Wilfred Bion and Samuel Beckett by Gerard Beandonu

The autobiography is discretely silent on the two years Bion spent working with the man who was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Towards the end of 1933 Samuel Beckett, who had been suffering from recurrent health problems, had been persuaded by a doctor friend that his problems might be of psychosomatic origin. He managed to leave Ireland, and his mother, to live in London. He decided to leave both because of his physical symptoms and the anxiety they caused him, sapping his strength, and because the literary world had discovered psychoanalysis, partly through the  Surrealist poets. On his friend’s advice, Beckett went to the Tavistock  Clinic early in 1934. As chance would have it, he began psychotherapy with a trainee who was to become one of the leading lights of psychoanalysis: Wilfred Bion. The experience was of great importance to both men, even though neither mentioned it in his publications. Each probably provide the other with the image of an ‘imaginary twin’, as Didier Anzieu (1986) suggested, on discovering a plausible series of analogies between the lives and problems of the two men. Their ancestors were French Huguenots who fled to Britain to escape religious persecution. They both had narcissistic and schizoid characteristics, and both had turned to culture to contain this psychotic part of themselves. Furthermore, Anzieu suggests that Beckett transposed the structure and experience of psychotherapy into his literature, although the writer himself considered that this suggestion was ‘psychoanalytic fantasies.’

The therapy enabled Beckett to understand himself differently; it pushed him to reveal more of himself in his writings of that period, although he was one of the most reserved writers of his time. He even acknowledged that his night-time panic attacks were caused by his ‘neurosis.’ His therapist soon had his work cut out, as he found himself faced with a negative therapeutic reaction. Beckett could not progress until he could acknowledge his ‘addictive’ relationship to his mother. Nine years older than Beckett, Bion, who was still in therapy with Hadfield, became, in the transference, the writer’s older brother Frank ( it was in his bed that ‘Sam’ sought refuge from his nocturnal panic before coming to London). The two men shared many intellectual interests, especially literature. At times they discussed, even argued about, the nature of the creative process. According to Beckett, the ‘analysis’ was limping along. The patient suggested to his therapist that the cost-effect ration was leaning towards termination, and that whatever his intellectual interests might be, he could not make a choice between Bion and his mother. His body somatized, producing boils, tremors and an anal abscess. Beckett announced his intention of stopping at the end of 1935.

Bion suggested to Beckett That he should go to the Tavistock Clinic to hear a lecture by Jung ( the third in a series of five lectures). The clinic had a policy of building a public profile by inviting famous lecturers to speak. Beckett remained very impressed by Jung’s ideas – he soon saw their relevance to his own work in progress. His therapy ended at Christmas. Bion had expressed reservations, as he doubted that the relationship to his mother would improve in the way his patient wished to believe. He was proved right in the long run. Nevertheless, Beckett finished his first novel, Murphy, not long afterwards.

Beckett was critical of his therapy in much the same way as Bion was to be critical of his analysis with Melanie Klein. Nevertheless, the writer maintained a lasting interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1960 he questioned his nephew, a psychiatrist, on the difference between Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. It is not impossible that he was aware of Bion’s resounding success in his work. Bion, for his part, certainly remembered the person he treated at the Tavistock who was nominated for a Nobel Prize each successive year from 1964, and he was awarded in 1969. It was in the late 1970s that the inspirational flow was reversed. Bion, in the last period of his lifework, was oscillating between literature and psychoanalysis. He too wanted to transcend the literary style of James Joyce, in order to create a language in which to describe the reality of intrauterine life. Had he been asked ‘Why are you writing? He would no doubt have replied, like Beckett: ‘Bon qu’a ca!’ [loosely: ‘The only thing I can do!’].

Bion’s apprenticeship ended with an encounter with another memorable man: John Rickman .  .  .  .

Wilfred Bion; His Life and Works 1897-1979 by Gerard Bleandonu

Unfortunately Didier Anzieu's 'Beckett' is only available in French and Turkish.

Incidents in Naval Warfare by James Sullivan

 

In the wardroom they treated Anderson for lacerations on his ankle and his head and noted the distinct possibility of internal injuries. Then he started talking. He told them they’d picked up radar contact at about five thousand yards just after midnight. The Buck rang general quarters, and Anderson went topside to his battle station on the ship’s platform just ahead of the forward stack. The bridge rang full ahead, and the charged after the contact, black smoke spewing from the ship’s funnels, looking out for a challenge from an unknown vessel. Just as the ship came up to speed, an ensign on one of the Buck’s 40mm guns felt the ship hesitate, as if she’d had a collision. She had, with a torpedo that slammed into the starboard side of the ship near the forward fireroom and exploded. The pressure  in the ship’s steam line fell from 560 pounds to nothing.

‘ I was blown over the side by the explosion.’ Anderson told Plunket’s officers.

The explosion knocked down an ensign on the 40mm gun and raked him with flying debris while a foot of water surged over the deck. The ensign got to his feet and ran to the fantail, yelling for the crew to set all the depth charges to safe. He glanced back for a sight of the stacks or the bridge and saw neither. Either the ship was cut in half, or smoke and steam from the forward fireroom blocked the view. Another lieutenant was now on the fantail, also calling for the depth charges to be set to safe, so they would not explode when the ship sank. . .

The need to abandon ship was obvious, and they made quick work of it, releasing life rafts if possible, shucking shoes if they could, and plunging into the sea. The stern sank, dragging  down all of the depth charges that had been set to safe, and one, a three-hundred-pounder in a K-gun, that had not. When that ash can sunk to 100 or 150 feet, or to whatever depth they’d set for explosion, the TNT burst from its shell, doubling down on the carnage.

The concussion brutalized the men in the water. The explosion ruptured pneumatic life belts and hit survivors like kicks in the stomach and pelvis. The blast perforated the membranes of their abdomens, bruised the loops of their intestines, and open lesions on their lungs. It was hell on the viscera. Those who weren’t killed immediately were so traumatized they drifted to death through the small hours of the morning. Fifty men who’d grouped on one life raft after the stern sunk dwindled to thirty by dawn.

With Anderson on board Plunkett, the lookouts spotted a group of objects that proved to be three more survivors, clung together. One of the three came aboard with a broken ankle, another with pain in his abdomen, and a third, wiped out from holding up his two shipmates through the night. When the lookouts heard shouts off the port bow, Jack Simpson scrambled back into the whaleboat to retrieve five more men from the sea. Each of them was smeared black with oil, and it was a slippery, frustrating business hauling them into the boat, and even to Plunkett’s deck. . .

After they brought these men on board, they resumed listening for shouts, and wondering that the men in the water didn’t have whistles, a simple piece of equipment that now seemed so obviously essential. Plunkett crept along at one-third, cutting a wake that muffled the ability of anyone to hear much of anything. Burke nudged the ship into thick fog and watched his lookouts for signals, but none heard the same thing. There were men in the water and they couldn’t be heard for the depth of the fog and the churn of Plunkett’s propellers. Burke ha no choice, ‘All Stop’, he said… the reassuring thrum of the ship underway gave way to silence made all the more deep by the muffling fog, and that was dreadful to every sailor topside and below deck. They may have well heard the ticking of a time bomb. You might lie to inside a submarine net, but you wouldn’t want to in contested waters, and you especially did not want to in the vicinity of a torpedoed ship. A U-boat liked nothing so much as a return to the scene of a crime, where the pickings might be good [ The refusal of the British navy to send rescue ships immediately to the Lusitania for this reason resulted in many passengers dying of hypothermia]. . . .

 

Soon Plunket had fifteen more men from the Buck onboard. Late the next morning, they brought on  four more, one man they weren’t ever going to identify because all there was to the trunk were two legs and one arm. Ken Brown watched them hoist the gig and remove the men, and the parts of men. Their work was done by then, and the cook had sent sandwiches up onto the deck for men who had labored through the night.

One of the young deckhands was eating a sandwich as they emptied the last gig, when Dutch Heisler, who was still in the gig, called for him to lend a hand. The sailor hopped to and waited for Dutch, who lifted from the belly of the whaleboat a last severed limb, this one with the bone exposed. He extended it to the unwitting young sailor. Ken Brown remembered that the kid stiffened, as if catatonic, and stayed that way while Dutch continued to hold the arm out, a gesture that took on the coloring of black humor and that was, if anything, one way to deal with the horrible consequences of a torpedo.

                   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

From seventeen thousand feet, the tracers spewing from the perimeter of the target winked out intermittently. But the bull’s-eye never dimmed. Looking through a little window in the floor of his Junkers Ju 88, a Luftwaffe pilot maneuvered Plunkett into position, then pulled his dive brakes with the 1.1- inch gun firmly anchored in his bombsight. The plane’s nose dipped trough forty-five degrees. Its speed accelerated for 350 mph.

At five thousand feet, a warning horn sounded as tracers flowed past the cockpit. Moments later, the horn stopped and the pilot released his payload. A stick of five bombs, each weighing 550 pounds, dropped from the bay. The first tumbled into the sea, as did the second, and then the third, though they walked a path right up on the ship’s stern. The fourth exploded twenty yards off the starboard stern, blowing off the ship’s port screw.

A 5:58 p.m., the fifth bomb in this stick fell directly on the 1.1-inch gun, at frame 134, as the area was known on a diagram of the ship’s anatomy, and exploded with a flash that illuminated the vessel in a stark, apocalyptic snapshot, a moment that would cleave time for the crew between everything that happened before Anzio and everything that happened after. In the forward fire room, the lights blinked out with the blast, and Jim felt the ship going down, straight down, a preternatural feeling as if the hand of Neptune had clutched the Plunkett by the hull and was pulling for the bottom. The explosions rattled the men on the bridge like ‘dice in a cup’ and Skunky grabbed the wheel, sure the ship was going down . . .

In the aft engine room, Irvin Gebhart had been climbing for the main deck when the bomb hit. The noise was like nothing he’d ever heard before, followed by the gushers of steam spewing from the ruptured lines; the roar of flames and the cries of the men as superheated steam spewing from the pipes at seven hundred degrees jerked, stabbed and sliced them to pieces.

The explosion obliterated the 1.1-inch gun mount and everyone one of the eight men on it, so thoroughly gone they’d have to be listed forever after as missing in action. Likewise, the no 5 gun mount for one of the ship’s 20mms: gone. The bomb cratered through the main deck by the no 6 gun and marooned the nearby 20mm gun mount above the rent. The explosion tore the arms and legs of the trunk of the strapped in gunner, as well as his head, though the straps held, leaving what remained in the embrace of the harness.

Gallagher’s gun tub was fifteen yards from the 1.1-inch mount but was spared the full thrust of the explosion by the back of the deckhouse. Still the upper reaches of the blast downed Garner and the gun’s handler and drove Gallagher into his shoulder braces. Shrapnel flailed his backside like a whip with a dozen tips. The heat of the fire was all over him and there was fusillade of 20mm and 1.1 inch shells, punctuating the roar of flame and the cries of downed men.

In McManus’s turret the concussion gripped each man in a vise of air that perforated eardrums and threatened to implode the cavities of their chests. But then it exhausted most of its surge out the canvas top of the mount. The force blew Mac’s trainer off his seat and dragged his leg over a jagged end of a pipe from hip to heel, gouging an inch-wide channel. Shrapnel raked each of them. The concussion sprang flecks of paint from the inside of the mount and embedded them in exposed skin. Flames flared everywhere.

At the searchlight, the blast blew every shred of clothing off Eddie Webber, blowing out the seams of his jasket, shirt, and trousers, even his underwear, but left him his shoes and the pneumatic life belt clipped around his waist. The integrity of his body was intact, however, unlike the men around him who lost limbs to flying shards of ship – limbs that would have no fidelity to where they’d come from and that would scatter about topside like obscene clues to a guessing game that would have to be played later.

Together the searchlight and the men on it were blown forward off the mount, onto men from the mid-ship repair party and towards the ship’s second stack. Flames scorched Webber’s stomach on route, and the collapsing mount broke the bones in his legs. Shrapnel pummeled his head and torso. One piece shot through his biceps, and other his thigh, and a large swatch of metal lodged in his stomach. The searchlight crashed against the superstructure, tangling Eddie and three shipmates in a heap Some of the same superstructure caught Jim Shipp at the waist. Splinters of metal lashed his face as he was brought down to the deck, and just before he blacked out, he said to himself, ‘Well this is the end.’

. . . . . At 6:30 p.m., the bridge rang the bell for getting underway, and the forwards engine room dialed up ninety-two turns on the still operable starboard screw. They shifted steering back to the bridge and followed a heading for Naples . . . Ken, in retrospect, would talk about teamwork on Plunkett that night, and Jim Feltz would talk about how they had all done their job, reaching for metaphors from the world of sport and employment to communicate, as understandably as possible, that they had not bucked in fear. They fought and they hadn’t stopped fighting when the odds were stacked against them. It was all that they could do, and it had been enough.

Graham Green in Paraguay by Richard Greene

‘If shit was worth money the poor would be born without arses.’

- Chuchu  Martinez-


About this time [in the late sixties], Greene was considering a visit to Paraguay, a repressive country with no industry to speak of, apart from smuggling. One of its distinctions was that its primary language was not Spanish or Portuguese, but Garani. He had been interested in the place for almost forty years, as around 1929 he had met the social reformer and historian R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who wrote of the Jesuit reducciones in Paraguay, a religious and social experiment that survives in modern memory through the film The Mission.

In the early seventh century, the Society of Jesus attempted to create what amounted to an indigenous republic among the Guarani of north-east Paraguay. By 1732, about 140,000 people lived in communes with shared ownership of most possessions. The Jesuits assigned just two priests to each of thirty missions, which would have an average population of 4500, so they had little power of compulsion – the Guarani lived in these places by choice. The Jesuits, of course, worked to make Catholics of the Guarani; they also encouraged the development of a rich, musical, artistic, and technical culture. For a time they were successful in protecting the Guarani from slavers, but were finally overmatched, as many thousands were abducted and forces to work in Brazil. The priests were expelled and the reducciones destroyed; Cunninghame Graham called it, rather romantically, ‘A Vanished Arcadia.’ Having made an enemy of the Portuguese government, The Jesuit order was suppressed by Romein 1773, although it continued to exist vestigially in Russia and a few other places, before being revived in 1814. The history of the reducciones took on an enormous importance in the evolution of  Catholic social thought, and Graham Green in particular gave a good deal of consideration to it. He longed for a non-Marxist alternative  to capitalism that would be respectful of indigenous peoples, and the reducciones contained the seed of such a thing.


In 1938, he had pitched a book about Paraguay to his agent. From 1932 to 1935, the country had fought its neighbor Bolivia, another landlocked country, over possession of the desolate Chaco region, thought to have oil reserves, and control over the rivers that would, with Argentina’s cooperation, give access to the sea. It was a dire conflict in which nearly 100,000 people died. Paraguay won, partly owing to the support of Argentina, but was internally riven with coups and revolutions. At the time, Green saw in Paraguay’ the totalitarian state transported to the center of South America.’

And he was right. A civil war  fought in 1947 saw the deaths of another fifty thousand people and the emergence of the right-wing Colorado Party as the dominant force in the country. In 1954, General Alfredo Stroessner, afterwards known as ‘El Excelentisimo’, seized control and ruled as dictator for thirty-four years. His regime was nationalist, corrupt, and repressive, and it maintained a large force of paramilitary killers. Since it had democratic pretensions and hunted down possible communists, the regime enjoyed American support. He had no real policy platform, and ran the country on the basis of what one historian has called ‘neo-sultanism’- he gave orders and expected them to be obeyed.

From the mid-1970s, Paraguay was a very active participant in ‘Operation Condor’ along with Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and later Peru and Ecuador. This secret cross-border arrangement, backed by the CIA, facilitated the pursuit, torture, and killing of supposed subversives. In 1992, an enormous cache of records now known as the ‘Archives of Terror’  was discovered in Asuncion, the Paraguayan  capital, documenting the deaths, disappearances, illegal detention, or torture of hundreds of thousands of people through-out Latin America. Some of these documents were later used in the prosecution of Augusto Pinochet, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. The Truth and Justice Commission/Commission for Historical Memory of Paraguay found that under Stroessner 19,862 people were detained illegally, 19,722 tortured, and 459 murdered or disappeared. It is hard to deny the dictator’s close involvement in all of this, as his summer residence near Ciudad del Este, known as  the ‘house of horrors’, was understood to be a center for torture, human remains were discovered there, under the floor of the bathroom, in 2019.

Green arrived in Buenos Aires in mid-July 1968 and found himself treated like a film star. Pursued by the press and by amorous women. He planned to travel up the Parana river, which formed a boundary between the countries, to Asuncion, but he was delayed two weeks trying to organize his passage.

 

His main contact in Argentina was his publisher and translator Victoria Ocampo, whom he had first met in 1938 and for whom he had a considerable fondness though they seldom saw each other. A leading figure in South American letters, she owned two houses, now UNESCO sites, one in San Isidro outside Buenos Aires and the other in Mar del Plato, to which she welcomed many authors and intellectuals, including Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Camus. She had a mystical bend, with interest in the Gospels, Dante, Buddhism, and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and this combination led her to pursue social justice and, especially, women’s rights. An opponent of Juan Peron, who she regarded as a fascist she had been imprisoned for a month in 129053 as the police tried, without evidence, to connect her with a bomb attack on the leader.

At the time of Greene’s visit in 1968, Argentina was under the authoritarian rule of General Juan Carlos Ongania, and there was unrest in the country. The northern state of Tucuman was near insurrection, largely over wages in the sugar industry; in the absence of labor leaders, parish priests led the protests. At the same time, the Montonero rebel group, consisting of Catholics, socialists, and left-wing  Peronistas, pursued a small-scale urban insurgency, and would make international headlines two years later by  kidnapping and killing a former president, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu; this group became a special target of right-wing Peronistas once the Dirty War started in 1974.

Ocampo arranged for Greene to spend an evening with a ‘clandestine’ group of young Catholic revolutionaries, whom he thought naïve and in love with theories. However, some of what they said did get his attention. They told him that in Paraguay opponents of the regime had been flung from planes and that their bodies, with hands bound, had been known to wash up on the Argentine bank of the Parana –he did not know whether to believe them. This was early evidence of the death flights which were later common practice in several South American countries. The best-known victim of a death flight was the Argentine chemist Esther Ballestrino, a very good friend of Jorge Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis.

Greene was struck by the young people’s devotion to Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest and sociologists who had joined a group of rebels and been killed in a skirmish in 1966. He is now regarded as one of the pioneers of liberation theology, which sought to reconcile the demands of the Gospel with a Marxist critique of class relations, but it is actually a very loose term, and can include quite traditional thinking about doctrine, a gradual approach to social reform, and a commitment to non-violence. Because Father Torres took up arms, his legacy is controversial. There are many other priests who joined revolutionary movements or endorsed them, but Torres stands out partly because he could turn a praise: “I took off my cassock to become more truly a priest’: ‘The duty of every Catholic is to be a revolutionary’; The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution’ ; ‘The Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.’ Greene spoke of him as ‘The Catholic equivalent of Che Guevara’, but he had little hope for the struggle such men were waging. Torres lodged in Greene’s imagination and was part of the inspiration for the rebel priest Father Rivas in his next novel, The Honorary Consul, also set largely in Paraguay. Greene told Bernard Diederich that Torrres was a ‘romantic’ figure and so somewhat different than Father Rivas’, Nonetheless, had there been no Torres, there would have been no Rivas.

Greene finally got on a steamboat on 1 August 1968 for the 1300 kilometer  river voyage north to Asuncion, a journey with its absurd aspect: among the passengers was a Hungarian plastics manufacturer trying to find a buyer for two million drinking straws. Greene worked him into the story. The five-day journey provided the backgrounds for an encounter between Henry and Tooley’s father, a CIA operative obsessed with his own bladder. Indeed, the comic and pathetic elements of his novel at times mask an underlying horror at the political; situation of Paraguay. Sailing north, he looked upon the fallen walls of the reducciones on either side of the river as if they contained the lost promise of justice and peace.

Arriving in Asuncion for a three-week stay, he had a brief encounter with the press but was then left alone. He met the British ambassador, who told him that artists accepted certain rules of censorship here and must not openly criticize the United States. Greene noted that such restraints were intolerable to the leading Paraguayan writer, Augusto Roa Bastos, a magic realist who spent most of his career in exile. Greene received a letter from Stroessner saying he was ‘gratified’ that the novelist was there in time for his inauguration to a new term as president and offering him any help he could –he had no idea the Englishman was about to embarrass him much as he had recently embarrassed the President for Life of Haiti.

Greene did meet members of the government but was more interested in the activities of the Jesuits, who were trying to create a new kind of Catholicism in Paraguay and encouraging the formation of peasant cooperatives. He admired these priests, but again had little hope of them succeeding. It was dangerous work in a right-wing dictatorship, as the Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara put it: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they’re poor, they call me a communist.’ In 1969, the police invaded a church in Asuncion in search of radical Jesuits and beat up some elderly priests, an act for which the Minister of the Interior was excommunicated. For obvious reasons, the regime preferred the traditional clergy of monsignors and army chaplains, who, in the midst of a malnourished country, specialized in grace after meals.

Paraguay had a superficial air of peace, which would suit the dream-like but menacing conclusion of his novel. The flowers of the capital alone were intoxicating. He came upon a large old house, which later provided the setting for the last section of his novel. It had a garden, sweet-smelling with jasmine and roses. Oranges fell to the ground and lay un-gathered. There were also lemon, grapefruit, and palm trees in this Eden of privileges. It could be purchased for 3000 pounds and the necessary servants employed for just 40 per month. Greene later framed his article on Paraguay with descriptions of this house. It stood as a temptation. One could end one’s life as a lotus eater in a country without  income tax and in such a house. The additional cost would be bearable – just living in a military dictatorship: ‘Only 150 men in the police station cells to forget and the children dying of malnutrition – no evil comparable at all to the wholesale massacres in Biafra and Vietnam. Perhaps if one were sufficiently fond of beef . . . .’

 

Snapshots of the Work of W. R .Bion

 

Selected Contributions from the International Centennial Conference on the Work of W. R. Bion, Turin, July 1997’ Karnac Books.


Bion’s “Transformations in ‘O’” and the concept of the ‘transcendent position” by James Grotstein

In the title of this chapter, I suggest that Bion’s concept of O transcends Klein’s concept of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as well as preceding and succeeding them. I could also have said that it goes beyond not only Freud’s pleasure principle but also his and Klein’s notion of the death instinct, each of which my thesis renders as signifying mediators of O, thereby making  O the ultimate, though unknowable, signified. From another perspective one can think of O as analogous to the ‘dark matter’, that amorphous mass that his hidden in our universe, which thoroughly perfuses it. It also summons concepts of  pure ontology for psychoanalysis, especially the idea of Ananke (Greek: ‘Necessity’ or ‘Fate’; Ricoeur, 1970), Lacan’s (1966)concept of the Register of the Real, and Peirces’s (1931) concept of ‘brute reality’. I believe that the concept of O transforms all existing psychoanalytic theories ( e. g. the pleasure principle, the death instinct, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions) into veritable psychoanalytic manic defenses against the unknown, unknowable, ineffable, inscrutable, ontological experience of ultimate being, what Bion terms ‘Absolute Truth, Ultimate Reality’. It is beyond words, beyond contemplation, beyond knowing, and it always remains ‘beyond’ in dimensions forever unreachable by man.

Furthermore, I believe that Bion’s O interfaces with Heidegger’s concept of ‘Being’. Although Bion never referred to the works of Lacan, Sartre, or Heidegger, I believe that he was attempting to position psychoanalytic thinking away from its ontic (deterministic, scientific) roots and recast it in an ontological perspective. While I shall endeavor to explicate the concept of transcendence to encompass Bion’s endeavor, this very term is misleading if one does not glean that the intrinsic aim of psychoanalysis is to help the analysand transcend the veils of illusion that obtrude between him and the other and between him and his Being-in-itself - his ‘Dasein’ as well as his desires. Thus, the seeming ‘beyondness’ of transcendence signifies one’s being just beyond the veil of defensiveness on one’s way to the unknown that is immediately near, both inside and out. In other words, what we commonly call reality itself is an illusion that disguises the Real (O). . . .

My own views (and by association, Bion’s) differ somewhat from Kant’s. In his Prolegomena (1783) he archly responded to a critic of the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). After first quoting an unnamed critic’s evaluation of his work, ‘This work [Kant’s] is a system of of transcendent  ( or as he translates it, of higher) Idealism’ , Kant then states in a footnote:

‘By no means ‘higher’. High towers, and metaphysically great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is in the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land of experience; and the word transcendental, the meaning of which is so often explained by me but not once grasped by my reviewer . . .does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible. If these conceptions overstep experience, their employment is termed transcendent, a word which must be distinguished from transcendental, the later being limited to immanent use, that is, experience.’

My reconciliation between my views as well as those I assume to be Bion’s  and Kant’s with regard to the ‘transcendent’ as ‘something passing beyond all experience’ is that O is not experienced per se - that is, as an object of experience. O, like the God of Moses in Exodus (‘I am that I am’) is the subject, something with which one can only subjectively resonate. . . .

The concept of the transcendent position does not constitute a whimsical journey into lofty, ethereal abandon, nor does it necessarily validate religion, spirituality, or the belief in God, except as the need by humans whereby they attempt to close the maw of the ineffable with an all-encompassing name. It is not in the oeuvre of Somerset Maugham’s Larry Darrel, who sought ‘enlightenment’ atop the Himalayas as in the Razor’s Edge. In other words, it is not a blissful ‘autistic enclave.’ O is one’s reality without pretense or distortion. This reality can be a symptom, the pain of viewing beautiful autumn leaves, gazing upon the mysterious Mona Lisa, contemplating the horror of Ypres, trying to remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, or Vietnam, or resting comfortably beside one’s mate trying to contemplate the exquisiteness and ineffability of the moment. . . .

What is Thinking by Paulo Cesar Sandler

Freud-like, Bion was seemingly able to integrate some most outstanding contributions stemming from the Renaissance and from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods with psychoanalysis, furthering the development of the knowledge of ‘facts as they really are’’  (Bion often quotes this phrase of Samuel Johnson) and the study of the vicissitudes, obstacles, and difficulties created by the same human being in order not to know what ‘the facts really are’: what Bion calls the –K field  transformations, such as rigid, projective, and in hallucinosis. Knowing and thinking are inseparable from the perception of reality and its vicissitudes.

Freud unburied the relevance of the Oedipal; triangle– in itself an antithetical pair followed by synthesis- in the same way he realized the existence of a principle. Poets such as Shakespeare and Goethe were able to convey it implicitly in poetic form; musicians such as Bach and Beethoven, in a musical form. For lack of a better name Freud called this principle the “Reality Principle” and bestowed on a practical use on it. Its hallmark is a ‘frustration factor’. This realization was doomed to remain stubbornly outside the reach of Science, whose silly infancy insists of being ‘positive’ –that is , pleasure seeking, satisfaction fulfilling. The ‘no-breast’ aspect of reality was and is continuously denied. ‘I think’, ‘I know’, “I discovered”, ‘I have”, ‘The solution’ seemed to be preferable to ‘I think that I think’, ‘I am and I am also not” (to put up with paradox), ‘I know and I do not know’, ‘I think and I hallucinate’, ‘I hate and I love.’. When once experiences what ‘No’ is all about, one may realize – in oneself- the evolving ‘Yes’. Psychoanalysis describes the names of our lies, through the formulation of names such as ‘transference’, narcissism’, ‘projective identification’, among many others. Perception of those lies may be a way for the person to become ‘what he or she is in reality’ as Nietzsche, Freud, and Bion insisted many times. The fact that psychic reality comprises psychic non-reality still befuddles many authors. . .


Searching for Bion in Cogitations by Franco Borgogna & Silvio Arrigo Merciai

But what is the tragedy that emerges in  Bion’s Cogitations?  Simply that it could let us realize with great lucidity how in the name of some supposed truth an institution may go so far as to kill the individual in all his uniqueness and singularity – yet, despite this awareness, that he remains roped to and duped by the very approach  he condemns. At many points in Cogitations, Bion, let it be said, unmasks a ‘social-ism’ that in an almost delusional fashion asks the individual to sacrifice himself for the sake of the group, while courageously re-evaluating ‘narciss-ism’ as a possible healthy response to murderous group pressures, if not as a potential bid for life and freedom, particularly when the subject is banished, uprooted, and forced into exile.

 

Thus during the period covered by Cogitations Bion appears as a tragic hero, caught up in a struggle for identity that is ultimately doomed to failure because he is still bound to the breast that fed him and first awakened in him the passion for analysis: that of Melanie Klein and her theoretical edifice, to which he looks uncritically and whose thesis he bends, with surprising and uncommon ingenuousness, in the shape of truth with a capital T.

 

 It is in this sense, therefore, in Bion’s wavering between ‘knowledge’ and ‘non-knowledge’, between listening to the patient’s and his own voice and that of the ‘group’, that it seems to us that in Cogitations the institution and its dogma finally gets the better of him. For he sacrifices or at least dodges the issues of reverie and dream- work alpha which, in theory at least, had suggested mating in the encounter with the confused and uncertain beast that lurks in each of us, to emit perhaps a simple grunt heralding a future individual voice, one that would no longer be bond by the mortifying chains that assail the subjectivity of any operation of thinking, however humble or inchoate.


The Primordial Mind and the Work of the Negative by Andre Green

Thinking is often confused with psychic activity. Freud, like Bion, was interested in that difference – or instance, when he said that drives were rooted in the somatic, though they are already primitive psychic activity ‘in a form unknown to us’. Can we say ‘unthinkable’? There surely is a difference compared with what we would have to say about thinking . The conclusion is that we have to distinguish between psychic events, which have to be understood as rooted in the body, thoughts without a thinker, which are very close to this primitive psychic activity, and thinking, which has to be thought by a thinker and therefore can be communicated to another thinker. Bion’s hypothesis that emotional experience is the matrix of the mind is related to the closeness of the thoughts without a thinker to models drawn from bodily activity. Thinking is the digestion of the mind.

Frances Tustin, who was analyzed by Bion and has worked with autistic patients, has convincingly shown this, reporting a session. The price that must be paid for thinking is that the thinker is almost necessarily a liar. Bion applied this conclusion to himself. The  thinker who had constructed this sophisticated theory inevitably falsified  the experience . . .

To some extent all knowledge is a loss of absolute truth compared to the formless infinite. [in so far as thinking provides consolation it diverges from the truth]. Hence Keat’s negative capability: another figure of negativity. Bion advocates an attitude where ‘man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without irritable reaching after facts and reason’ (Keats, 1817) Patients take refuge in evacuation  or omniscience; analysts have ready-made answers. I remember how struck Bion was when I quoted Maurice Blanchot’s sentence La réponse est le malheur de la question [ the answer is the misfortune of the question] He used that phrase many times.