corresponds to a large degree, or exclusively, to reaction to the intensity and quality of the patient’s projective identification. In this case, the emphasis is placed on the patient and not on the analyst.
Fantasy is reaction to the patient; imagination is action regarding the material of the patient. Therefore, fantasy produces just thoughts while imagination is the path to thinking all kinds of thoughts no matter how wild they are.
For Bion, fantasy is the natural consequence of a repetition, which doesn’t offer much of a new chance. Imagination is that which allows this new chance, therefore, a non-repetition. In imagination there is an offer of new objects, which means that a new level can be reached within the spectrum narcissism<>social-ism, for which the subject has to organize himself in a new way.
Some Clinical material
This patient whom I shall name Simon, 55 years old, a physician, phoned me asking for a first consultation. He left a message on my answering machine saying that I was well recommended by his daughter’s psychoanalyst (which happens to be a member of one of my study groups on Bion’s ideas).
But this was not my first association. What came to my mind was the fact that I had known him since adolescence from many occasions and I thought that he might be making some kind of mistake in seeking a consultation with me. I found myself immediately invaded by many memories, because we both used to go to the same places during summer holydays on the late 60´s. In fact, he went often to my cousin’s house, a place where I was also a guest and many teenagers used to gather before going out together. It came to my mind that in a way I used to admire him because he was the only guy at that time which seemed to be mature enough to have what seemed to be a serious relationship with a very nice girlfriend. Later, once in a while I heard about him because he also entered Medical School, but not the same I was in. We graduated in the same year, and have shared many common friends and colleagues since then. I also met him three or four times at the house of a cousin of my wife in children’s birthday parties. And I remember talking with him in a group on such occasions. He was invited to those parties because he was a neighbor and apparently a friend of my wife’s cousin.
When I called him back I was still thinking that he was making some kind of mistake, therefore I decided to mention to him that he might have forgotten that we had known each other for a long time. He seemed really surprised when I told him this and he asked me if we had known each other from the Gym? At first, memory and desire kept pushing over me in order to clarify our previous connection since adolescence, but I decided not to do it and wait to see what will happen. This could be considered an attempt or an example of a reaction against memory and desires.
He came to my office with no apparent signs of anxiety or any signs of recognizing me from somewhere else. I tried to listen to his story.
He told me that he had been in analysis with Dr.J, from 17 to 28 years of age because of a depressive character. He stopped this analysis because he got married, but six month after, he started analysis with Dr.V remaining for 10 years. Then he stopped this analysis. Two years later, because of the same complaints of his wife about his cold and distant behavior at home, he experienced for six months a behavior-cognitive therapy with a psychologist, which happens to have his office in the same building I have mine. At this moment of his speech he said: ...and I must tell you right now, dude: I left all those three therapies exactly the same, with no changes at all.
What came to my mind was an obvious question: Why a person who has all this time in analysis with no results at all should be here talking to an analyst? What I can call as being my imagination answered me: All this is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...and I added...to another idiot.
Why should I have to be an idiot or should Simon be an idiot? My action was: sound is sound, but in my situation it is obvious that I was evaluating it as a noise. Could Shakespeare, from whom I took that quotation, help my imagination to work this out? What kind of play is taking place in my office? Macbeth? Of course I was feeling very uncomfortable with Simon’s report.
At that moment, maybe my prejudice in favor of psychoanalysis made me tell him something that can be considered an awfully inadequate interpretation. But I learned with Bion not to bother about that because one never gives any other kind. I considered before saying what I said, as a matter of rational conjectures, that most people become used to the idea that someone will “cure” them. But doctors at least should know it is a mythology. Nevertheless, something is making this patient who happens to be a doctor, think that perhaps he can hope that a new psychoanalysis will solve the problems which has never been solved by others, and which he has had to keep within himself. At the same time he doesn’t want to be disillusioned again, although I can imagine that he is used to being disillusioned with psychoanalysis – and he doesn’t even want to believe that psychoanalysis might help. What are his beliefs?
I suggested to him that we might consider the fact that he had never told anything to his previous analysts. So, it could be just a waste of time what he had been doing so far. Similarly, I could not find any evidence that this was not happening again with me.
He evidently seemed to be very angry about my interpretation. So, in order to prove I was wrong, he talked about some benefit his previous analysis could have had, because in a way or another it helped him keep his marriage. His ex-wife had always complained about him as being a secluded and bitter personality. That complaint which started before marriage, increased after the honeymoon. She became progressively depressed and, after the birth of the first daughter, went also through analysis. He told me that she was hoping that while in analysis he might be “cured”. But all that happens is that analysis helped her in being a successful doctor. As I knew it from hear to say of many common colleagues, I once more found myself fighting against memories until the moment that my imagination started working and brought about some typically surprising and dream-like vague images with associations: many years ago, I met Simon’s first girlfriend while she was a resident in psychiatry at the University Hospital. I was a supervisor in psychotherapy as a part of my master degree in Psychiatry. Although we had never been introduced to each other in the past, she instantly remembered me from my cousin’s house and we have a brief conversation about it. When I mentioned her relationship with Simon, she told me that was a big relief to get rid of him.... “I blossomed after breaking it up, now I am happy...he made me feel ill”. On that occasion I thought that maybe this was just an ex-girlfriend talk. But at that moment with Simon I realized that those ideas were coming to my mind for a different reason. This is a man who can’t get married to psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts. He pretends to be devoted and capable of marriage and want to give such impression to a psychoanalyst. I formulated a question to myself: could those women be a symbolic reference of Simon’s unconscious? Where those women containers of what he could not contain? At this point my inquiries met with what can be called evidence for my hypothesis. Simon started talking about his ex-wife again and told me that the real reason he was with me at that moment was the fact that not only his wife but also theirs two daughters said they were greatly relieved when he left the home. His wife told him that she was dying while living with him but after he left she blossomed. He also had to leave the office he used to share with her. Then he tried to explain to me that he did not really like being a doctor like his father, a very well known physician. He was doing a burocratic job, as far as he understood it, although his office always had a full schedule. But that didn’t matter as much as the fact that his wife was reborn after divorcing him and one of the daughters was cured from her asthma. Why is that so? He made this question much as a kind of complaint to life and told me: I don’t mean to be a Hardy Har Har [11], but I tried to do everything they want me to do. I have been always a good husband and father, I had never been interested in going out or doing things out of the family’s interest. I sold the only thing I really like in my life in the name of such interest: a small farm where I used to grow orchids…
It came to my mind that the association hyena-orchid could be the key to what I can imagine is Simon’s resentments against his ex-wife; therefore I could think he was in a kind of turning point between either revenge or forgiveness. This is a kind of imagination in a different level of the first associations; it is much more like an interpretation waiting for evidence. Then Simon told me: I was 10 yrs old when I grew my first orchid. I crushed my father’s Cuban cigars to feed the soil and it worked nicely. But my father was really upset with me. He told me that I was in the way to becoming a useless guy… and he looked at me very seriously and said: and don’t tell me those cigars were my father’s penises because I am sick and tired to hear that nonsense for many years.
Again, Simon was telling me how exasperating was to hear about his inner child, but what came to my imagination was a general idea of a predator, because in a way, both species, the orchids and the hyenas, are predators. It is also remarkable that orkhis in Latin means testicle, and the flowers are bisexuals. I had also to myself that orchids are parasitic plants [12]. So it came to my imagination a very hard thing to say, at least at that moment. I thought that I might facing a potential serial killer and this was why people felt so bad while living next to him. The resistance I felt to say that gave me an indication that this was the thing I should say, and I did it. I noticed he became very pale with my interpretation and became silent for some time. Then he said that he had never thought about that before. And I added: you never thought that this could be thought before you thought of it first? Should I take your phrase as an expression of regret for coming here? He replied me instantly: I don’ t get it. I don’t get your points here. I may think about everything you told me. I told him that he could give himself some time to think in everything we spoke and if he wanted to talk to me again I would agree. When he left I had the feeling that he would never return again, but that could be a desire of to not seeing him in analysis.
After 5 months he phoned me asking for a new consultation. He came and told me that he was now informed that we have met many times before, but he was sorry to say again that he had never seen me before. But I should not feel myself badly because of thatbecause he didn’t remember his patients either. He always had to consult the files before consulting a patient and it doesn’t matter if he had seen the patient just a week before.
Should I not feel bad? How Should I proceed? As long as he compared me with his patients does that mean I could be telling about myself more than about him? I call this undecidable principle of observation; a point where you cannot say what is from the patient or from the analyst, because “O” is there.
He is a smart predator of psychoanalysts and his following report was what could be considered an attempt to satisfy the analyst’s need for comprehension, or an attempt to bring the analyst inside his hunting territory. He told me a story about a girl friend he met three months ago. After dating her for some weeks, she became very frightened about him and she broke up the relationship. She said that he is a straight nice guy, but she felt sad at his side because he has a black cloud over him. As this story confirmed my terrible interpretation about him he decided to come back to see me. It was a logical thing to do, he said.
It sounds as if the important thing here is the threat of violence; it becomes dangerous to live with him. But this is already known. So I had to move from my vertex and to stay in an empty point until I could describe his love for rationality in the same way someone could love his religion. I could imagine that one can not get along well if there is a belief that above all, order must come, second, as a consequence of order, growth came naturally, then he could decide to love someone as if it was a matter of a conscious alternative. That description made him very angry again and he made a reply, which a psychoanalyst could consider very significant because he compared me with his deceased mother. I am not sure if with the mother or just with the deceased object, but I took it as an authorization to analyze him, as he was recognizing that before him came another generation, a very important link for emotions.
Simon brought back the talk about Hardy, the hyena of the cartoon, which happens to have a black cloud over its head, and he tried to make a joke; he said that like one of these animals he was in a position of attacking only weak preys, and still laughing even though eating shit and having sex relations only once a year. Should I be the weak prey while he is “praying” in my office?
I said he was reporting to me his refusal to occupy a place in analysis, in the same way he refused to occupy the masculine role in the relationship with women. He resigns the male role, with a sacrifice of his qualities, to act as if he was at the side of women. He became silent for some moments then he associated with the part in Homer’s Odyssey where Ulysses is hiding between the mermaids…I made him notice that the mermaids are characters without sex, with a fish tail covering the lower part of the body, but for a man that means no testicle, no orchids, an useless hard-y on…but I lot of seduction.
My interpretation tried to bring about his refusal to listen the bisexual voice coming from the orchids. It is possible to speak of someone having an orchid as his god? With such refusal he resigned to real existence as a person. The voice is also deeply predatory and full of derision but it is also creative. I could observe how he expresses himself with emotions every time he is listening to such voice. What kind of creation could it be? I don’t know, but it cannot do any harm while it could be worked trough. I think the trouble is that as soon as he wants the feminine role, he becomes afraid of it and wants the masculine role; when he has the masculine role, he is afraid of that and wants the feminine role – and this goes on and on. In short, he wants some assistance from the analyst, but doesn’t know how to get it, because he thinks he knows everything about analysis and because he is afraid from me, whatever I am. In so far as he mentions I look like his mother, there is the fear of needing to have a relationship with me, or with the mother’s breast. But then he is anxious about the intercourse the breast would penetrate his mouth.
As psychoanalysts we need to have courage to deal with questions about intimacy if we really mean to properly answer to the suffering of the people who seek for our professional help.
The serial killer’s interpretation it is a kind of Language of Achievement (Bion, 1970) that allowed Simon to keep contact with the many symbolic murders he perpetrated in his life without knowing it. Such interpretation was at the same time unbelievable and efficient, because each one of us authorizes its own existence to the fact that there was a dead father on the previous generation that was devoted to a dead mother. Both are ghosts demanding gratitude, but if one has a lot of envy in the realization it is impossible to mate an adequate conception for gratitude. Preconceptions will always find the inadequate realization to mate a conception.
In a somewhat technical way one could say that when the baby is born it kills off the father and takes possession of the mother’s breast, which is the father’s property. Those feelings are ordinarily made more bearable if the father and mother are happily married and the atmosphere in the family is flatly contradictory to this frightful story. But suppose there are no reassuring father and mother, but a distant father, busy with his work, and a mother which is unhappy and in bad humor for having a baby taking her out from another activities. The only chance Simon has now is to see something different form this unfortunate picture of the world, and he can have it only if he could face his inner world, however terrifying and however intolerable.
Another way to say this I found in Roger Money-Kyrle’s theory of the three unavoidable truths which Simon must face: we are alive because there must be a good breast in the past, we are living in the present because a father and a mother engaged in some creative sex relations, and everybody is going to die in the future.
Some transient conclusions
In this paper I tried to expand what I do think Bion’s theory of preconception is. To me it contains the idea of a creative essence of the human mind. I called this essence of radical imagination, borrowing the term from the philosophical work of Cornelius Castoriadis. It is radical because it is root of a basic flow that later, after birth, became an unceasing stream of images, memories, desires, fears, mental states, from where all things come. One cannot do anything to oppose it; “something” will always be created. Bion called this an urge to exist (1975,1987).
Sometimes one can understand a meaning in this flow but in most of the time one cannot. There is no logical thinking, except occasionally. The elements are not connected to each other by logic, as our rational thinking would like, links are just a psycho-logical need, trying to deal with a kind of almost chaotic state – therefore, a state of creation.
In a clinical case like Simon’s one can discuss how to work through the almost chaotic state. In order to do it is necessary to work in a mental state without memories, desires and the need for comprehension. Sometimes we can do something for the patient because our common imagination is able to contain elements of our radical imagination. Only imagination can create a new form of communication with such a patient, who happens to be one of those people whose words one can never believe. This is not because they are liars, but because they hide all the time and while doing this they become a self-deceitful person.
The psychoanalytical work I am trying to perform with Simon is still very tough because it means defiance against all aspects of his personality and character. From the operational point of view of transference I am conducting an investigation about the reliability of his mental functions. On doing this I discovered his low capacity to observe and to pay attention to humans, his incapacity to think and to have feelings, and finally his incapacity for love and sexual love. In this process it an intense femininity came out came out, an underlying homosexuality and his incapacity to love a woman. I could not discover this if I have had insisted in seeing him as a known person, who took eventually part in my personal life - that was just my fantasy.
I tried and I am still trying to face those discoveries as facts originated in some point of the development. I think that something happened before adolescence, maybe in latency that created a stereotype in which his social behavior was based. Since latency, a period of life when he didn’t really know what he would like to be, everybody expected him to be a great doctor like his father. After that he managed to be socially successful just because he seems to be like his father. But being alike is very unsatisfactory. Simon told me that he used to have a wish of giving up medicine and becoming a botanist, but couldn’t defy his father, or at least what he thought his father would feel and think about it: infuriated and frustrated, maybe that would kill him. He became a kind of servant of his father, someone who attended the father’s desires with sacrifice of his own life.
He used to describe his father as a cruel and superficial man, ruled by fashion, and his mother as someone who was never capable of being sincere. This description was at first moment a shock to me and I fought against my memories, because I had my own thoughts (my fantasy), based on external experience and hear to say that his father was a brilliant doctor and a warm person and his mother also a very nice person.
It is very hard to any psychoanalyst to deal with a patient who puts you under the shadow of an insidious and constant disdain. But we can understand it as a symptom of a major disorder of thinking, and see how he will do everything to make it very difficult to think clearly near him.
I think that one of the things that mainly intrigued Simon when he came to see me was that he could not understand my “psychoanalytical method” because it did not coincide with any of his beliefs about psychoanalysis. He could not discover what was going on and became really confused with his beliefs about psychoanalysis. From this point of view every analysis brings with it two important questions: when to begin analysis and how to stabilize it?
Anyone with intelligence and reasonable culture has ideas or beliefs about the psychoanalytical method, but those ideas can produce in the first days, weeks, months and even years a false transference. It is a kind of system that must be dismantled in order to work with the real transference. If we managed to effect this deconstruction then we may see a change from well-established prejudices to preconceptions seeking new realizations.
Simon is a kind of a patient whose emotional life is imprisoned. His personality was constructed in the expectation to fulfill others’ expectations and to be just like his father. Both of his parents seemed to support this fantasy and so the culture around him. As a consequence he became immature, a kind of an 8 years old boy acting as if he was an adult.
In this situation is required to use our imagination about children’s behavior. It may help a lot if we have a real experience as fathers or mothers because that can make easier to have a negative capability – the expression that Bion borrowed form Keats, when the poet was trying to explain to his brother why Shakespeare was so capable of writing about human characters: a capacity to tolerate mysteries, half-truths and uncertainties without an irritable search for fact and reason.
REFERENCES
Bion, W.R. (1958) On Arrogance In Second Thoughts, London, Heinemann, 1967, p.86-92
____________ (1960) A Theory of Thinking In Second Thoughts, London, Heinemann, 1967,p.110-119.
____________ (1962) Learning from Experience, London, Heinemann.
____________ (1963) Elements of Psychoanalysis, London, Heinemann.
____________ (1965) Transformations: Change from Learning to Growth, London, Heinemann.
____________ (1967) Notes on Memory and Desire, Psychoanal.Forum2: 271-280
____________ (1970) Attention and Interpretation, London, Tavistock.
____________ (1971) Two papers: The Grid and Caesura, Imago, Rio de Janeiro.
____________ (1973) Bion’s Brazilian Lectures, Imago, Rio de Janeiro.
____________ (1975) A Memoir of the Future-Book1-Imago, Rio de Janeiro.
____________ (1987) Clinical Seminars and Four Papers, Abington, Fleetwood Press.
____________ (1992) Cogitations, Karnac Books, London.
____________ (1997) Taming Wild Thoughts, Karnac Books, London.
Chuster, A (1989) Um Resgate da Originalidade, Degrau, Rio de Janeiro.
____________ (1996) Diálogos Psicanalíticos sobre W.R.Bion, Tipo e Grafia, Rio de Janeiro.
____________ (1998) Bion cria de fato uma nova psicanálise? Revista da SPPA,vol V.-3
____________ (1999) W.R.Bion-Novas Leituras, vol.I, Co. De Freud, Rio de Janeiro.
____________ (2002) An Oedipal Grid, paper presented at the International Conference on the work of W.R.Bion, Los Angeles, California.
____________ (2003) W.R.Bion-Novas Leituras, vol.II, Co.De Freud, Rio de Janeiro.
____________ (2004) Intimacy and development, paper presented at the International Conference on the work of W.R.Bion, Sao Paulo, July 2004.
Freud, S.(1926) Interview to The Press, George Viereck.
Lacan, J. (1994) Le Seminaire, livre IV, La relation d’object, Seuil, Paris.
Meltzer, D.(1997) Meltzer in São Paulo, casa do psicólogo, São Paulo.
Poe, E. (1892) Histórias de Terror, Clube do Livro, Rio de Janeiro, 1972.
[1] Uncertainty about the origins is always present. To observe things in such areas one should resort always to an Undecidable principle of observation (Chuster, 2002). In mathematics this is called Gödel’s theorem, in Physics this is Heisenbergs’ Uncertainty Principle. [2] This tension is still present and sometimes makes the CNS to misidentify other systems as predators therefore causing, for instance, conditions known as autoimmune diseases. [3] Zeleny, Milan (org.) Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organization, North Holland, New York, 1981 [4] The communications between the terrestrial mammals occurs by means of patterns related mainly to the rules and vicissitudes of the link. It is an iconic-analogical communication composed by kinesthetic and rhythmic means like the body movements, muscles tension and changes in face, sounds and breathing. In human beings this language (made of beta elements) is still very strong and sensitive. It is located in the external part of the twin-fold, while inside there is a recently acquired digital language made from alpha elements (idioms for instance). [5] Within the human capacities constituted by the oedipical preconception, one can find what Bion called the psychoanalytical function of personality. The meeting of this function of the analysand with this function of the analyst, plus the means: the minimal conditions necessary (MCN), which organize this meeting, is what constitutes the activity of psychoanalysis. [6] Bion understand them primarily as communications of the baby’s needs and not as a mechanism of defense. [7] Castoriadis, Cornelius, Figures du Pensable – Le Carrefours du Labyrinthe vols. I-VI, Ed. Seuil, Paris, 1999. [8] “Even the fetus develops a capacity for what later called projective identification. In other words, it has feelings or primordial ideas that it tries to deal with by evacuating them – a primitive mechanism derived maybe from the physical capacity for evacuating…I am suggesting that besides conscious and unconscious states of mind, there can be another one- the nearest I can get to giving a provisional title is inaccessible state of mind. It may become inaccessible because the fetus gets rid of it as soon it can. Whether it is an awareness of a heartbeat, of feelings of terror, of sound, or of sight – the kind of sight experienced through the pressure of the optics pits by changes of pressure in the intrauterine fluid – all that may never been what we would call conscious or unconscious”. [9] As those forms are created inside a twin fold system, for natural and economic reasons, they have always a three-dimensional form or triangular links. [10] “speculative imagination, however ridiculous, neurotic, or psychotic, can be a step on the path to what in the end will be seen as scientific, psychoanalytical formulations”. (Bion, W.R. Taming Wild Thoughts, 1997) [11] Hanna Barbera ‘s cartoon character: a Hyena, which was always complaining. [12] But this is not correct. They just use other plants as a support without taking out anything.
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