Concept
O
Bion's sign for the ultimate reality or truth of an emotional experience, which can never be known directly but only approached through the transformations it undergoes into thought and speech. In his later work the analyst is to move toward becoming O, being at one with the truth of the session, by setting aside memory, desire and understanding.
Development
1965
introduced by Wilfred Bion
Introduced in Transformations (1965); the stance of approaching O without memory or desire is set out in Attention and Interpretation (1970).
In Attention and Interpretation (1970);Transformations (1965)
Relations
- 1965 introduced by Wilfred Bion
Introduced in Transformations (1965); the stance of approaching O without memory or desire is set out in Attention and Interpretation (1970).
- 2019 gave rise to Ontological psychoanalysis
Ogden traced ontological psychoanalysis to the later Bion's turn from knowing about experience to becoming it, and to Winnicott's emphasis on being.
Works
- 1965
Transformations (London: Heinemann Medical, 1965), subtitled Change from Learning to Growth, is the third of Wilfred Bion's short theoretical books of the 1960s, after Learning from Experience (1962) and Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963) and before Attention and Interpretation (1970). It asks what a psychoanalyst actually observes, and how an interpretation stands to the experience it is about. Bion borrows the idea of transformation, and of what stays invariant under it, from geometry. A painter's picture of a field of poppies transforms the scene, yet a viewer recognises the field because certain features survive the change. In the same way the patient's associations, the analyst's interpretations and analytic theories themselves are transformations of something never directly given. Bion calls that something O: the ultimate reality of the session, the thing-in-itself, absolute truth, which cannot be known but only become, and which evolves until it can be met in experience. He gives a notation for the process of transforming (Tα) and its product (Tβ), for patient and analyst alike, and uses the Grid from his previous book to place the elements of a session. He then distinguishes kinds of transformation. In rigid-motion transformations, as in transference in its classical sense, feelings and ideas move from one setting to another with little deformation. Projective transformations, rooted in projective identification, deform far more. In transformations in hallucinosis the psychotic part of the personality treats its own evacuated products as self-sufficient and superior to anything it could receive from another. Transformations in K concern knowing about something; transformations in O concern becoming it, and Bion argues that the passage from K to O, on which psychological growth depends, is feared and resisted. Along the way he discusses the psychotic's intolerance of the 'no-thing', the point that marks where the breast was; hyperbole, the exaggeration by which an emotion is forced out to reach an object felt to be distant or unreceptive; and a psychotic breakdown as a catastrophe whose invariants can be traced in the states before and after it. The book points towards Bion's later insistence that the analyst must be at one with the emotional reality of the session, not merely know about it.
- 1970
Attention and Interpretation (1970), subtitled A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups, is the last of Wilfred Bion's four theoretical books on thinking and psychoanalytic method, after Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis and Transformations. It begins by questioning the medical model: a physician works from what the senses report, whereas the realities an analyst meets, such as anxiety, have no shape, colour or smell, and must be intuited rather than perceived. Bion names the ultimate reality of the session O, the unknowable truth or thing-in-itself, which cannot be known but only 'become'; knowledge (K) can describe its evolutions, but a transformation in O changes the person who undergoes it. To be open to O, the analyst should set aside memory, desire and even understanding, since each fills the mind with what is already known or wanted and blocks perception of what is evolving now. Bion calls this disciplined state an act of faith, and links it to the 'negative capability' described by Keats: the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without straining after fact and reason. He describes the analyst's movement from patience, a state close to the paranoid-schizoid position in which incoherence and persecution are tolerated, to security, akin to the depressive position, in which a pattern emerges and an interpretation can be given. The second half extends the theory of container and contained to the relation between the mystic or genius, who carries a new and disruptive idea, and the Establishment of the group, which must both preserve the idea and protect itself from it. Such relations may be commensal, symbiotic or parasitic, and the same pattern governs the relation between an emotion and the words meant to hold it, as in a stammer that breaks the words apart. Bion also argues that true thoughts need no thinker, while a lie requires one, and discusses the psychotic patient's experience of an unbounded mental space and of the 'no-thing' left where an object was. The book closes by distinguishing language that substitutes for action or thought from a 'language of achievement' that is itself a prelude to growth.
See also
People
References
- Attention and Interpretation1970Evidence for a relation
- Transformations1965Evidence for a relation
- Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?”2019Evidence for a relation