Melancolias

As melancolias (vulgarmente chamadas de depressões) são, na sua grande maioria, acima de tudo, lutos mal resolvidos.
“Lutos mal resolvidos” significa que num passado mais ou menos recente existiram situações e/ou acontecimentos sentidos como dolorosos que não puderam ser ultrapassados (i.e, elaborados) adequadamente. É como uma ferida que foi aberta (no passado) e que, não podendo cicatrizar, continua (no presente) a provocar muito sofrimento e a absorver muita energia.
A pessoa que sofre do abatimento e profunda tristeza provocada pela "depressão", foi carregando o sofrimento dentro de si durante muito tempo até que ele acabou por dominá-la completamente, tornando o dia e a noite num “vale de lágrimas” sem sentido e em que as outras pessoas à volta parecem não entender e aceitar o que se passa.
Frequentemente, como a dor e a angústia são tão grandes, recorre-se à medicação e esta pode facilmente começar a ser tomada sem qualquer controlo. A medicação pode ser muito útil mas deverá ser utilizada com muito cuidado e responsabilidade, sempre com aconselhamento e acompanhamento médico, sobretudo de um psiquiatra competente.
Na minha experiência como psicólogo clínico com casos desta natureza, tenho comprovado que uma correcta medicação pode ser uma ajuda importante para que os pacientes se sintam menos angustiados para que depois, num segundo tempo, através de um acompanhamento psicológico regular, seja possível começar a analisar os verdadeiros motivos que os fazem sentir infelizes, desesperados e sobretudo incompreendidos.Muitas vezes quem sofre de "depressão" não consegue saber exactamente o que provoca o mal-estar e é tarefa do psicólogo identificar a origem da(s) “ferida(s)” para que, ao longo das consultas, se possa iniciar o processo de “cicatrização”.
Não é possível voltar atrás para alterar o passado mas podem ser criadas as condições terapêuticas necessárias para que o presente deixe de ser visto como tão negro e sem saída e a pessoa possa recomeçar a ter esperança e entusiasmo face ao Futuro. Não é voltar atrás à infância mas acertar contas com o passado…

* Este texto foi originalmente publicado no jornal regional Gazeta do Interior.

(quadro: "The Way Home" de Tandi Venter)

Quantos desertos em mim conseguirei transformar em oásis?

“Formulações sobre os dois princípios do funcionamento mental” FREUD (1911)

Há muito tempo observamos que toda neurose tem como resultado e, portanto, provavelmente, como propósito arrancar o paciente da vida real, aliená-lo da realidade. Não poderia um fato assim fugir à observação de Pierre Janet; ele falou de uma perda de ‘la fonction du réel‘ [‘a função da realidade’] como sendo característica especial dos neuróticos, mas sem descobrir a vinculação deste distúrbio com as determinantes fundamentais da neurose. Pela introdução do processo de repressão na génese das neuroses, pudemos obter uma certa compreensão interna (insight) com referência a isto. Os neuróticos afastam-se da realidade por achá-la insuportável — seja no todo ou em parte. O tipo mais extremo deste afastamento da realidade é apresentado por certos casos de psicose alucinatória que procuram negar o evento específico que ocasionou o desencadeamento de sua insanidade (Griesinger). Mas, na verdade, todo neurótico faz o mesmo com algum fragmento da realidade. E defrontamo-nos agora com a tarefa de investigar o desenvolvimento da relação dos neuróticos e da humanidade em geral com a realidade e, desta maneira, de trazer a significação psicológica do mundo externo e real para a estrutura de nossas teorias.
Na psicologia que se baseia na psicanálise, acostumamo-nos a tomar como ponto de partida os processos mentais inconscientes, com cujas peculiaridades nos tornamos familiarizados através da análise. Consideramos que são os processos mais antigos, primários, resíduos de uma fase de desenvolvimento em que eram o único tipo de processo mental. O propósito dominante obedecido por estes processos primários é fácil de reconhecer; ele é descrito como o princípio de prazer-desprazer [Lust-Unlust], ou, mais sucintamente, princípio de prazer. Estes processos esforçam-se por alcançar prazer; a actividade psíquica afasta-se de qualquer evento que possa despertar desprazer. (Aqui, temos a repressão.) Nossos sonhos à noite e, quando acordados, nossa tendência a afastar-nos de impressões aflitivas são resquícios do predomínio deste princípio e provas do seu poder.
Retorno a linhas de pensamento já desenvolvidas noutra parte quando sugiro que o estado de repouso psíquico foi originalmente perturbado pelas exigências peremptórias das necessidades internas. Quando isto aconteceu, tudo que havia sido pensado (desejado) foi simplesmente apresentado de maneira alucinatória, tal como ainda acontece hoje com nossos pensamentos oníricos a cada noite. Foi apenas a ausência da satisfação esperada, o desapontamento experimentado, que levou ao abandono desta tentativa de satisfação por meio da alucinação. Em vez disso, o aparelho psíquico teve de decidir tomar uma concepção das circunstâncias reais no mundo externo e empenhar-se por efectuar nelas uma alteração real. Um novo princípio de funcionamento mental foi assim introduzido; o que se apresentava na mente não era mais o agradável, mas o real, mesmo que acontecesse ser desagradável. Este estabelecimento do princípio de realidade provou ser um passo momentoso.

(1) Em primeiro lugar, as novas exigências efectuaram uma sucessão de adaptações necessárias no aparelho psíquico, as quais, devido a nosso conhecimento insuficiente ou incerto, só podemos relatar muito superficialmente.
A significação crescente da realidade externa elevou também a importância dos órgãos sensoriais, que se acham dirigidos para esse mundo externo, e da consciência a eles ligada. A consciência aprendeu então a abranger qualidades sensórias, em acréscimo às qualidades de prazer e desprazer que até então lhe haviam exclusivamente interessado. Institui-se uma função especial, que tinha de periodicamente pesquisar o mundo externo, a fim de que seus dados já pudessem ser conhecidos se uma urgente necessidade interna surgisse: a função da atenção. Sua actividade vai encontrar as impressões sensórias a meio caminho, ao invés de esperar por seu aparecimento. Ao mesmo tempo, provavelmente, foi introduzido um sistema de notação, cuja tarefa era assentar os resultados desta actividade periódica da consciência — uma parte do que chamamos memória.
O lugar da repressão, que excluía da catexia como produtoras de desprazer algumas das ideias emergentes, foi assumido por uma passagem de julgamento imparcial, que tinha de decidir se determinada ideia era verdadeira ou falsa — isto é, se se achava ou não em concordância com a realidade —, decisão que era determinada efectuando-se uma comparação com os traços de memória da realidade.
Nova função foi então atribuída à descarga motora, que, sob o predomínio do princípio de prazer, servira como meio de aliviar o aparelho mental de adições de estímulos, e que realizara esta tarefa ao enviar inervações para o interior do corpo (conduzindo a movimentos expressivos, mímica facial e manifestações de afecto). A descarga motora foi agora empregada na alteração apropriada da realidade; foi transformada em acção.
A coibição da descarga motora (da acção), que então se tornou necessária, foi proporcionada através do processo do pensar, que se desenvolveu a partir da apresentação de ideias. O pensar foi dotado de características que tornavam possível ao aparelho mental tolerar uma tensão aumentada de estímulo, enquanto o processo de descarga era adiado. Ele é essencialmente um tipo experimental de actuação acompanhado por deslocamento de quantidades relativamente pequenas de catexia, junto com menor dispêndio (descarga) destas. Para este fim, foi necessária a transformação de catexias livremente móveis em catexias vinculadas o que se conseguiu mediante elevação do nível de todo o processo catexial. É provável que o pensar fosse originalmente inconsciente, na medida em que ultrapassava simples apresentações ideativas e era dirigido para as relações entre impressões de objectos, e que não adquiriu outras qualidades perceptíveis à consciência até haver-se ligado a resíduos verbais.

(2) Uma tendência geral de nosso aparelho mental, que pode ser remontada ao princípio económico de poupar consumo [de energia], parece encontrar expressão na tenacidade com que nos apegamos às fontes de prazer à nossa disposição e na dificuldade com que a elas renunciamos. Com a introdução do princípio de realidade, uma das espécies de actividade de pensamento foi separada; ela foi liberada no teste de realidade e permaneceu subordinada somente ao princípio de prazer. Esta actividade é o fantasiar, que começa já nas brincadeiras infantis, e, posteriormente, conservada como devaneio, abandona a dependência de objectos reais.

(3) A substituição do princípio de prazer pelo princípio de realidade, com todas as consequências psíquicas envolvidas aqui esquematicamente condensadas numa só frase, não se realiza, na verdade, de repente; tampouco se efectua simultaneamente em toda a linha, pois, enquanto este desenvolvimento tem lugar nos instintos do ego, os instintos sexuais se desligam deles de maneira muito significativa. Os instintos sexuais comportam-se auto-eroticamente a princípio; obtêm sua satisfação do próprio corpo do indivíduo e, portanto, não se encontram na situação de frustração que forçou a instituição do princípio de realidade. Quando, posteriormente, começa o processo de encontrar um objecto, ele é logo interrompido pelo longo período de latência que retarda o desenvolvimento sexual até a puberdade. Estes dois factores — auto-erotismo e período de latência — ocasionam que o instinto sexual seja detido em seu desenvolvimento psíquico e permaneça muito mais tempo sob o domínio do princípio de prazer, do qual, em muitas pessoas, nunca é capaz de se afastar.
Em consequência dessas condições, surge uma vinculação mais estreita entre o instinto sexual e a fantasia, por um lado, e, por outro, entre os instintos do ego e as actividades da consciência. Tanto em pessoas sadias quanto em neuróticos, esta vinculação impressiona-nos como muito íntima, embora as considerações de psicologia genética que acabaram de ser apresentadas levem-nos a identificá-la como secundária. A continuidade do auto-erotismo é que torna possível reter por tanto tempo a satisfação momentânea e imaginária mais simples em relação ao objecto sexual, em lugar da satisfação real, que exige esforço e adiamento. No campo da fantasia, a repressão permanece todo-poderosa; ela ocasiona a inibição de ideias in statu nascendi antes que possam ser notadas pela consciência, se a catexia destas tiver probabilidade de ocasionar uma liberação de desprazer. Este é o ponto fraco de nossa organização psíquica; e ele pode ser empregado para restituir ao domínio do princípio de prazer processos de pensamento que já se haviam tornado racionais. Parte essencial da disposição psíquica à neurose reside assim na demora em ensinar os instintos sexuais a considerar a realidade e, como corolário, nas condições que tornam possível esta demora.

(4) Tal como o ego-prazer nada pode fazer a não ser querer, trabalhar para produzir prazer e evitar o desprazer, assim o ego-realidade nada necessita fazer a não ser lutar pelo que é útil e resguardar-se contra danos. Na realidade, a substituição do princípio de prazer pelo princípio de realidade não implica a deposição daquele, mas apenas sua protecção. Um prazer momentâneo, incerto quanto a seus resultados, é abandonado, mas apenas a fim de ganhar mais tarde, ao longo do novo caminho, um prazer seguro. Mas a impressão endopsíquica causada por esta substituição foi tão poderosa que se reflecte num mito religioso especial. A doutrina da recompensa noutra vida pela renúncia — voluntária ou forçada — dos prazeres terrenos nada mais é que uma projecção mítica desta revolução na mente. Seguindo constantemente neste sentido, as religiões puderam efectuar uma renúncia completa do prazer na vida, adiante a promessa de compensação numa existência futura; mas não realizaram, por este meio, uma conquista do princípio de prazer. É a ciência que chega mais perto de obter êxito nessa conquista; ela, contudo, também oferece prazer intelectual durante seu trabalho e promete um lucro prático ao final.

(5) A educação pode ser descrita, sem mais, como um incentivo à conquista do princípio de prazer e à sua substituição pelo princípio de realidade; isto é, ela procura auxiliar o processo de desenvolvimento que afecta o ego. Para este fim, utiliza uma oferta de amor dos educadores como recompensa; e falha, portanto, se uma criança mimada pensa que possui esse amor de qualquer jeito e não pode perdê-lo, aconteça o que acontecer.

(6) A arte ocasiona uma reconciliação entre os dois princípios, de maneira peculiar. Um artista é originalmente um homem que se afasta da realidade, porque não pode concordar com a renúncia à satisfação instintual que ela a princípio exige, e que concede a seus desejos eróticos e ambiciosos completa liberdade na vida de fantasia. Todavia, encontra o caminho de volta deste mundo de fantasia para a realidade, fazendo uso de dons especiais que transformam suas fantasias em verdades de um novo tipo, que são valorizadas pelos homens como reflexos preciosos da realidade. Assim, de certa maneira, ele na verdade se torna o herói, o rei, o criador ou o favorito que desejava ser, sem seguir o longo caminho sinuoso de efectuar alterações reais no mundo externo. Mas ele só pode conseguir isto porque outros homens sentem a mesma insatisfação, que resulta da substituição do princípio de prazer pelo princípio de realidade; é em si uma parte da realidade.

(7) Enquanto o ego passa por suas transformações, de ego-prazer para ego-realidade, os instintos sexuais sofrem as alterações que os levam de seu auto-erotismo original, através de diversas fases intermediárias, ao amor objectal a serviço da procriação. Se estamos certos em pensar que cada passo destes dois cursos de desenvolvimento pode tornar-se local de uma disposição à doença neurótica posterior, é plausível supor que a forma assumida pela doença subsequente (a escolha da neurose) dependerá da fase específica de desenvolvimento do ego e da libido na qual a inibição disposicional do desenvolvimento ocorreu. Assim, uma significação inesperada liga-se aos aspectos cronológicos dos dois desenvolvimentos (que ainda não foram estudados) e a possíveis variações em sua sincronização.

(8) A característica mais estranha dos processos inconscientes (reprimidos), à qual nenhum pesquisador se pode acostumar sem o exercício de grande autodisciplina, deve-se ao seu inteiro desprezo pelo teste de realidade; eles equiparam a realidade do pensamento com a realidade externa e os desejos com sua realização — com o fato — tal como acontece automaticamente sob o domínio do antigo princípio de prazer. Daí também a dificuldade de distinguir fantasias inconscientes de lembranças que se tornaram inconscientes. Mas nunca nos devemos permitir ser levados erradamente a aplicar os padrões da realidade a estruturas psíquicas reprimidas e, talvez por causa disso, a menosprezar a importância das fantasias na formação dos sintomas, sob o pretexto de elas não serem realidades, ou a remontar um sentimento neurótico de culpa a alguma outra fonte, por não haver provas de que qualquer crime real tenha sido cometido. Somos obrigados a empregar a moeda-corrente do país que estamos explorando; em nosso caso, uma moeda neurótica. Suponha-se, por exemplo, que estamos tentando solucionar um sonho como este. Um homem, que outrora cuidara do pai durante longa e penosa doença mortal, contou-me que nos meses seguintes à morte daquele havia repetidamente sonhado que o pai estava novamente vivo e lhe falava da maneira costumeira. Mas ele achava excessivamente penoso que o pai houvesse realmente morrido, apenas sem sabê-lo O único modo de compreender este sonho aparentemente absurdo é acrescentar ‘como aquele que sonhou quisera’ ou ‘em consequência de seu desejo’ após as palavras ‘que ele [o que sonhou] o desejaria’, às últimas palavras. O pensamento onírico é então o seguinte: foi-lhe penosa a lembrança de haver sido obrigado a desejar a morte do pai (como liberação) enquanto este ainda se achava vivo, e quão terrível teria sido se o pai houvesse tido qualquer suspeita disso.
As deficiências deste breve artigo, que é mais preparatório que expositivo, serão talvez desculpadas, apenas em pequena parte, se eu alegar que são inevitáveis. Nestas poucas observações sobre as consequências psíquicas da adaptação ao princípio de realidade, fui obrigado a esboçar opiniões que, no momento, teria preferido reter e cuja justificação certamente exigirá esforço nada insignificante. Mas tenho esperança de que não escapará à observação do leitor benevolente como, nestas páginas também, o predomínio do princípio de realidade está começando.


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Notas de rodapé


Nota 1, Pág. 237, Vol. 12
A ideia, com a expressão ‘fuga para a psicose’, já pode ser encontrada na Secção III do primeiro artigo de Freud sobre ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894a). A expressão real ‘fuga para a doença’ ocorre na Secção B de seu artigo sobre crises histéricas (1909a).

Nota 2, Pág. 237, Vol. 12
Janet, 1909.

Nota 3, Pág. 237, Vol. 12
W. Griesinger (1817-1868) foi um famoso psiquiatra berlinense de uma geração anterior, muito admirado pelo professor de Freud, Meynert. A passagem citada no texto é indubitavelmente a mencionada por Freud três vezes, em A Interpretação de Sonhos (1909a), em [1], [2] e [3], 1972, e novamente no Capítulo VI do livro sobre chistes (1905c). Nesta passagem, Griesinger (1845, 893) chama a atenção para o caráter realizador de desejos das psicoses e dos sonhos.

Nota 4, Pág. 237, Vol. 12
Otto Rank (1910) recentemente chamou a atenção para uma previsão notavelmente clara desta causação em O Mundo como Vontade e Idéia, de Schopenhauer [Parte II (Suplementos), Capítulo 32].

Nota 5, Pág. 238, Vol. 12
Este parece ter sido o primeiro aparecimento do termo atual ‘princípio de prazer’. Em A Interpretação de Sonhos, é sempre denominado ‘princípio de desprazer’ (p. ex., em [1], 1972).

Nota 6, Pág. 238, Vol. 12
Na Secção Geral de A Interpretação de Sonhos. [Isto é, no Capítulo VII. Ver, em particular, a partir de [1], 1972. Mas o que se segue, na maior parte, é também prenunciado no ‘Projecto’ de 1895. Cf., por exemplo, o final da Secção 11 e a Secção 15 da Parte I.]

Nota 7, Pág. 238, Vol. 12
O estado de sono é capaz de restabelecer a semelhança da vida mental, tal como era antes do reconhecimento da realidade, por que um dos pré-requisitos do sono é uma rejeição deliberada da realidade (o desejo de dormir).

Nota 8, Pág. 238, Vol. 12
Tentarei ampliar a descrição esquemática acima com outros pormenores. Corretamente objetar-se-á que uma organização que fosse escrava do princípio de prazer e negligenciasse a realidade do mundo externo não se poderia manter viva, nem mesmo pelo tempo mais breve, de maneira que não poderia ter existido de modo algum. A utilização de uma ficção como esta, contudo, justifica-se quando se considera que o bebê — desde que se inclua o cuidado que recebe da mãe — quase realiza um sistema psíquico desde tipo. Ele provavelmente alucina a realização de suas necessidades internas; revela seu desprazer, quando há um aumento de estímulo e uma ausência de satisfação, pela descarga motora de gritar e debater-se com os braços e pernas, e então experimenta a satisfação que alucinou. Posteriormente, criança de mais idade aprende a empregar intencionalmente estas manifestações de descarga como métodos de expressar suas emoções. Visto que o cuidado posterior das crianças se modela no cuidado dos bebês, o predomínio do princípio de prazer só pode realmente terminar quando a criança atingiu um completo desligamento psíquico dos pais. (continua…)

Nota 9, Pág. 239, Vol. 12
Algumas observações sobre as opiniões de Freud sobre a atenção podem ser encontradas na nota de rodapé 2 do Editor Inglês ao artigo metapsicológico sobre ‘O Inconsciente’, em [1], 1974.

Nota 10, Pág. 239, Vol. 12
Esta noção, amiúde repetida por Freud, aparece já na primeira edição de seu livro sobre chistes (1905c, perto do final do Capítulo VI), sendo examinada mais profundamente em seu artigo posterior sobre ‘A Negativa’ (1925h).

Nota 11, Pág. 240, Vol. 12
Cf. ‘Projecto’, Parte I, Secção 11.

Nota 12, Pág. 240, Vol. 12
Cf. ‘Projecto’, Parte I, Secção 18, e A Interpretação de Sonhos, em [1], 1972.

Nota 13, Pág. 240, Vol. 12
Cf. ‘Projecto’, Parte II, Secção I, e A Interpretação de Sonhos, em [1] e [2], 1972. Isto é desenvolvido ainda na Secção VII de ‘O Inconsciente’ (1915e).

Nota 14, Pág. 240, Vol. 12
Da mesma maneira, uma nação cuja riqueza resida na exploração do produto de seu solo mesmo assim preservará certas áreas em seu estado original, para protegê-las das mudanças ocasionadas pela civilização. (P. ex., o Yellowstone Park.) [Cf. os exames de fantasias em ‘Creatives Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908e) e em ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ (1908a). A expressão ‘Realitätsprüfung‘ (‘teste de realidade’) parece fazer seu primeiro aparecimento nesta frase.]

Nota 15, Pág. 241, Vol. 12
A superioridade do ego-realidade sobre o ego-prazer foi apropriadamente expressa por Bernard Shaw nestas palavras: ‘Ser capaz de escolher a posição de maior vantagem no lugar de submeter-se à direção da menor resistência.’ (Man and Superman.) [Observação efetuada por Don Juan perto do final do interlúdio mozarteano, no Ato III. Uma descrição muito mais elaborada das relações entre o ‘ego-prazer’ e o ‘ego-realidade’ é fornecida em ‘Os Instintos e suas Vicissitudes’ (1915c), em [1], 1974.]

Nota 16, Pág. 243, Vol. 12
Cf. a posição semelhante, assumida por Otto Rank (1907). [Ver também ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908e) bem como o parágrafo de encerramento da Conferência XXIII das Conferências Introdutórias (1916-17).]

Nota 17, Pág. 243, Vol. 12
Este tema é desenvolvido em ‘A Disposição à Neurose Obsessiva’ (1913i), a partir de [1].

Nota 18, Pág. 243, Vol. 12
Esta dificuldade é examinada extensamente na parte final da Conferência XXIII, das Conferências Introdutórias.

Nota 19, Pág. 244, Vol. 12
Este sonho foi acrescentado à edição de 1911 de A Interpretação de Sonhos (1900a), em [1], 1972, logo após a publicação do presente artigo.]

NOTA DO EDITOR INGLÊS


FORMULIERUNGEN ÜBER DIE ZWEI PRINZIPIEN DES PSYCHISCHEN GESCHEHENS

(a) EDIÇÕES ALEMÃS:
1911 Jb. psychoan. psychopath. Forsch., 3 (1), 1-8.
1913 S. K. S. N., 3, 271-9. (1921, 2ª ed.)
1924 G. S., 5, 409-17.
1931 Theoretische Schriften, 5-14.
1943 G. W., 8, 230-8.

(b) TRADUÇÃO INGLESA:
‘Formulations Regarding the Two Principle in Mental Functioning’
1925 C. P., 4, 13-21. (Trad. de M. N. Searl.)

A presente tradução inglesa, com o título modificado, baseia-se na publicada em 1925, mas foi em grande parte redigida novamente.

Informa-nos o Dr. Ernest Jones que Freud começou a planejar este artigo em Junho de 1910, e que trabalhava nele simultaneamente com a história clínica de Schreber (1911c). Seu progresso foi lento, mas, em 26 de Outubro, falou sobre o assunto perante a Sociedade Psicanalítica de Viena; achou a assistência indiferente, porém, e ele próprio se achava insatisfeito com sua apresentação. Foi somente em Dezembro que começou realmente a escrever o artigo. Achava-se pronto ao final de Janeiro de 1911, mas não foi publicado senão no fim da primavera, quando apareceu no mesmo número do Jahrbuch que o caso Schreber.
Com este notório artigo, que constitui um dos clássicos da psicanálise, e com a terceira parte, quase contemporânea, da história clínica de Schreber, Freud pela primeira vez, após um intervalo de mais de dez anos, novamente empreendeu o exame das hipóteses teóricas gerais que se achavam implícitas em suas descobertas clínicas. Sua primeira tentativa ampla de tal exame fora feita em terminologia quase neurológica, em seu ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, de 1895, que, no entanto, não foi publicado durante a sua vida (Freud, 1950a). O Capítulo VII de A Interpretação de Sonhos (1900a) foi a exposição de um conjunto muito semelhante de hipótese, mas, desta vez, em termos puramente psicológicos. Grande parte do material do presente artigo (especialmente em sua primeira parte) deriva directamente destas duas fontes. O trabalho dá a impressão de ter o carácter de um levantamento de estoque. É como se Freud estivesse trazendo à sua própria inspecção, por assim dizer, as hipóteses fundamentais de um período anterior e preparando-as para servir de base para os principais exames teóricos que se achavam adiante, no futuro imediato: o artigo sobre narcisismo, por exemplo, e a grande série dos artigos metapsicológicos.
A presente exposição de suas opiniões é excessivamente condensada, não sendo fácil de assimilar, mesmo hoje. Embora saibamos agora que Freud muito pouco dizia nela que já não se achasse há muito tempo em sua mente, por ocasião de sua publicação deve ter impressionado os leitores como desconcertantemente cheia de novidades. Os parágrafos assinalados (1), por exemplo, a partir de [1], seriam verdadeiramente obscuros para aqueles que não se achassem familiarizados com o ‘Projecto’ ou com os artigos metapsicológicos e que tivessem de retirar o esclarecimento que pudessem de um certo número de passagens quase igualmente condensadas e muito pouco sistematizadas de A Interpretação de Sonhos. Não é de surpreender que a primeira assistência de Freud se mostrasse indiferente.
O tema principal da obra é a distinção entre os princípios reguladores (o princípio de prazer e o princípio de realidade) que dominam, respectivamente, os processos mentais primário e secundário. A tese, na verdade, já fora enunciada na Secção 1 da Parte I do ‘Projecto’ e elaborada nas Secções 15 e 16 da Parte I e nas partes posteriores da Secção I da Parte III. Foi novamente examinada no Capítulo VII de A interpretação de Sonhos (Ver a partir de [1] e [2], 1972), mas o tratamento mais completo foi reservado para o artigo sobre a metapsicologia dos sonhos (1917d [1915]), escrito cerca de três anos após o presente. Um relato mais pormenorizado do desenvolvimento das opiniões de Freud sobre a questão de nossa atitude mental para com a realidade pode ser encontrado na Nota do Editor Inglês a esse artigo (Ver a partir de [1], 1974).
Perto do fim do trabalho, surgem vários outros tópicos relacionados, cujo desenvolvimento ulterior (como o do tema principal) é deixado para posterior investigação. Na verdade, todo o artigo foi (como o próprio Freud observa) de natureza preparatória e exploratória, mas não é menos interessante por essa razão.
A maior parte deste artigo, na versão de 1925, foi incluída em General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud (1937, 45-53), de Rickman.

[Quadro: "Nocturne" de Christopher Wood]

Os demasiadamente irritáveis

Sem querer entrar uma discussão técnica acerca de personalidades cuja característica comum pode ser descrita como sendo, entre muitas outras, a “irritabilidade”, podemos no entanto tentar reflectir sobre quem são e como é a vivência destas pessoas. Sabemos à partida que são indivíduos extremamente sensíveis onde a todo o momento a sua fúria e raiva está prestes a desabar sobre aquele ou aqueles que tiveram comportamentos que foram sentidos como provocando, de forma intencional, sentimentos de incalculável mal-estar ou desconforto. Muitas das vezes em determinados momentos e circunstâncias do quotidiano (por mais insignificantes que sejam) podemo-nos aperceber que do outro lado está uma violência latente prestes a explodir ao mínimo sinal de injúria. São pessoas que invariavelmente carregam dentro de si – ao longo das suas vidas secretamente sofridas … – intensos sentimentos de insatisfação relacional com os outros, sejam estes mais ou menos próximos. São pessoas que procuram transmitir e provar aos outros uma mensagem de que não precisam deles para nada, adoptando frequentemente posturas de relativa frieza no contacto, utilizando palavras duras e tentando criar em quem os rodeia sentimentos de mistério, fascínio, autonomia e, não muitas das vezes, inveja. Todas estas situações reflectem tentativas de negação da extrema dependência e desamparo que realmente sentem. Naturalmente nestas pessoas, a par com a sua sensibilidade e susceptibilidade, encontra-se exacerbada a desconfiança sobre os outros. Confiar é uma tarefa demasiadamente custosa pois implica baixar as defesas que durante tanto tempo e a tanto custo foram erigidas e são mantidas. Baixar as defesas significa ficar vulnerável. Esta vulnerabilidade reporta-se a situações do seu passado (infância) onde foram expostos a situações de frustração e humilhação e que tendo estado numa posição passiva e sentindo impotência, tentam, sem saber e aperceber-se, fazer o oposto no resto da suas vidas: controlar, ter uma postura (supostamente) activa e sobretudo não sentir ou recordar demasiado. Pois como diz o povo “recordar é viver”. Neste caso, reviver… São verdadeiros guerreiros afectivos procurando uma autonomia e domínio afectivo sobre os seus sentimentos. Guerras internas despoletadas pelo universo exterior: a realidade afectiva das outras pessoas. Nestes casos o calor afectivo dos outros é um sentimento que fere em demasia. Porque os obriga a parar a sua gélida guerra ancestral no labirinto das suas vidas. Muitas das vezes somente o fio de Ariadne da psicoterapia poderá possibilitar momentos de tranquilidade e descanso. Com eles próprios sobretudo.

João Balrôa

[Quadro: promenor de "Demónio sentado", de MIKHAIL VRUBEL (1890)]

What is thinking - an attept to an integrative study of W.R. Bion´s contributions...

Paulo César Sandler

"Solomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance, so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion" (Bacon, 1625, Essays, 58, 'Of Vicissitude of Things')

THINKING AND THOUGHTS; PROCESSES OF KNOWING AND KNOWLEDGE
One is used to regard 'thinking' as the typical feature that differentiates humans from other living beings. Is that so? There are other animals that probably think. Thinking was at first regarded as a conscious process, and the fact that it has some unconscious features follows on being object of abhorrence (For example, Archard, 1984). The capacity to rationalize (Jones, 1937; Freud, 1911) complicates the issue, linked to a persistent tendency to regard thinking and logical reasoning as if they were synonymous. It became clear that 'thinking' is a kind of time-server to goals striking by their lack of commonsensical thought -- rationality at the service of irrationality. The growing perception of the existence of some phenomena which became known as illusions, delusions and hallucinations added another question to the whole issue of thinking. Their 'presence' became to be regarded as indicating lack of thinking but it came to be regarded as an excess of thinking as well.
Is the capacity to hallucinate a subtler and more precise factor that differentiates human beings from other living beings? Are there any relationships between thinking and emotional experiences, such as the avoidance of pain? Another factor was brought into consideration: forgetfulness, later enlightened by psycho-analysis, in many cases, as appertaining to the realm of repression, splitting and denial. More questions gushed in, in a seemingly unceasing sprouting: is thinking is a material fact, dependent on brain or neuron enzymes or some brain occurrences at a quantic level-occurrences? Is it not a material fact at all? (Planck, 1946, p. 88; Penrose, 1989, 1994). Those who do not deal with it as a material fact brough tanother whole set of questions, such as: are there any relationships between thought processes, verbal formulations and symbol formation? (Bion, 1956; Segal, 1957). Is what we call reality something that already exists or is it something we create through the use of our thinking apparatus? This is only a sample among the myriad of unanswered questions which display how cloudy and uncertain is the issue of thinking. It produced more questions than answers.
There is contention even in our human 'ardent desire for knowledge', as Kant called it (Kant, 1781, p.250). This urge was called by Melanie Klein as an 'epistemophilic instinct' (Klein, 1932, p. 153). It seems to be met through the use of one of its factors, namely, our capacity to think and thinking itself. Thinking and knowing are intertwined; one is either a function or a factor of the other. The contention was brought into awareness when we human beings realized that despite the fact that truth is the food of mind, mind hates truth, in the metaphor coined by Bion and used in many occasions (Bion, 1962b, 1970, 1975)
One may discriminate to pursue knowledge and to cope with processes of knowing. A very abridged glance at a long history that was expanded elsewhere (Sandler, 1994, 1996) can be the comparison between features of knowledge vis-à-vis features of processes of knowing.
When one aims to get knowledge, one also is involved in:
- teleological aims
- final answers
- possession of truth (absolute truth)
- achievement of something 'positive'. Thinking is directed towards satisfaction, for "knowledge" is completeness-seeking. It abhors the 'negative', frustration of knowledge.
- the belief in sequential and linear relationships of cause and effect. It privileges rational thinking through the heavy usage of deductive and inductive methods of the so-called 'pure reason' without paying attention to observation of facts. It typically dwells research into the realm of what is already known (through postulates already known); pure reason is used to prove something and to predict occurrences.
- the construction of doctrinaire bodies which constitute scholasticism; those doctrines are by their turn, used as new postulates, completing a self-feeding closed system. Doctrinaire bodies are like buildings with no inhabitants; it leads to the feeling of having new discoveries that in fact are product of forgetfulness. The pretension is to store knowledge in the consciousness and therefore no forgetting, in the sense of unconscious learning, is taken into consideration.
- the adoption of Canons. Authoritarian views based on those pre-established codes obtrude. Doctrines usually ignite a mushrooming of moral codes of judgement based on 'right' and 'wrong' reasoning.
- spotting no links between the person who knows and the object known except in what regards to the use of the sensuous apparatus.
- as a consequence of above, one is bound to regard the methods of attaining knowledge in an area which is in fact outside the central nervous system, for in the accumulation of knowledge, empiricism is regarded in its pre-Kantian, wholly sensuous based terms. The term 'experience' concerns itself exclusively with the sensuously apprehensible facts, or facts that apprehensible through our sensuous apparatus. The near-awareness of those doctrines as concrete, touchable things (which partake qualities of inanimate objects) is visible in terms such as 'body of doctrine'. This composes the positivist, comtean movement. Ernest Cassirer called this tendency 'naive realism'. Psycho-analysis enlightened the fact that this corresponds to a very primitive mode of mental functioning, when milk is confused with the breast and the sensuous-concrete (material) aspect prevails over thinking itself. In science it flourished in 'positivism'.
- in a paradox to the above stated naive realism, 'knowledge' is also involved in another erecting of bodies of doctrines based in a 'naive idealism'. It is a kind of negative kind of knowledge, claiming that individual views, individual products of mind are the reality. In brief, that mind creates reality or legislates over reality. This is usually known as 'idealism' ou 'subjectivism'. Psycho-analytic research enlightened the fact that this also corresponds toa very primitive aspect of PS, namely, the hallucinated breast that installs itself when one abhors the frustration of the no-breast. There is the belief that human mind creates thoughts. 'Cogito ergo svm' is one of its earliest, if still unrecognized, seed and expression. This path makes attemps to prove that reality is a product of mind. This composes what was known as 'subjetivism' (deeply criticized by Kant), also 'idealism'(specially Fichtean) and in more recent years, a school around some French thinkers such as Bachelard, Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault among others.
- believing in the no-interference of the observer in the phenomena observed. This belief brushes aside any regard to emotional experiences involved in observation and thought processes and much less in knowledge and its achievement.
- aiming comprehension and explanation
- using axiomatic, definitory language.
Knowledge displays a basic contradiction: it is usually regarded as final (in the innings of the doctrine or school that grows from them) and suddenly it may come to be regarded as disposable, for new 'paradigms' (Kuhn, 1983) are incessantly called forth. This created the ideas of falseability according Popper (Popper, 1963). Those paradigms or 'canons' are immanences amenable to be surpassed and incapable of conferring durability to findings which by its turn make them immune to time and space (See, for example, Bion, 1965, p. 32, when he describes features of 'O'). It lacks the 'beauty' referred by Poincaré, Keats and Penrose which appertains to the realm of transcendence, platonic forms or 'O'. It furnishes a sense of dominating and taming 'O'. Despite the heavy usage of postulates, it many times loses itself in the shrine of theories and methods, as pointed out Adorno in his famous discussion with Popper (Adorno, 1967). It creates a 'thinking' that at its best can prove its own presumptions.
One may contrast some features of processes of knowledge:
- an absence of aims ('la réponse est le malheur de la question', a much loved quotation by Bion, from Maurice Blanchot). Aims are replaced by attempts to observe ontology, or genetic development. The absence of aims allowed for observations such as the existence of penicillin and the formulation of the theory of natural selection, for example.
- an acceptance of the lack of final answers; a tolerance of paradoxes during an unending process of knowing; or in other words, the use of the dialectical method as developed by Socrates and in later years, by Hegel.
- an attempt to achieve a sense of truth, which means that the process of knowledge is a method of perceiving that the loved object and the hated object -- or the known object and the unknown object -- are the one and the same object. This is the first object which serves as a prototypical (not paradigmatic) model of tolerance of paradoxes to be developed during the life cycle of the individual.
- it is 'negative', that is, it tolerates frustration and does not seek complete satisfaction.
- there are no mandatory sequential and linear relationships, much the less the belief in cause and effect; it looks for the 'selected fact' and invariances; it describes evolutions and tries to describe processes of 'being' (without ever achieving those descriptions). Process of knowing leave aside, at least when they are functioning, attempts toward rational and logical thinking, which may constitute an afterwards exercice. Therefore there is no compulsory usage of deductive and inductive methods of reasoning. Research into the unknown uses intuition and the training of intuition, considering common sense (Hume, 1748; Bion, 1959c); there is no pure reason involved, but respect toward real facts. There are no beliefs on postulates, but observation of Nature-dependent realities instead, beared on needs and possibilities (choice and chance). As Bion puts in 'A Memoir of the Future', vol. II, one does not need to waste one's 'capacity do believe', in facts.
- process of knowing do not erect doctrinaire bodies and scholasticism and therefore there is no appearance of established, authoritarian, institutionally approved truths, either coming from each one' individual mind ('compulsion to repetition'; Freud, 1920) or from the group. The development of knowing does not depend of postulates but it depends of the intuition of individuals, compassion and love to truth (Bion, 1960, p. 125). There are no moral codes of judgement. 'Right' and 'wrong' are considered products of mind, not Nature-dependent observable facts. Right and wrong rationales are replaced by observation of falsity and truth (or hallucination and reality). 'Forgetting', in the sense of having been learned by experience and stored in the unconscious, is taken into consideration. 'Must' is replaced by 'need', 'desire' is at least partially replaced by 'possibility'.
- It is beared on Organons. Authoritative views based on learning from experience obtrude. Canons are seen as appertaining the domain of Nature-dependent, ultimately unknowable 'O'. They are real, "intuit-able" but they are not knowable. They can be shared by the individual with himself as his common sense (when he has all his senses in common, according Hume and Bion; Bion, 1959) and with the group.
- empiricism is regarded in its post-Kantian terms, as developed by Schopenhauer, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein and Heisenberg. That is a sensible intuition based in pre-conceptions which are Nature-dependent and development-dependent. In other words, pre-conceptions that seek realisations that never wholly match them. This not-complete- matching allows for the formation of conceptions. The experience of no-breast allows for the inception of thought processes -- thinking in the absence of the object (Bion, 1962b). Sensuous apparatus is a port of entry to data which are transformed into thoughts and dream-work. The experience therefore concerns either to the sensuously apprehensible facts appertaining to the material reality (Freud, 1900, p. 620) or to the psychic reality, which is non-sensuous; it does not split them and does not deny any one of them either.
- it does not aim to comprehension, but it makes attempts to life-like, transient (Freud, 1918) apprehensions.
- there is regard to the interference of the observer in the phenomena observed. Conscious awareness of this fact was turned more possible due the recognizance of the emotional experience in the process of knowing, specially by the achievements of the Romantic Period. There is regard to the links involved, and processes of knowing partake qualities which are typical of animate beings (referred by Bion as 'animism'; for example, Bion, 1960b, p. 133; 1963, p. ). The links of thinking itself were first described by Klein and expanded in the now classical studies of Bion; the disturbances of those linkings, as well as the model of a K-link, were also adumbrated. (Bion, 1957; 1962b)
- it uses a 'language of achievement' (Bion, 1970, p.73n, 125; 1975, p. 203 and 204 for a more complete, practical exposition). The 'axioms' thus obtained are linked to need and possibility, determined by choice and chance, and are nature-dependent.
A process of knowing is ever in the move. Its movement is characterised by a constant paradox that includes what is known and what is unknown (Or PSD in Bion's quasi-mathematical notation of Klein's formulation on the two positions). 'Knowledge' thus obtained is never final and therefore there are no doctrines or schools sprouting from them. It looks for selected facts (Poincaré, quoted by Bion, for example, in 'Learning from Experience' and 'Cogitations', pp. 72 and 18 respectively) and invariances (Bion, 1965) and therefore it respects some transcendences and their dynamic equilibrium with immanences, again without splitting them. There are neither paradigms nor canons when it can be put into function. There are some transient, flashy, fleeting spotting of expressions of transcendences, or 'invariances', evolutions in 'O' (Bion, 1965).
Its main consequence is the hypothesis that thoughts exist without a thinker to think them. It is not very easy to estimate the value of such an hypothesis and it can be measured by the reactions against it; for it constitutes a blow in human omnipotence, which equals previous blows given by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. The processes of thinking and perhaps even the development of an ability to think are imposed into mind, as a developmental need, due the existence of thoughts. For example, the thoughts 'wheel', 'natural selection', 'aeroplane', 'passionate love', 'Planck's constant', 'Einstein's constant', 'relativity theory' already existed, albeit in a non-sensuous or very primitive, larvae or cystic form, 'floating in the reality as it is', much time before someone was available to think them. The clinical relevance of this hypothesis is that thoughts without a thinker also exist in the analytic room, waiting for the creative couple to think them. As far as I was able to investigate, this kind of hypothesis was seriously expanded for the first time in the history of western thinking by Wilfred R. Bion: thoughts are epistemologically previous to thinking (Bion, 1962a,b, 1963).
Psycho-analytical research, specially through the contribution of Dr. Wilfred Bion, enlightened some fact: pretensions to knowledge and abhorrence toward transient processes of knowing perhaps appertain to the realm of hallucination. In contrast, coping with processes -- necessarily incomplete -- of knowing appertains to the realm of human nature and its relationships with the real world and the real facts, namely, those Nature-dependent facts. This is necessarily incomplete; it is a transient alive fact, in perpetual motion, evolving if and when life exists. He suggested that the whole body of psycho-analysis could be a 'vast paramnesia' to 'fill the void of our ignorance' (Bion, 1976, 1977c), coming to the point of suggesting to 'stop investigations in psycho-analysis', 'but in the psyche it betrays' (Bion, 1975, p. 122); also that the insight could be linked to the perception of 'trains of thoughts already available' to the patient (Bion, 1975, p.204). 'Paramnesias', 'investigations in psycho-analysis' correspond to knowledge. 'The psyche it betrays' and 'already available trains of thoughts' correspond to processes of knowing. Also, his observations on thoughts without a thinker challenges some omnipotent, 'idealistic' ideas that mind produces thoughts and reality itself. Those observations met some sensible reactions from the establishment, already emphasized by other authors (as Green, 1992) that do not interest us now.
The 'non-explanation factor' stems from 'an ability to tolerate paradoxes' (Sandler, 1996). The tolerance of paradoxes is possible in many ways and one of them is the use of intuition coupled with the dialectical method: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Or mother, father and son/daughter, or in Bion's quasi-mathematical notation. This method was developed by some Ancient Greeks as a conversational tool. In recent times it was Hegel, after Kant and Fichte, who profited from it, not as a method of conversation, but as a method to encircle mental functioning and to develop processes of knowing. Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott developed a tolerance when facing paradoxes up to a point that the most important key-concepts in our science are formulated through the use of antithetical pairs. For example: the two principles of mental functioning (being the synthesis, the conscious awareness of reality), the life and death instincts (being the synthesis, life itself); love and hate (being the synthesis, the creative parental couple); PSD (synthesis: mental life itself); psychical reality and material reality (synthesis, human being), container/contained (in its various expressions, synthesis is mother/baby, the creative couple, analyst and analysand among others), binocular vision.
Bion expanded and developed the verbal formulation of some relationships between unconscious thought processes, dream-work and perception of reality, as well as some factors that hampers those processes. Processes of knowing are dependent of an epistemological function of the mind. This is a function that strives to near reality, the fulfilment of this goal notwithstanding (for 'O' is unknowable). Thinking processes are factors in the various expressions (manifestations) of the epistemophilic instinct which promotes the K-link. Those manifestations, or phenomenic expressions, are themselves, by their turn, functions. Hence we have the psycho-analytic function of the mind as one of those manifestations, the mathematical function of the mind, the artistic function of the mind. Those functions strive to near 'O' or to express fleeting glimpses of partial aspects of 'O'.


KNOWING, THINKING, AND PSYCHO-ANAYSIS

Freud, Klein and Bion furthered the apprehension of some thought processes and some modes of thinking and not-thinking that sets them forth -- or back (the field of minus K according Bion). Dr. Bion was able to reunite the most outstanding contributions stemming from the Rennaissance, Enlightenment and Romantic period with Psycho-analytsis toward the development of knowledge of "facts as they really are" (Bion oftently quotes this Samuel Johnson's phrase) and the study of the vicissitudes, obstacles and difficulties created by this same human being in order to do not know what "facts really are" -- various kinds of transformations, such as rigid, projective and in hallucinosis (Bion, 1965). Knowing and thinking are inseparable of perception of reality and its vicissitudes.
In the wake of the unearthing of 'classics' that occurred during the Renaissance and thereafter, in the tardy British Renaissance of Shakespeare, and in the curious blend of romantic thrusts and classical influence as it appeared in Goethe's and Nietzsche´s efforts, Freud was able to unbury the relevance of the Oedipal triangle -- in itself and antithetical pair followed by synthesis. Also, he was able to formulate, perhaps for the first time in the Western Thinking, the existence of a principle, that for the lack of a better name, he called 'Reality Principle'. Hobbes and Locke, as well as Kant, neared it without ever touching it in an effective way; Bacon also neared it through science; but all of them seemed to remain clinged to the "Pleasure/Pain Principle'.
The perception/realization of the Reality Principle was doomed to remain stubbornly outside the reach of Science. For the goofy infancy of Science still insisted in being 'positive', that is, pleasure-seeking, satisfaction-fulfilling. The 'no-breast' aspect of science was and is continuously denied. 'I Think', 'I Know', 'I discovered', 'The solution' seemed to be preferable 'I think that I think', 'I am and I also am not' (to put up with a paradox), 'I know and I do not know', 'I think and I hallucinate'. Poets such as Shakespeare and Goethe were able to grasp it and to convey it into poetical form; musicians such as Bach and Beethoven, into musical form. The problem that remained with artistical (and philosophical) forms are their unsuitability to a broadened practical use. Freud's medical interest conferred practical use to the perception of the existence of the two principles of mental functioning to the care of individuals. Using his observations on World War I, the same war Dr. Bion experienced in its most deadly form, Freud was able to improve his previous formulation of the principle (Freud, 1920).
The end of it all, the reality of death, the existence of what Sir Arthur Eddington called 'the arrow of time' (Eddington, 1933) helped Melanie Klein to further enlighten death instincts and life instincts. Through Klein's developments of Freud's observations we became more prepared to face, during an actual analytical session, how those instincts come to compose the ethos of thought processes and also the ethos of absence of thought processes. Starting from Klein, Bion was able to study disorders of thought, or the epistemological errors at their inception, when they are in a most primitive, inchoate forms. Perhaps as any practising psycho-analyst, Freud, Klein and Bion used some of their personal life experiences or emotional experiences to nourish either their search and their findings, thus endowing their research -- processes of thinking and knowing -- of living features. In brief, they used their capacity to think, the ´nous´, the mind thinking about itself as Aristotle first called it, in order to tool their research. Freud´s perceptions were coupled with an undaunted honesty toward perceiving his relationship with his mother; Klein´s perceptions were linked of her experiences with sons and daughter; Bion´s contributions were linked to his life experiences as a teacher, a war tank officer, a father; in brief, his experiences into the realm of non-comprehension and mindless states. Is it possible to separate 'thinking' from common sense and life itself as it is, or 'facts as they really are'?
Early attacks against psycho-analysis used the argument of an 'undue' extension of observations made on ill people to 'healthy' ou 'normal' people. What critics did not realize was that psycho-analysis, perhaps intuitively and not in an explicit manner, always described the No-breast. It allows the inception of thought processes through the experience of 'No'. When one experiences what 'No' is all about, one may realize -- in himself -- the evolving 'Yes'. Psycho-analysis describes the names of our lies, through the formulation of names such as 'transference', 'narcissism', among many others. Perception of those lies may be a way to the person become 'what he or she is in reality' as Nietzsche, Freud and Bion insisted many times. Are 'transference' and 'projective identification' epistemological errors linked to the lack of concern toward truth and reality? (Bion, 1960, p. 125; circa 1960, p. 247).
Is it possible to get an inner, vivid and experienced apprehension of processes of thinking starting from the vertex of their absence? In analytical practice, this means the possibility to hallucinate during a session of analysis and to experience expressions of the psychotic personality, specially those appertaining to PS and the lack of ability to experience PSD). This is the 'stamping ground for the wild asses' referred by Bion in 'A Memoir of the Future' (Bion, 1975, p. 9). Conscious awareness of no-reality created by human mind, 'to turn the unconscious, conscious' in its highest pitch, the field of -K or ' minus', 'negative' broadly speaking, yields to the evolving experience (being, transformation in 'O') of reality.
We propose to consider some states where thinking and as a matter of consequence, perception of reality seems to be almost absent: the obtrusion of moral values, transference phenomena, allegiance to the Pleasure/Pain Principle to the point of being enslaved to it, denials of the movement between PS and D (the part). Starting from Bion´s contribution, after Keats (truth is beauty, beautiful truth) we consider that reality and truth are fully interchangeable terms, real synonyms. We are not considering truth from a moral vertex, but from cognitive vertex instead. Let us focus 'transference' and 'projective identification' starting from the 'truth'(or 'reality') vertex.


TRANSFERENCE AND PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION: MINDLESSNESS?

Transference phenomena stem from the compulsion to repetition -- and if it is repetitive, it is dead, for only death itself abolishes movement. Patients attribute to some people the same feelings, ideas, desires and perhaps realistic ideas that were due to significant figures of their historical past, long gone and now appertaining to the realm of memory and hallucination. Freud himself was able to explicitly state the hallucinatory character of transference (for example, Freud, 1912). Patients under 'transference' are not able to deal with reality, to face it, even the most elementary of the realities, as for example that the analyst is not their father. The person cannot think and discriminate; probably it was not a mere coincidence that Bion proposed to regard transference as a rigid transformation -- the rigor mortis of thought processes?
Projective identification as observed by Klein, being an unconscious omnipotent phantasy that makes its 'owner' to believe that he has the power to split out and thereafter to expel undesired ideas, wishes, feelings, thoughts or whatever it be. Once felt as appertaining to the outside, external milieu, this phantasy completes its cycle with the omnipotent feeling that such undesired feelings and ideas ought be 'inoculated' into someone else (primarily Mother). Projective identification perhaps may be regarded as another type of epistemological error too. Either transference or projective identification -- when they occur in adulthood -- are expressions of lack of thought processes or mindlessness. In Bion's terms, the field of minus K and the transformations in hallucinosis. Freud and Klein were acutelly aware of the hallucinated and 'phantastic nature' of transference and projective identification (Freud, 1912, p. 108; Klein, 1946, p. 298)
Love toward truth, or Plato's, Bacon's, Hume's, Kant's attempts can be seen in Freud's, Klein's, Winnicott's and Bion's works through their commonsensical dealing with some natural realities. Let's single one to illustrate the issue -- the breast.
'Breast' is a ´real reality´. In order to perceive it, the baby cannot insist either on as 'naively realistic' approach, splitting and denying its immaterial character, or in a 'naively idealistic' approach. The individual repeats the fumbling infancy of epistemology (and perhaps epistemology itself, still divided in the following dilemma, also repeats the fumbling psychotic infancy of any individual mind):
I) The baby may fall in what in philosophy is regarded as the ´naive realism´, that is, one relies exclusively in the sensuous apparatus and then one concludes that what was apprehended through this comparatively short-ranged method is reality itself. In Freud´s terms, the baby splits out psychic reality from material reality and privileges the later; it corresponds to the enforced splitting described by Bion in chapters 5 and 6 of ´Learning from Experience´. This approach means that the baby will be too leaned towards the sensuously apprehensible aspects of the breast. Psychic reality turns to lose its psychic features and is replaced by a state of mind which is neither awake nor asleep, neither alive nor dead -- thoughts are reified and turned into concrete entities. Development is hampered; adults who followed this path come to be a kind of mosaic of psychotic and neurotic aspects, without integration and coherence between fragmented aspects. Things-in-themselves cannot cohere in the extent 'they' constitute closed, isolated 'worlds'. They cannot be "link-able" objects. Bion coined dozens of metaphors which in my view help us the achievement of this kind of perceptions he had, as for example, ´the mind is too heavy a load that the sensuous beast cannot carry´ (Bion, 1975, p. 45). Greedy politicians, consummerism and pseudo-science best exemplified by positivism or neo-positivism are some of its offshoots in the 'adult' world; concrete, sensuously apprehensible pseudo facts replace, albeit tremporarily, psychic reality.
II) In the later case, one (a baby or a philosopher) insists in dealing with the breast as it was a bunch of projections. Intolerance of frustration means that such a baby tries to introduce its pre-conceived breast into the real breast, transforming it, in his mind, into a non-reality that can reach a point of no-return (a special kind of Tp which constitutes a deformation, as described by Bion in p. 12 of 'Transformations'. This kind of baby, as the hallucinated ´adult´, refuses to deal with the real breast. He or she does not allow reality to be as it really is, but tries to make sure it will be what he or she desires it to be. He or she cannot introject the real breast, for enviously and greedily hating it, trying to be superior to the breast. I shall not dwell on the vicissitudes of mother-baby relationship taking for granted the reader's acquaintance with Mrs. Klein's descriptions on the issue. It is linked to some specific unconscious phantasies such as the confusion between a breast and a penis. This phantasy can express itself in later ages through homosexual phantasies and hate directed towards the reality of the existence of Mother as the nourishing entity of the mind.
Hallucination prevails in either case. In (II) one privileges mind´s products, overvalues one's own faeces in a paranoid-schizoid fashion, dealing with them as if they were thoughts and reality itself. The person inflicts to himself a pseudo-mental life which grows, inflationarily, cancer-like, but cannot develop for it has no limiting factor (the No-breast, frustration) as well as it has no marriage with this limiting factor, reality itself. We will return to this point in the following sessions. In (I) the baby and the adult produces a manic overvaluating of concrete properties. In both cases, the baby cannot put up with the paradox first described by Dr. Winnicott (Winnicott, 1969): that the breast was created by him as well as it already exists. In this subjectivistic approach, 'naive idealism', the baby thinks he or she created the breast and denies it already existed; in the first case the baby stifles its mental life. The non-sensuous spectrum of psychic reality is almost extinguished accordingly. The baby feels that what exists is the external breast and nothing more than it. The expressions of those vicissitudes of development of thinking appear in later ages in many guises. For example, the naive idealism that mistakes the products of the mind with reality creates the belief on the existence of geniuses; its most extreme forms take the guise of mysticism. It also created the idea that the world or reality itself does not exist at all beyond what we see. The naive realism expresses itself in greedy tycoons and politicians, and also in sheer delinquency -- lack of concern toward life, people and truth. In Science, it produced the 'positivism'. This lack of concern to life expresses itself through dismissal or contempt toward Motherhood, Fatherhood and lack of interest in symbiotic relationships, collaborative links with oneself and with other people.


SOME EXTENSIONS MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH BION´S CONTRIBUTIONS

Bion proposed an analogic model which seems to me useful when one endeavours to improve one's apprehension of thinking processes, namely, the functioning of the digestive apparatus. This model allowed for some synthetic metaphors which convey the functioning of the mental apparatus used to think, such as 'truth is the food of mind´. His research lent to some insights in what concerns to the transformation of concrete sensuously apprehensible stimuli into non-concrete, immaterial, psychic facts (this is the operation of 'alpha-function'; Bion, 1962a, b) in the same way that concrete food is transformed into immaterial energy (ATP-adenosine tri-phosphate, where matter and energy meets in the human body).
Bion's improved insights seem to me allow the analogic use the mammal's reproduction system in order to approximate to what ´thinking´ is, adjoining it to the already existent model of the digestive system. I propose to join his concept of container/contained, in the sense of the exercising of masculinity and femininity and the basic creative act, namely, the parental couple and its intercourse, into the framework of alpha-function model and the digestive apparatus model in order to enable us to have some glimpses of the thought processes and the processes of knowing - as they appear during an actual analytic session. Does it exist a psychic ability to be intuitively introduced, without confusing a breast with a penis? Should this same ability exist without confusing a vagina with a mouth? Should it be a useful model to our apprehension of the processes of thinking? Does the spermatozoid is a material reality which has a counterpart in psychic reality that can be called a 'thought without a thinker', waiting for a thinker who will think it -- then the ovum is a material reality that has as its psychic reality counterpart the thinker who will think the spermatozoid? In this primeval, inchoate area, one cannot separate matter from energy, psychic from material. I propose to regard as non-separate facts, made separate by effects of rational discourse and splitting processes in the mind: psychic and material, father, mother and the reproduction system. Should be ´the thought´ thus ´created´, a counterpart of sons and daughters? This implies that it is being symbolically, creatively produced, a product of a creative pair. In contrast, we have a mind that disregards truth and reality and hallucinates a ´homo-´ capacity which alone, idealistically or subjectivistically, or in psycho-analytic terms, autistically 'produces' thoughts (naive idealism). The counterpart in 'O' (ultimately unknowable) of what we call ´Nature´, ´reproduction´, the ´creative act´ always involves a creative pair and its 'product'. A new being is born, which is paradoxically new and not new.


SOME LINKS BETWEEN THE 'DIGESTIVE AND REPRODUCTION SYSTEMS MODEL' AND THE THINKING PROCESSES

The digestive system produces nourishment (energy) out from food (matter). In the same sense, Bion proposed to regard the mental apparatus as having an ability to produce 'alpha-elements' that are useful to thought processes and specially to dream-work, either during the night or during the day (Bion, 1962a, b). The latter is a most effective form of knowing. The digestive system produces 'useful' energy and 'useless' faeces -- something that must be put aside (waste), not useful as nourishment in its original form. The digestive system is a highly developed and effective system that ensures an useful splitting between blood (living, perpetual movement, energy, manifestation of life instincts) and faeces (dead, immovable, expression of death instincts). This splitting must occur from the point of view (vertex) of the living body. Social groups also share this point of view: they learned to do this very same splitting when they began to separate the water that could be used to drink from the water that could not be used to this purpose. Anyway, we are not stating that faeces are waste per se, or 'absolute waste'. We are not dealing here with absolute truths, for faeces, once expelled, may collaborate with the life cycle, albeit in a transformed way, in the sense that Freud described the fusion of death and life instincts. Bion's model allows us to compare hallucinations to faeces, and the capacity to hallucinate with some of the functions performed by the mental apparatus in the same sense that the production of faeces is a function of the digestive apparatus. Hence we may consider that the human capacity to hallucinate differs from its products, namely, hallucinations, in the same sense that faeces differ from the human capacity to digest food.
Scientific models and verbal formulations are evolutions in K; they do not evolve to ´O´ by themselves, for they need the thinking individual to do this. ´O´ in unreachable if one stops at the model that strives to convey aspects of it. I suppose that there is a need to maintain in a state of fitness the firm grip to the fact that only for purposes of discursive talk, to the building of scientific models, in order to communicate among ourselves in a given area of knowledge, we 'can' split the production of energy, ATP and glycogen, or some more minute products, still unknown, perhaps occurring at a quantic level, from the production of faeces. This is one of the aspects of human thinking: unable to grasp 'O' in its entirety, the very act of to think splits reality in order to apprehend it. In reality, the production of faeces and the production of glycogen and ATP is simultaneous: a basic real life paradox or antithesis which demands tolerance. In the same sense, material reality is a different form of existence as compared with psychical reality, yet it is in fact inseparable from it in the domain of the unknowable and the unreachable ´O´. Faeces (material) are a different form of existence if compared to ATP, living energy (immaterial) in its more elementary form hitherto know. The validity of the digestive model to the functioning of mind already was perceived by early psycho-analysts, in what concerns to the oral-cannibalistic stage; the love, life instincts manifestations appertaining to the noble art of cooking, hospitality, need no expansion here.
The capacity to hallucinate goes on, hand in hand with the capacity to think, all the time, day and night. Much like a hand or a coin which have two faces and one may reach their ´coin-ness´ or ´hand-ness´ nature observing any one of the faces. The simultaneous observation of the two faces is impossible to the sensuous eye. Therefore thoughts could be compared to ATP; hallucinations, to faeces. Both share the ´digestive´ ethos, the purposive function. Shakespeare makes this very clear in his plays: take for example the murdered king's ghost at Elsinore in Hamlet's opening scene; or the witches in Macbeth´s story: all convey some truths and they are at first pure hallucination, offering a chance to a process of knowing that can lead to in-cursionsex-cursions intoout of truth.
If the pre-conception of a breast does not find a realization, it is doomed to remain pure hallucination. The same outcome will happen to be when if the baby hallucinates it found an exacting matching realization.
Thus the human capacity to hallucinate may be discerned from hallucination, its final product. From the raw material coming from outer milieu through the senses, we simultaneously create thoughts and produce hallucinations. To create is here regarded as linked to a creative couple; to produce is a 'homo-', solitude-ridden act. I propose to regard the capacity to hallucinate as having a relevance to thinking in the same sense that Counterpoints have relevance to musical language. With the due respect to the established musical concept of Counterpoint, one would not be too far off from the mark if one states that Counterpoints are living, movement-dependent facts in music. More than simple accords, which can be accessed in a static, given moment and can be more easily read in the musical score, counterpoints flow longitudinally across the score. For example, in a score to the piano, counterpoints 'make' a living, matching pair with the melodic theme given by ht eright hand. They are 'endowed', so to say, of a 'life of their own' in the 'hands'(or mouth or mind) of a creative pair, namely, a seasoned composer coupled with a seasoned player. The matching pair as an invariance pervades the experience, in the counterpoint itself, in the composer/interpreter, a creative couple flows in the music itself and in the listener; Counterpoint was and always is a novel polyphonic musical experience. The capacity to produce faeces is a counterpoint to the capacity to produce glycogen and ATP, energy to the body; ditto, for the capacity to hallucinate and the capacity to think and to dream. A basic difference between real thoughts and hallucinations is that the latter, like faeces, are purely individual productions which do not require a pair; its 'dead' quality stems from its 'homo-' quality. They are all the same -- faeces. The person can claim ownership and authorship on their faeces as well as on their hallucinations; little children usually do this. Thoughts are a particular form of apprehension and transformation of something that already exists -- thoughts without a thinker claim for a thinker to 'marry' with them. Thoughts, unlike hallucinations, demand a link; in this case, with reality itself. It's both an individual transformation and something that already existed, appertaining to the realm of Platonic forms or 'O'. Authoritarian views, conclusions, are closed, homo-, sterile, solitude-ridden events. Open works, prose and poetry that allow a 'talk', a 'dialogic' text with the reader/onlooker are hetero-, pairing-promoting events.


TALKING AND A CREATIVE COUPLE

The analyst talks something, the patient talks something. In the classical sense, there is attention to what is talked and what is said; this sense may be amended by en epistemological observation that takes into consideration something more than the content of what is talked. One may observe what is happening when the two members of the analytic couple talk each other -- the emotional experience that casts specific links - hte uses and functions of what is being said.
What is happening and links may be the clue to furthering the insertion of the reproduction system model into a broader framework that includes alpha-function and the digestive system model. What the patient talks may be considered as a masculine thrust. Hence, besides the content of what is said, which should be regarded as the psychic counterpart of food (the digestive model) we should observe that there is occurring an active, perhaps potent intruding as well. Further links between 'food' and 'gametes' is that gametes are a kind of food to the continuation of life and both are vital to life; perhaps expressions of life in their own way.
Clinical experience allows for the hypothesis of using the digestive apparatus model and the reproduction system model in a binocular way. The binocular vision according Bion, or 'dual track' posture according Grostetin is another manifestation of an 'internal creative couple', a perennial interplay of the good objects. During an actual session of analysis, the analyst will pay attention either to content or to the function of what is being said, felt and done. Any separation is artificial and leads to an impoverishment of the possibility to profit from the material. This inability may happen during the infancy, and the baby will not use the two models. I am proposing a description of a state of mind where the two basic facts of life -- nourishment and reproduction -- have psychic counterparts which function simultaneously and have expressions in the area of thinking and knowing, including the very earliest method to know something, the basis of introjective and projective identifications. One may try not to separate them and one may also try not hastily to blend them to the point of such an intermingled confusion that form the basis of some unconscious phantasies. For example, the confusion between a penis and a breast. The food to mind is simultaneously the food to life -- sperm -- and the analyst, irrespective of his or her physical sex, may exert at least to some extent his or her feminine qualities in order to be 'drilled' or 'introduced' by what the patient says. To do this, his or her analysis must be extensive enough, up to the point of working through feminine and masculine aspects. I suspect that this is one of the many manifestations of the bisexuality of the human being observed by Freud (Freud, 1905) which must be dealt with must be dealt with during an analytic session. This conscious awareness of it demands to be developed up to a point that a male analyst will not fear excessively his femininity and a female analyst will not fear excessively her masculinity. To be introduced by the patient's talk is to exercise a feminine function; to furnish a view or an interpretation is to exercise masculine potency. An insight is a 'son'. The same happens when a patient is able to talk and hear. Or with anybody in a real talk, even in social intercourse, by the way.
Thoughts without a thinker, reality itself will be allowed to be 'introduced' -- and the thinker will think them, in the same sense the ovum 'thinks' a spermatozoid. In a given moment the patient says something. Intuition -- feminine intuition -- and the ability to care -- perhaps a most synthetic way love manifests itself -- are put into play. The analyst may say something after this true insemination. In order to say this something he or she intuited through the use of his or her femininity, he or she must exert now his or her masculine traits. For to say something that is constitutes an active accomplishment, an action in the environment, and an attempt to introduce into the 'patient´s universe'. This something will by its turn inseminate the patient who is able to minimally use his very same feminine and masculine qualities. What is said finishes there -- words are acoustic movements in the air that cease to exist a few seconds later they were uttered -- they are transient as life itself (Freud, 1918). A new being is born -- the intercourse between the two members of the pair. Perhaps this is one among the factors that determine the impossibility of reproducing an analytic experience in printed form -- it is ´livable´, so to say -- much like a little child which grows and disappears as a little child.
One cannot be too glued to PS if one is bound to cope with reality as it is -- to allow 'inoculation' by reality itself. A very silent patient who confused a penis with a breast 'saw' a special helmet in his head, with a sliding roof, that could be put into function each time the analyst, obviously seated behind him, uttered a word. He felt the analytic intercourse as a homosexual attack and transformed his hallucinated experience into a visual image, the ´anti-analyst helmet´. When the helmet was being 'seen' by this patient, before its putting into words, it was pure hallucination. After telling the image to the analyst, who was inseminated by it, a session was amenable to be dreamt, and hallucination (faeces) turned to be a shared dream -- the verbal formulation: 'anti-analyst helmet', the session itself. The analyst's alpha function digested part of the patient´s hitherto beta element (the visual image of an incomprehensible strange helmet) that made some scattered facts coherent -- homosexual fears, the session of analysis itself, and so on).
This insight was transient - in the way to more developments. It serves to be communicated in a paper, but it was not useful to analysis anymore. In the same way, fathers and mothers, when they had a sibship, may be regarded as a kind of fertilizer in the way to death; the new beings, the infancy and childhood is what matters at all.


THINKING AND COPING WITH REALITY

Thinking encompasses unconscious processes; nothing can be conscious if it was not turned unconscious. This is Dr. Bion's amendment to Freud's theory of unconscious. His now classical examples appear in ´Learning from Experience´ and ´Cogitations´: the learning of walking and the constant conjunctions involved in the learning of words such as Dad. No K-link can evolve without the obtruding of H-link and L-links. (Bion, 1962, 1963)
The inception of thinking occurs in the extent one is able to cope with the No-breast. No-breast is experimented if there is a minimum ability to tolerate the frustration and the pain that things are what they are and not what one wishes they should be. The breast is the prototype of this truth. This is also the prototype of hate toward reality, depending of greed, envy and intolerance of frustration. Moral codes are born here, for one attempts to impose what one feels it must be instead of coping with and dealing with what it is, being the very imposition of feelings thae person makes on himself and on others (or omnipotence of thinking as described by Freud in 'Totem and Taboo') a manifestation of PS) Why the universe should adapt itself to our feelings and demands, asks Bion in 'A Memoir'? In the same sense, years before, he noticed that some patients become 'baffled' when events follow the 'laws of Natural Science' and not the laws of this person's 'mental functioning' (Bion, 1956). What a baby receives may be very far from what he needs, what he wishes or what must be minimally good (´good enough´). Maturity perhaps is the ability to face this truth -- and the truth is: the breast never is what one demands it should be or expects it to be, even if those expectations may prove to be reasonable. Presence of memory and desire hampers thinking since its inception.


SENSE OF TRUTH

Is there a possibility of the development of processes of thinking outside the already known schemata of evasion or modification of reality? I suspect that if there is such an alternative, it is linked to the attaining a sense of truth (Bion, 1962a, p. 119): to stand the paradox that the object that is loved and the object that is hated is the one and same object. To get -- a continuous getting, 'being', spanning during the whole life cycle of an individua-- a real inner object that is matchingly loved and hated, the inner creative pair going on, alive in the mind, furnishes strenghth to the 'intrusion into' the reality, without evasion or simple attempts to adolescent modification of it. Is it a feasible task, in the end run, to evade from an internal object? Is it possible to modify it? Or there is a possibility to know it, with all the pain involved in facing its limitations, in order to be what one in truth is? 'To know one's proper station in life' may be a commonsensical thought that goes farther than its political use. In other words, profitting from another Bion's formulation, 'to be at-one' with one's own object is the basis for its 'at-one-ment' in the PSD sense.
Thinking is furthered when the sense of truth allows one to do not befall on occupying the paranoid-schizoid position wholly and therefore one is able to do not cling tenaciously to judgmental values of "right" or "wrong". {Right or wrong} is the outcome of one who loses the sense of truth. One tries somewhat desperately to replace real thinking for rational or imitative (delusion) rules {Right or wrong} when one cannot perceive that truth and false appertain to the realm of reality and hallucination.
The tolerance of the first paradigmatic paradox furnished by the real object that is at once loved and hated allows for a model to the human being. To have some allowance to be introduced by reality as it is -- by facts as they are. One cannot know its ultimate truth, but one can intuit some truthful aspects of real life, expressions of ´O´. Gradually one is able to build up faith that reality itself exists despite its ultimate unknowability. Therefore one may intuit when it is existing, unknowable as it is. This is the first "thought without a thinker" presented to the new-born, and thereafter a continuous exercise one is called to do. This continuous exercise is expressed by the part of PSD -- or by the 'refiner's fire' metaphor (Bion, 1975, p.46), a kind of 'warfare' from where 'there is no release' as Bion would add later in the same Trilogy. As a Brazilian poet was able to put into words, 'love is eternal while it last through'.


THE ANALYTIC COUPLE AND THE PROCESS OF THINKING

The K-link and the digestive/reproductive model:
As in the container/contained relationship, the nest of all emotional experiences, thinking is an emotional experience whose counterpart in reality is the basic creative couple, the sexual parental couple. The analytic couple provides an opportunity to experience links and emotional experiences. In what concerns to thinking, we may consider the parts to be related: a) the patient with the analyst; b) the patient with him(her) self or internal reality and c) the patient with common sense (external reality), paving the way to his or her commonsensical apprehension of reality. A), b) and c) above can be linked in at least two ways:
Genetically speaking, K-link as described by Bion (Bion, 1962b, 1963) at the intrapsychic level stems from one's daily and nightly dream-work, primitive projective identification and introjective identification as methods of communication with mother and formation of objects, allowing for pre-conceptions (protophantasies in the sense described by Freud) mating with frustrating realizations (Bion, 1962a); in brief, our realistic perceptions of the internal and external reality. The K-link would be achieved at its more developed condition under a symbiotic relationship. There is a real relationship and a real, evolving (life-instinct) inroad into the unknown; a sibship or real thoughts appear.
The parasitic and comensal relationships lead to pseudo-thinking, to transformations in hallucinosis and/or to rational constructs; in philosophical terms, idealism/subjectivism from the former and rationalism/positivism, concrete ´thinking´ from the later. K link cannot install itself in the parasitic and in the comensal relationships, there is a ´homo-' intercourse, or no intercourse at all. The person cannot hear the other person (usually one has no regard to the 'otherness'); the person cannot even hear him(herself). There's an unreal, static, ever-repeating, false, imitative (Philips, 1989) pseudo-relationship, producing psychomas, wasteful and destructive as cancers in the physical realm are.
In analysis, there is no concrete, sensuously acted-out sexual intercourse; in fact, not counting the setting and two concrete persons with their humane needs, limitations and other features (including L and H, murderous and its obverse acts), there is nothing concretely regarded that can even ocur but that must be object of concern. To have concern to presence of another person in the room expresses itself through real talking. If the digestive-reproduction model is valid, we may observe symbiotic, comensal and parasitic links when observe the talk and its functions in a particular case. There occurs 'talking', 'hearing' and 'listening'; also their opposites appertaining to the field of minus K: no-talking disguised as talking as a manifestation and medium of projective identification (Bion, 1956, 1957), not-hearing, not-listening. 'Hearing' is here regarded as a purely sensuous act; to listen may be regarded as encompassing the former as well as words, feelings, emotions and the appearance of the most basic needs -- instinctual needs. The activity of 'listening' and the link is not only with the onlooker, but it also has to do with the person who talks: it is an intrapsychic relationship between the person and him(her)self.
The person who is really up to talk will be able, to some extent, to be intuitively introduced, "femininely" introduced by his or her own needs. Thinking processes either starting from ichoate states as well as being able to entertain second thoughts, cogitations, reflections, regard to truth are inner, mostly unconscious 'talks' of a person with him(her)self. In this level, I propose not to regard thinking processes as either purely material or purely immaterial fact; there is no such a thing except in the realm of our limited possibilities of apprehension of real facts. For example, people are who cannot even know that they must drink some given quantities of liquids; in the end run they produce kidney stones; one cannot say they were able to talk with themselves and think. People are who cannot listen to other forms of this inner voice that indicates that one's needs and possibilities, not only one's desires and idealizations. One may search for one's own abilities, know them, must work, or must look for a mate, or must take care of a sibship. During analysis, an occurrence which is both common as it is overlooked, is that patients utter words but cannot hear what they say. Many times no interpretation is needed at all, but only a helping aid to invite the person to hear what he or she is saying. For example, a person says, ´Oh, I came here because the physician sent me -- he said, you have nothing at all, go and look for a psychiatrist. Among those people, many of them cannot hear that they are pointing to their depression or sense of helplessness on not having themselves at their disposal. In truth, they ´have nothing´, for they cannot count with their true self. What happens, that a person cannot hear what he or she says and thus produces a split between him and himself? A common finding is the idea that pain may be avoided.
Sometimes, in thinking processes which are not ´homo-', thus providing a counterpart of the symbiotic relationship in the area of thought, the person can ´marry' with reality itself. If the person is an artist, he or she can marry with a certain media. The paradigmatic situation of the baby with the breast is a ´hetero-´ relationship. In this case the baby yields to being introduced by nourishment. 'Nourishment' is another area where psychic reality and material reality are married and yet they are not intermingled, preserving their own 'identities', in a paradox that cannot be resolved outside the realm of splitting,m denial and projective identification, as seen in the earlier quoted fallacies of the 'realism'and 'idealism', also reviewed by Bion in Chapter V of 'Learning from Experience'. Nourishment and Thinking, like Music and Life, like a real analysis, are ever renewed, ever-new experience, each time they occurs. To think is life-like experience -- it has no memory and no desire. One may live the moment; may perceive the moment; and try to profit from it after realizing it; in the extent it is possible.


SUMMARY

1. There is a "de-sense-fying" of raw sensuous data that comprises reality. Milk becomes breast, an alpha element whose O is "nourishment", the real counterpart of a concept; In Bion´s terms, alpha-function as a function of thought processes. Alpha-function is a "de-sense-fying" function of the mind, turning sensuous impressions, whatever they are as well as feelings (internal sensuous impressions) into alpha-elements, are useful to think either consciously or unconsciously. Raw sense data must be allowed to be introduced into; the transductive function of alpha-function may be compared to physical transducers such as microphones, which transform acoustic impulses into electrical impulses; the 'electrons' may correspond, specially in their 'valence capability', to Bion Talamo's analogy of alpha-elements as 'Lego' building blocks (Bion Talamo, 1995). Mother's sexual apparatus transform the raw concrete data coming from the spermatozoids into some kind of energy during its symbiotic relationship with the ovum, in the same sense that the digestive apparatus can transform the raw material coming from the external world into energy, ATP.
2. Dream-work is a factor in thinking and in the apprehensions of reality; it allows for the differentiation between psychic reality and sensuosuly apprehensible pseudo-realities.
3. Thinking is considered as a term having some counterparts in reality, a method used to the apprehension of reality when this apprehension goes beyond the use of our sensory apparatus.
4. The prototype of real thinking may be seen through the aid of a twofold model: it is a basic creative situation, namely, it is the psychical counterpart of the parental intercourse, and of the basic intercourse between mouth and breast. Thinking is born when the baby can apprehend what a breast and what nourishment are all about. Its first mo(ve)ment, like an overture, happens to be when the baby can think in the absence of the object, that is, when it experiments the No-breast. The adagio, a second mo(ve)ment, when the baby is able to apprehend breast and nourishment as separate entities which are the one and same entity, without splitting them. In other words, not splitting material reality from psychic reality and not confusing them either. - much like a real marriage where the partners are reunited but are able to preserve their individualities in a paradox that demands tolerance. In this sense, "Thinking" might be regarded as mind's counterpart of an emotional experience of recognizing the supreme creativity of the parental couple as well as the caring and loving attitude and action of the nourishing breast.
5. Either the reproductive system or the digestive system have counterparts in psychic reality and therefore they might be used as models to the processes of thinking and knowing. Knowing may be compared with having a sibship. An artist must match with its media, or to perform a kind of marriage, in order to produce its 'sons' and 'daughters', the work of art, a 'new being' in the world of onlookers who will (or will not) marry with it and so on, so thinking and thought processes, in the way to knowing, must marry with reality itself; new products, that already existed before but nevertheless are new in their forms. Sons and daughters may be born and may die, but ´sons´ and ´daughters´ as such follow on existing as Nature's ever-going processes. 'Thinking' may progress like this too.
6. One is able to accept one's own femininity, being introduced by breast and reality itself as nourishment; one is able to accept one's own masculinity, being able to potently with prodigally to act into this reality in order to perform a 'marriage with reality'. I suspect that this was formerly regarded as 'modification in reality' by Freud and Bion. As a result, Oedipus, the son, is born -- the son is 'A Thought'. It is New and it is also Not-New. It was not created by a hallucinated mind, but by a mind which was able to introduce and to be introduced by a Natural Reality -- 'O'. 'Oedipus' is one of its expressions. Some tools used in this process are to project and to be introjected; the Myths are used as expressions of a racial truth that can be transformed by each individual according his emotional experiences. In this sense Thinking may be regarded as Mind's perennial presentation (to itself) of the parental creative couple and its outcome, the sibship.
7. The analytic couple which is able to think also gives expression to this original creative couple, for the analyst is inseminated by each patient's free associations and back.
8. Thinking allows a marriage of the person with his or her inner reality, instinctual needs and real possibilities and limitations - the person as he or she really is. With the aid of thinking processes one is able to reach some partial knowledge of who he or she is in reality. As Bion puts in the Trilogy, an analysis presents the person to himself; this person is the only being with whom he (or she) will have to live until the end of his (her) life, and perhaps it will be of his (her) interest to know who this person is.
9. Moral judgements and rational constructs, as well as logical deductive and inductive reasoning, are outside the realm of thought, at least in what concerns to psycho-analysis and in any area which interests itself to research into the unknown..
10. To know, to think, to live and to love are inseparable facts, made separate for failures in thinking.
'My grand daughter, aged seven, put into words what so many of us felt after Wilfred's death -- 'I didn't realize I knew Grandpa so well'. His love, wisdom, affectionate humour, sympathetic concern permeated our lives. I believe we shall continue to feel, sometimes with surprise, that we didn't realize we knew him so well' (Francesca Bion, 1981)



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©1997 - Copyright by Paulo Cesar Sandler

The myth of Satan:

an aesthetic view ot Bion´s concept of "transformation in O"

Arnaldo Chuster

The complete version of my paper is metonymic. It opens to many standpoints. But I will try to adjust it for the allowed time of presentation focusing on the specific situation that I had in mind when I wrote it. It is the state of mind described by analysands as a mixture of terror, loss of known identifications, increase in sensitivity ( to pain, pleasure, and responsibility), insecurity about future life, and painful doubts about waist of time in the past, as one finds oneself moving toward what seems most undesirable, uncontrollable, and denied in oneself – something that " urge to exist". This "state of affairs" (sometimes acompanied by some kind of 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"effect is the way to "cure" ( lacking a more adequate term). Bion talked many times about this situation: I am thinking here mainly on Bion’s concept of "Transformation in O" {Transformations (1965), Emotional Turbulence (1977) and Clinical Seminars (1987).
I made a comparison of this state of mind with one of the most tragic and eloquent myths in human history: the myth of Satan, the one embodied in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, relying specifically on some psychoanalytic concepts put forth by W.R. Bion ( In a sense, I was also thinking about the links between Bion,Milton and Satan. I believe that one of this links is man’s struggle for modernity, a standpoint that can be fully reinforced in literature).
Milton described this 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 dreams. That is why the Almighty sees him as a destroyed, fallen angel, the very symbol of hubrys.To dream is to think, to go beyond the métron, beyond oneself, toward the enigma. As in the case of Oedipus, Satan’s curiosity is treated as arrogance ( Bion, 1957), and he is accused of being criminal, 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. He criticized the Establishment.
Having lost Paradise, Satan is constantly falling in a new world, and, as much he falls into an infinite, empty, formless space, as much he falls into himself.
In another analogy with our patients, while Satan is falling he is posessed 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, the 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 surprises and 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 Satan becomes aware of the banality of daybreak, of the 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 also subject of curiosity and again as Oedipus, his curiosity is punished with exile and physical suffering, invoking the elements of mourning and melancholia, subversion and irony, harmony and disharmony, the same elements that one can observe at the analytic process.
In metaphoric 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 also a form a 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.
William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell affirms that the reason why Milton wrote Paradise Lost was the fact that he was both a real poet and "of Devil’s party without knowing it". Observe how the artistic and literary vision illustrated by Blake’s statement sees the process of creation associated with the fall of the knowledge. I think that one can point out here another aesthetic aspect of Bion’s concept of "transformation in O": it is not knowledege that make us change, but the enigma that invade us. The subject of "transformation in O" is what 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 object: rather, he is spoken; not a dreaming subject, but one who is dreamed of. I think this is a way of describing aesthetically the transition from "knowing about one self " to "being oneself" -Bion( 1965, 1970, 1987 )
The condition of this situation is, to Bion, the emotional experience, represented in writing as the triangle K, L, H, ( thirst for knowledge, love, hate). This concept sustains also 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 psychoanalytical poietic self. I have found in Holderlin an analogue for this Self, in a quotation where the poet stresses the infinite vertex of language in "the triple nature of the poietic 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 (determinate infinity) is comunicated to the group ( general infinity ).This definition shows the preconception as the source of all communication of the experience of the unconscious to the social group through the individual.
In short, the psychoanalytical poietic self is one which possesses the analytical function, since its limits is "O"( the void and formless infinite) and it operates with the uninhibited use of imagination freeing intuition to search for new interpretations. Bion(1970,1975) formulated the conditions that must prevail if the analyst is to function as such. He suggests that this is possible by means of furthering and deepening the state of sensorial deprivation, working as free as possible of memory, desire and the need for comprehension.
The definition of the psychoanalytical poietic self may be completed by Wordsworth’s comparison of imagination to the birth of a child who disappears in the adult, but who may be retrieved by contemplation of nature and human society. There is a double movement in this retrieval: the way to maturity is also a return to childhood - this can’t happen without turbulence since the subject is falling in himself.
To reword the statement so as to adapt to my own purposes, I would say that analytical act occurs only within the scope of the double movement of restoration and evolution of the Self ( Bion, 1970), when it becomes possible to create spaces for reflections, 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 (1970) describes as being essentially the envy of good objects that produce growth. This inhibition is always a inhibition of the capacity for imagination, and these objects are those that can be articulated by the language of achievement, paving the way to Transformation in O .
The practice of psychoanalysis is an activity founded on myths. Its discovery comes from Freud’s use of the Oedipus myth. His use 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 people 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. This concept can be well represented by many aspects of Bion’s concept of "transformation in O".But these ideas I haven’t time to present now. It can be readed on the complete version of my paper, where I intended also to discuss the intrinsicaly modern nature of psychoanalysis. Milton’s caractherization of Satan, from a socio-historical vertex is surprising poetic antecipation of modernity, with is caracteristics of critique ( of religion, morals, law, and politics), revolution ( as an instrument for social change but mainly in kantian sense as change of method) and the discovery of double infinity (cosmic and psychical). Through this aesthectic standpoint I was thinking how much the psychoanalytical process allows the analysand to fine-tune to modernity, defined as the incresase in critical and reflexive ability to make responsible choices, increase in autonomy, and adequate working-through of the confrontation between finitude and infinity, by means of lessening the envious inhibition of growth-producing good objects?

©1997 - Copyright by Arnaldo Chuster

[Gravura: "A queda de Lúcifer", de GUSTAVE DORÉ (1866) - ilustração de "O Paraíso perdido" de John Milton]

Poderia arriscar um pouco mais, s.f.f?

Um título como este poderá evocar no leitor um sentimento de alguma inquietação mas na realidade aquilo que lhe proponho considerar é que pondere se não existirá eventualmente, em cada um de nós, uma atitude positivamente activa e saudável perante a vida que deverá implicar, a todo o momento, uma certa forma de risco.
Arriscar connosco e com os outros: na superação de dificuldades, na partilha de bons momentos e no atingir de objectivos. Por muito grandiosos ou insignificantes que eles às vezes possam parecer… Esta postura vibrante de arriscar situa-se no lado oposto daquele risco que será certamente o mais conhecido: o que tem um grande potencial de perigosidade, ameaça e destruição para quem o vive e pratica.
(Não pretendo de forma alguma sugerir que quem sofre de alguma forma de “doença” psicológica será alguém cobarde ou de menor valia enquanto ser humano: isso é uma apreciação moral e não é essa a atitude científica e ética que deverá ser utilizada na tentativa de compreensão das dificuldades de cada um).
Continuando: um processo de crescimento e de aquisição de maturidade, como todos de certa forma sabemos em virtude dos acontecimentos de vida que (des)necessariamente suportamos (ou não…), comporta muitas das vezes uma reflexão acerca dos momentos em que se arriscou ou não se arriscou. É a nossa parte depressiva a pensar nos caminhos, nas escolhas e no viajante (nós mesmos). Pois esta nossa existência é como que uma viagem de uma só pessoa (algo difícil de entender e suportar, como é o caso daquelas pessoas que têm angústias exageradas de separação, o que é dizer, dificuldades em viver autonomamente, por elas próprias).
Em retrospectiva: no percurso individual percorrido reconhece-se que existiram “erros” que se cometeram; arriscou-se onde afinal não se devia. Ou então sente-se não se arriscou. Ás vezes até se sabe onde reside a chave para sermos remediadamente felizes (porque é isso que tentamos desesperadamente todos os minutos), mas muitas vezes existem passos/gestos que ficam por dar e assumir, palavras que ficam por dizer, sorrisos que ficam por esboçar.
No decurso de uma psicoterapia, mais cedo ou mais tarde, cada paciente reconhece que não foi somente a vida que foi malvada ou adversa consigo mas sim que o maior obstáculo consistiu (ou ainda consiste) em resistências que possui, que boicotam o percurso que tenta traçar para si mesmo.
O indivíduo que se procura compreender a si próprio tem que superar, acima de tudo e em primeiro lugar, a sua resistência a essa mesma compreensão. Compreender é então encarar diferentes facetas de si (o lado mais deprimido, mais louco, mais raivoso, mais criativo) que estão separadas, ocultas ou por desenvolver.
Esta será certamente uma forma de deixarmos de ser tão estrangeiros de nós próprios.

João Balrôa

[quadro: "Eu fecho a porta atrás de mim", de FERNAND KHNOPFF (1891)]

Mudar de inimigos

Embora seja consensual que o Homem está à mercê de uma infinidade de acontecimentos acerca dos quais terá pouca ou nenhuma capacidade de controlo ou influência na alteração do curso dos mesmos, ninguém terá certamente, à partida, a sua vida predeterminada. Seja no que diz respeito ao sofrimento ou a uma ausência substancial do mesmo.
Considero mais inspiradora a visão de uma vida que é edificada a todo o momento e onde o seu construtor, através dos seus comportamentos e decisões (até nas mais imperceptíveis e insignificantes), assume o papel de interveniente activo. Mesmo que a tal se recuse: não tomando decisões ou não efectuando escolhas. Recordo-me que num âmbito diferente, o da Filosofia, os existencialistas (veja-se Sartre) sublinharam o facto do ser humano estar condenado a efectuar escolhas. Freud, por seu lado, mostrou-nos que as escolhas, decisões e comportamentos dependiam de motivos que muitas vezes não eram conhecidos pelos seus próprios protagonistas.
Intimamente associada a uma postura activa perante a vida está a responsabilização de cada um pelos seus actos. Responsabilizar-se por resolver os seus problemas “exteriores” mas sobretudo por reconhecer e assumir perante si próprio as suas vitórias e os seus erros. Naturalmente esta reflexão (balanço), consoante a estrutura de personalidade de cada um e auto-estima a ela associada, será possível ou não. Muitas das vezes é mais fácil (na medida em que é menos doloroso) culpar os outros por todo o mal que nos aflige e acontece: culpar o chefe, a esposa, o vizinho, o clube adversário, os políticos, … “Projectamos nos outros as angústias e o desconforto que sentimos”, dizem os técnicos de saúde mental. E com razão.
Evidentemente que se torna necessário para efeitos de sanidade mental, canalizar adequadamente as nossas frustrações e alguma agressividade. Não sendo apologista de um saudosismo excessivo, reconheço que em sociedades mais tradicionais, a tarefa de canalizar a agressividade estaria certamente mais facilitada, clara e ritualizada. Hoje em dia, numa sociedade em constante mudança, com a sua miríade de símbolos e referências, constata-se uma diminuição e desaparecimento de possíveis alvos reais para a nossa inquietude. Os nossos inimigos não desapareceram certamente. Tornaram-se virtuais.

João Balrôa

[quadro: "Rapazinho e crânio", de MAGNUS ENCKELL (1893)]

Solidões interactivas

Quando penso no fenómeno da Internet lembro-me sempre de “solidões interactivas”. Encontrei estas duas palavras no livro de um sociólogo francês perito em Comunicação (Dominique Wolton) e penso que ambas conjugadas sintetizam de forma muito interessante um dos muitos paradigmas da vida moderna, em especial no que concerne às relações humanas: por um lado, nos dias de hoje são notórias as dificuldades que os indivíduos têm em comunicar (do latim communicare «dividir alguma coisa com alguém») e, sobretudo, em estabelecer relações afectivas profundas e duradouras. Por outro lado, nos artefactos tecnológicos existentes actualmente – televisão, computadores, Internet, etc. – materializaram-se as esperanças e ilusões de muitos seres humanos. Esperanças de maior proximidade, interactividade e de solução fácil (?) para os sentimentos de isolamento.
Com o início da Revolução Industrial por volta de 1800, surgiu a ideia de “Progresso” (supostamente concretizado, materializado e parcialmente atingido através dos desenvolvimentos tecnológicos actuais) onde, de forma lactente, encontramos associadas crenças e fantasias de Felicidade. O passar dos tempos veio demonstrar-nos que a chave para a Felicidade (também este um conceito e ideia com relativamente poucos séculos) não residia em determinados aspectos da tecnologia; não negando aliás algum valor acrescido que trouxe para a espécie humana. Mas seguramente não é uma televisão ou frigorífico ou computador que torna as pessoas mais felizes. Confortáveis talvez.
Não resisto a citar Wolton: “O símbolo maior do aumento destas solidões interactivas está na obsessão crescente de muitos em estar permanentemente contactáveis: é o telemóvel, o bip e a Net. È assim que milhões de indivíduos se passeiam, telemóvel na mão, e-mail conectado à rede e o atendedor de chamadas como derradeira esperança! Como se tudo fosse urgente e importante, como se morrêssemos se não estivermos próximos a todo o instante.”
Não pretendo diabolizar a tecnologia. Pretendo apenas sublinhar que existem consequências positivas e negativas da/na sua utilização.
Recentemente surgiu a notícias que num determinado país estão a ser implementadas medidas para evitar que os utilizadores jovens de computadores em locais públicos não estivessem mais de três horas como forma de evitar possíveis dependências. Curiosamente, nestas ocasiões lembro-me sempre daquelas pessoas que referem ter dificuldade em fazer amigos...
Na nossa cintilante sociedade ocidental – do consumo, do espectáculo, da (des)informação e da solidão – a mensagem que transpira por todo o lado é de que a “Mudança” é possível, instantânea e fácil de concretizar. Refiro-me evidentemente à mudança exterior: de aspecto, de estilo de vida, de local. No que se refere à mudança no interior de cada um a questão já é outra. Não foi certamente em vão que um certo senhor insistiu que a grande batalha era o coração dos homens.

João Balrôa

[quadro: "Lamentos de Orfeu", de ALEXANDRE SÉON (1896)]