THE MYTH OF SATAN: An Aesthetic View of Bion’s Concept of “Transformation in O”

Paper presented to International Centennial Conference on the work of W.R.Bion.

July 16th to 18th,1997

Centro Torinese di Psicoanalisi Società Psicoanalitica Italiana

In this paper the author critically reviews Bion’s concept of “Transformation in O”, making links with the Satan as conceived by John Milton in Paradise Lost, its literary influence on Bion’s work and the intrinsic extent of modernity that relies on such influence and use of this kind of discourse.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant

T. S. ELIOT, East Coker

A reflection on psychoanalysis might begin — or end — with a couple of questions that would be just as applicable to poetry or myth: How many people are interested in it? Who are these people?

Note that the placement of psychoanalysis side by side with myth and poetry not only reaffirms the fact that it belongs in the sphere of words and language but also leads to a definition of it — an admittedly controversial one — as the other voice of modernity, established not as a technique but rather as a practical-poietic activity (Castoriadis: 1987).

But before we take up this definition in order to enlarge on it, let us answer the questions posed above. Octavio Paz (1993) would say that these people make up an immense minority. In other words: the few are many — so many, in fact, as to be innumerable, like everything that is immense. This statement amounts to a logical impossibility — if a minority is innumerable, it cannot be a minority. Nevertheless, we might read a different meaning into the phrase: those who are interested in myth, poetry, and psychoanalysis, though always few, although many, are, individually and collectively, part of the immense. And what is the immense? It is what cannot be measured or counted. Thus we can say that the very few who are interested in these three possibilities of human expression are aware of incommensurable realities; and, in countless mirrors of words, exposed by various kinds of discourse, they run the risk of discovering their own infinity.

This infinity — which is at the core of every speaking being as the enigma of his or her own speech, as it is revealed to us by psychoanalysis, through the synchronic landscape in which it joins myth and poetry — is the subject of this paper.

At the juncture where these concepts join, I would like to discuss one of the most tragic and eloquent myths in human history: the myth of Satan. But, rather than adopt an extensive approach and consider the innumerable folk and popular versions of it, I will examine a particular form of the myth, the one embodied in John Milton’s Paradise Lost; relying specifically on some psychoanalytic concepts put forth by W. R. Bion.

In Paradise Lost, the author, falling under the spell of the character he had intended to criticize (as Cervantes in Don Quixote and Byron in Don Juan), subverts the traditional form of the myth and, instead of presenting a Christian and popular personification of Evil, gives us a hero who justifiably rebels against a tyrant — God. As Empson wrote in Milton’s God, “the poem is so good because it makes God so bad... the poem is wonderful because it is an awful warning not against eating the apple but against worshipping that God.”

Contemporary critics are aware that the most common mistake made by several generations of scholars was to approach the poem from an exclusively religious outlook. Thus Paradise Lost became a heavy disquisition on “the inscrutable ways of Divine Providence” (“assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to Men”). In fact, according to Robson (1982), Milton was what one might call a heretic, who rejected the Trinity, infant baptism and marriage in the Church, questioned the naturalness of monogamy and believed the soul died with the body.

On the one hand, it is easy to see Satan as an expression of Milton’s doubts concerning the cultural beliefs and political system of his time. An inveterate polemicist and pamphleteer, Milton, always nostalgic for the “good old cause” of Cromwell’s regime, was a leader of young writers and intellectuals opposed to Stuart rule. On the other hand, Milton’s Satan, a hero-villain with sharp, striking “baleful eyes,” as a dramatic and fictional creation, transcends whatever religious or political intentions are metaphorized by the poem’s plot.

As to the mystical aspect, represented by the various descriptions of God as “the Great Mystery, whose inscrutable ways can be comprehended only in the ‘light’ which is as yet inaccessible to men” (which some critics have compared to the concerns of St. John of the Cross in his “Ascent to Mount Carmel”), I believe it should be understood in the terms spelled out by Bion (1970): as the intuition of a human truth (plurality and novelty) around which followers and opponents gather, in a permanent confrontation. This truth, from a socio-historical vertex, suggests a surprising anticipation of modernity, with its characteristic trajectory defined by critique (of religion, morals, law, and politics), revolution (as an instrument for social change and, in the Kantian sense, change of method), and a reference to the discovery of the double infinity (the cosmic and the psychical). Because of these three elements, man experienced a profound crisis in his conceptual underpinnings, particularly those of an anthropocentric nature. Hence the image of a fall, which, as perceived by a narcissistically wounded Self, transforms modernity into a “diabolical project,” into the character who suffers the mythological fall, the “Great Satan” of Islamic fundamentalists and other religious and ultraconservative groups.

I believe that it is because of its dramatic aspect, which represents man’s search for modernity, that Satan is Milton’s major creation, one that has had a numerous literary progeny.

To Byron, he is Don Juan, a reflection of the rebelliousness contained in the use of poetical language, the earthly double, the corporeal and spiritual copy of Satan, the angel of freedom.

To Baudelaire, he is the fallen angel, the typical urban man. He falls into the city, and wears elegant but threadbare black clothes. He sports subtle stains of wine, oil, and mud. In him, modernity is made evident by the contact with machinery, leisure, and sexuality.

Appolinaire describes him as a city tramp, a poor devil, lost and lonely in the crowd, but nevertheless facing the multitude with his frail and awkward frame. He criticizes the powerful who arrogantly underestimate him and who, seeing him as naive, attempt to use him. In fact, he is sensitive and vulnerable to all that is human; he is the figure embodied by Chaplin in the movies: a being full of “energy,” a clown and a magician, a passionate, anonymous man, bewildered by the cruelty of those who speak in the name of God.

In Coleridge, he is an aspect of the wanderer described in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows, a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

If the road is taken as a metaphor for analysis, as in Bion (1970), to the wanderer (who is the analysand but also a representation of Oedipus) the frightful fiend is either the search for truth or the active defenses opposed to it, depending on his or her standpoint. Truth, though fearsome, is a driving force, illuminating defenses and being illuminated by them.

Thus the myth of Satan allows us to examine, from the vertex of the search for truth pointed out by Bion, two strands of human experience: one, from the socio-historical vertex, is the vicissitudes of mankind as it enters modernity; the other, this process as seen by psychoanalysis.

In another sense, we may say that psychoanalysis is intrinsically modern. That is, we may ask whether and how much the analytical process allows the analysand to fine-tune to modernity, defined here as the increase in critical and reflexive ability to make responsible choices and, through adequate elaboration of the confrontation between finitude and infinity, to lessen the envious inhibition of growth-producing good objects ( Bion,1970) ?

Part of the answer is given by a comparison between the concept of id and the mathematical conception of infinity. Both conceptions, which are essentially characteristics of modernity, are systematically opposed by the same formulas of denial.

The discovery of cosmic infinity by mathematics and the discovery of psychological infinity by psychoanalysis opens a new horizon that could not have been anticipated by pagan antiquity, let alone by the Christian Middle Ages. Dante’s world was finite; that is why he was able to map Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In this limited world, man was eternal, fated to live forever, in damnation or bliss. Modern man, in contrast, lives in an infinite universe, but is doomed to disappear forever. This is the radical difference between the modern and the medieval worlds. No matter how we behave, our condition is ineluctably tragic, and thus satanic. We wander around in a universe where black holes, as was shown by Hawking in the sphere of astrophysics, attest to the reality of infinity, not only in imagination but also, as Cantor and Pascal had already demonstrated, in the order of writing and mathematical thought, as an actual, determinate, viable reality. [1]

Another part of the answer, I believe, is to be found by an investigation into the aspect of transference called by Bion (1965) transformation in O.

“O” — an ideogram devised by Bion to fulfill the epistemological need arising from the use of an empty concept, a concept not saturated with meaning, open to the experience of the interlocutor — signifies the constitutive limit of psychoanalysis’ characteristic challenge: the unconscious taken as a quantic concept through the infinity indicated by the terms truth, absolute truth, ultimate reality, thought without a thinker (Bion 1970, 1975, 1979).

This delimitation acknowledges the unconscious as a psychological “essence,” ruled by the uncertainty principle — we can never be certain as to its location and movement; the more we know about one of its facets, the less we know about one of the others — and as a theory of singularity — which implies the constant search for a concept that will translate a human singularity as a bridge in space-time, where the curve of space-time becomes infinite.

For these reasons, instead of “O” I shall use for the analyst vertex the phrase ultimate difference. I believe it underscores more sharply the uncertainty and singularity with which he or she is dealing in the analytical field, and establishes more clearly the place and function of the analyst in the functional unity of transference and countertransference. That is, the analyst’s place should be the place of ultimate difference — the place of impossibility. In other words, the analyst’s function is one which is not operative if it is identified by the analysand as that of the “analyst.” From the moment that the analyst is seen as occupying the “place” of an analyst, analysis no longer takes place. Thus analysis, like all kinds of creation, begins and proceeds as long as it is able to establish the discourse of some language other than psychoanalysis.

Bion (1970, 1975) formulated the conditions that must prevail if the analyst is to function as such. He suggests that this is possible only by means of furthering and deepening Freud’s propositions concerning the state of sensorial deprivation. Bion states that the analyst must attempt to work in a mental state as free as possible of memory, desire, and the need for comprehension. These three elements are sensorializing, and thus they obstruct the sensorial deprivation that is necessary to the perception of the object of psychoanalysis.

Bion’s model is meant not to search for pure function, but rather to keep in mind a critical referent that will constantly point to the transit of differences which make transference possible. The analyst’s function is to interpret — as far as his or her countertransference allows — as many differences as possible, in order to allow analytical transformations.

Therefore, to question the place and the function of the analyst is to question the vigor of the ultimate difference through the relationship with the object that is actualized in the analytical act by the differences of which thought is capable, such as neurosis, perversion, psychosis, dreams, parapraxes, myths, poetry, science, art, philosophy, modernity — but which, at any moment and in any discourse, is a limit that exists only to the extent that it withdraws as an enigma.

This limitation forces the analyst constantly to steer the analysis toward this enigma that is only manifested by the manifold vertices of its withdrawal. This condition suggests that we may think of the transformation in O as a transformation in search for freedom of Self originality (an original transformation). I believe that this term does no harm to Bion’s epistemological conception. For when we call it “original,” we not only underscore the fact that it comes from “O” as in O-rigin (which I believe was Bion’s intention) but also affirm that its trajectory, like that of art, has the sense of the emotional experience of a new beginning. Its meaning differs from those of other transformations (Bion 1965) in that it arises in the course of a process of growth that merits the same name: the process of bringing the analysand as close as possible to the person he or she ought always to have been is the analytical function of a link established so as to privilege the interpretive movement, conceived as neither hermeneutic nor deterministic (Laplanche, 1993 [2]), but as an effort towards a translation of enigmatic messages. This translation is a basic condition for psychological development. To interpret is to deconstruct, to open space-time for the historical word of a new construction of the subject as the essence of the analysand’s task. To interpret is to reveal the identity of the strangeness of Being in the midst of the historical processes that make up difference.

In Bion, these characteristics lead to a unique theory of the unconscious, originally deduced as the continent of preconceptions which seek the psychical actualizations that create the forms of human structure. Thus Being is the result of the differences brought about by the impact of an enigmatic conception of potentialities, one that transcends the socio-historical existence of the subject, that breaks into the totality of the real, and therein values them as forms of thought. Since there is an infinite number of forms of thought, preconceptions, in their quantic uniqueness, open to psychoanalytical thought an infinity principle connected to the two Freudian principles of mental functioning. That is: since the object of psychoanalysis is situated in the sphere of the clash between pleasure and reality, the withdrawal of an enigma happens to be an even higher power.

However, height here is not a mere figure of speech. It indicates a point of departure the dynamism of which is expressed in the richness provided by the language of a mythical fall: Satan is a character who, given the curiosity about his personality, is constantly falling, and, as he falls into an infinite, empty, formless space, he falls into himself. This consequence, I think, is the major aspect of the original transformation.

Once this transformation is actualized by analysis, it invariably includes a state of emotional turbulence (Bion,1977), described by analysands as a mixture of terror, loss of known identifications, increase in sensitivity (to pain, pleasure, and responsibility), and insecurity, as one finds oneself moving toward what seems most undesirable, uncontrollable, and denied in oneself. This “state of affairs” (sometimes accompanied by dreams in which one falls into an abyss, or the ground disappears under one’s feet) leads to the belief that analysis is having a “worsening” effect (a hypothesis that may be reinforced by complaints from family members and coworkers). However, this “worsening” is the way to “cure” (lacking a more adequate term).

In other words, analytical cure is a fall, in the sense that the earlier state can never be reconstituted. But, for all its deconstructive nature, for all the losses and objects that can never be completely restored, the fall is poietic — it is a form of creation. What is created is precisely the advent of a new subject, never given, but painstakingly attained, in the course of a struggle for greater inner freedom.

This is a struggle in the mythic tradition of Icarus contained by Satan, as he takes flight, applies his wings, his ingenuity, and his subtlety to a single cause: the search for autonomy. He no longer acknowledges God’s right to limit his aesthetic experience of conquering the space of his dreams. That is why the Almighty sees him as a destroyed, fallen angel, the very symbol of hubris. To dream is to think, to go beyond the métron, beyond oneself, toward the ultimate difference, the enigma. As in the case of Oedipus, Satan’s curiosity is treated as a crime, and he is accused of being arrogant, lustful, and megalomaniac. Nevertheless, he will not back away, and he pays the necessary price in order to experience pleasure and freedom: he is driven out of Eden.

Having lost Paradise, Satan enters a new world, “rising from waters dark and deep, won from the void and formless infinite”. At this moment he is possessed by two painful feelings, which point to the sharp vulnerability of his being, now separated from God: he feels all alone and at the same time dependent. From now on, his new consciousness is increasingly filled with doubts and uncertainties. But the darkness that comes with them is not only the exclusion from heavenly glory: it is also a scientific principle and a function of life itself — everything moves, everything becomes precarious, nothing is solid any more. The only certainty is death, and the search for certainty is, metaphorically, a death wish.

Satan denounces those who aspire to death because they fear to live, for life is a fall, a trajectory full of accidents. Also, the fall is passion, and passion is what invests life with meaning, making relationships more intimate. It differs from the blind love required by God and refused by Satan; that is why Satan becomes aware of the banality of daybreak, of sundown, of the color of the sky. And it is when the phenomenom is most unjustified that he is most philosophical; for every situation said to be banal always points back to the original vigor of silence that allows observation of what is most difficult: the obvious.

At this point Satan is Lucifer, the light of morning. In order to face darkness, he takes on the mythic tradition of Prometheus. He is the subject of the technology, the subject of accelerated modernity. Again as in Oedipus, his curiosity is punished with exile and physical suffering, invoking the elements of mourning and melancholia, subversion and irony, harmony and disharmony, all quite characteristic of the consequences of the frustrations with the promises of social redemption and political seduction of modernity (particularly promises of change through “revolution,” which became the great myth of the twentieth century).

William Blake affirms in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that the reason why Milton wrote Paradise Lost was the fact that he was both a real poet and “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Observe that the artistic and literary vision represented here sees the process of creation as associated with the fall of the knowledge illustrated by Blake’s statement, which implies a new aspect of the original transformation: it is not knowledge that makes us change, but the enigma that invades us. The subject of the original transformation is that which embodies this enigma — as in dreams, in myths, and in poems. He is a subject who speaks another language, and for this reason needs another voice. It should be understood, thus, that he is not exactly a speaking subject: rather, he is spoken; not a dreaming subject, but one who is dreamed of.

The condition of this situation is, to Bion, the emotional experience, represented in writing as the triangle K, L, H (Thirst for Knowledge, Love, and Hate).According to Meltzer(1992) this conception undoes the classical philosophical love-hate dichotomy present since Freud. There is no phenomenon in analytical discourse that can arrive at the analytical act without taking as its reference point the link K, in which the major problems of human evolution are concentrated. The links K, L, and H are confronted with their mirror-image negatives -K, -L, -H, meaning respectively, in the domain of adaptive social relations (Meltzer 1992), pharisaism, puritanism, and hypocrisy, which act in the sphere of anti-emotion and anti-thought. In Bion, emotion and thought characterize intimate relationships.

The concept of emotional experience sustains the mythico-literary view of analytical discourse allowing a different understanding, as it establishes, on the side of the analyst, a mental state I will label the psychoanalytically poietic Self. I have found in Hölderlin an analogue for this Self, in a passage where the poet stresses the infinite vertex of language in the “triple nature of the poetic Self, by means of which it becomes possible to transcend the operation of transition from a determinate infinity to a more general infinity.” This description, I believe, coincides with the definition of myth given by Bion in Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963), as a basic form of preconception and a stage at which the individual’s private knowledge is communicated to the group. The more general infinity is the group; the determinate infinity is the individual.

This delimitation establishes that the preconception is the source of all communication of the experience of the unconscious to the social group through the individual. The way of being of this Self is thus necessarily both mythical and conceptually empty. Its power of psychoanalytic actualization depends on certain conditions, such as those Bion(1970) formulated in his proposition “without memory, without desire and without the need for comprehension.” The rationale for this proposition is confirmed by Freud himself, in a letter to Lou Andréas-Salomé where he says that, in the investigation of dark places, he tries to “blind [him]self artificially in order to focus all the light on one dark spot.”

Bion’s proposition attempts to deepen this state of sensorial deprivation as a sine qua non condition of attunement to the object of psychoanalysis. He emphasizes the use of the negative capability, a term originating from Keats, who uses it when he says that Shakespeare was able to develop his language to the extent that he was “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In order to arrive at the “analytical fact,” the analyst must resort to the unshackled use of his or her imaginative capacity. This is also reminiscent of Blake’s statement that imaginative capacity is freed only when the resort to memory is eliminated.

In short, the psychoanalytic poietic Self is one which possesses the analytical function, since its limit is the ultimate difference and it operates with the uninhibited use of imaginative conjectures, in counterpoint to psychoanalytic rational conjectures (analytical theories), freeing intuition to search for new concepts of the subject.

This definition may be complemented by Wordsworth’s comparison of imagination to the birth of a child who disappears in the adult, but who may be retrieved by the poetic spirit through contemplation of nature and human society. There is a double movement in this retrieval: the way to maturity is also a return to childhood.

In Bion, analytical theories assume clearly the shape of mythical language in The Grid (1977) where he selects five theories as tools in his analytical work: the myth of Oedipus, the myth of Babel, the myth of Eden, the death of Palinurus (in the Aeneid), and the description of the archaeological discovery of the royal cemetery of Ur. The object of this process of selection seems to be the search for the language of achievement (1970). This is what might be called Self-language: although charged with meanings that are representative of the subject of analysis, it preserves the mystery where it originates and which invests it with strength. The analytical encounter should aim to be a consequence of this language, which is both an action and a prelude to action. Bion (1970) says it evolves from a matrix of Love, until it is transformed in consecution; an activity should be sought that is both a restoration of God (the Mother) and the evolution of God (the infinite, the ineffable, the formless), which is to be found in a state where there is no memory, desire, or need for comprehension.

To reword the statement so as to adapt it to my own purposes, I would say that the analytical act occurs only within the scope of the double movement of restoration and evolution of the Self, when it becomes possible to create spaces for reflection, in which the potentialities of the subject’s future allow him or her, if only for a moment, to have the emotional experience alluded to in Keat’s lines:

Then I felt like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken.

This can occur only if attention is given to the impulse to inhibit, which Bion describes as being essentially the envy of the good objects that produce growth (1970). These objects are those that can be articulated by the language of achievement, paving the way to the original transformation.

The reaction against the idea of infinity present in the original transformation suggests not only a reaction against human modernity, which is also that of the subject, but also essentially an inhibition as regards Love and the Joy of freedom. When this inhibition is lifted, through the interpretive deconstruction of the confining neurotic discourse, there occurs a strange, tempestuous, frightening, and exceptional burst of creative freedom. This indicates that the analysis is moving toward a new construct of subject, which is gradually made more responsible in the process of unending construction of the mind, through “learning” from emotional experience. But is should be remembered that the “pedagogy” of this learning process consists in sustaining absence of thought, or rather, opening oneself up to infinity by setting aside memory, desire, and comprehension.

The myth of Satan, as it has been used in the present paper, attempts to illustrate the facets of this interpretive deconstruction, guided by Bion’s concept of K link, originally the thirst for knowledge about a body that is the original source of life, pleasure, suffering, and desire: the mother’s body. The hero of this myth, whom I compared to the subject of analysis and whom I tried to define as the subject of the original transformation, can retrieve these experiences only after he successfully undoes the original fusion with the Mother and suffers his fall toward the infinity of language. It is the search for the retrieval or the re-creation of this body lost among the objects of the world that generates meaning in the inner world. A new “body” — of feelings, thoughts, ideas, moved by the difference set up between the Self and the Non-Self — takes the place of this original body, substituting for its loss even as it tries to repair it.

The practice of psychoanalysis is an activity founded on myths. Its discovery comes from Freud’s use of the Oedipus myth. His use of it brought to light a number of elements that had been neglected by other fields of knowledge, and furthered, within the socio-historical process, the ethical goal of helping subjects to become autonomous, more capable of reflecting and of making responsible choices. All of mankind, though exactly how much cannot be measured, has benefited from psychoanalysis, which as a practical-poietical activity may be said to be the other voice of modernity.

It is the other voice because, as it includes myth and poetry, it also includes the voice of the passions and the senses — in short, every feeling, thought, and idea, with no exception or discrimination. It is the other voice of listening, with a novelty and freedom that had never been achieved in the history of mankind.

It is a practice because its two agents are participants in the process, the analysand being the major agent of his or her own development.

It is poietic because it is creative, and its result should be the analysand’s self-transformation, leading to the advent of a new subject. Implicit in this process is the personal version of the myth, the acknowledgment that the myth is a social version of the dream, inserted in the world made possible by the dream model through the achievements of the process Freud named transference.

All psychoanalysts — at any point in the analytical session, whether it is made up of repetitions or of new material, as long as they remain without memory, without desire, and without the need for comprehension — can hear man’s fall into himself.

REFERENCES

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

---------------(1977) Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura, Imago, rio de janeiro

---------------(1977) Emotional Turbulence, in P.Hartcolis(ed.) Borderline personality Disorders,Int.Univ.Press, New York

---------------(1987) Clinical seminars and Four Papers, Fleetwood, Abingdon.

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[1] In his introduction to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988), Carl Sagan writes: “This is also a book about God... or perhaps about the absence of God.... a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do.” [2] According to Laplanche, there are two major views of interpretation: the deterministic, dominant in Freud, in which the present is determined by the subject’s actual past; and the creative-hermeneutic, which attempts to provide a meaning for a meaningless past. The author shows how Freud, like the hermeneuts in the opposite field, is bound by the limitations of the antithesis between the interpretation of factual reality and a purely subjective interpretation of fantasies. Laplanche believes this antithesis may be resolved by the search for a third category, the message, whose meaning lies in the message itself, particularly in the form of nonverbal sexual messages conveyed by adults to children.