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The International Journal of Psychoanalysis The latest Psychoanalytic Controversy between Rudi Vermote and David Taylor, on the value of 'late Bion' for analytic theory and practice, is now available for discussion. The position papers are available to read at the links below: To submit a contribution to the discussion of these pieces, email ijpa@psychoanalysis.org.uk. Contributions will be posted below. Contributions received so far: From Nicola Abel-Hirsch (received 28/11/11) I would like to thank Rudi Vermote, David Taylor and Rachel Blass for their really excellent pieces. This necessarily brief posting is to raise the question of whether the difficulties discussed in relation to Bion’s later work might actually be a particular instance of a difficulty running throughout his work, rather than the prevailing view that something radically changed - or alternatively went wrong - towards the end of his life. In Freud’s model, knowledge and learning from experience are a more surface phenomenon - the core of the personality being the instincts and the sexual instinct in particular. In Bion’s earlier work he puts knowledge and learning from experience at the core of the personality and thought that the importance of the sexual instinct had been overestimated. When in his later work Bion comes to the view that knowledge is a more surface phenomenon he does not return to Freud and the instincts, but draws on a religious tradition which places even less emphasis on the body, sexuality and instinct than he had himself in his earlier period. A specific example of what I mean can be seen when Bion draws on Freud’s work on the reality principle in his later work Attention and Interpretation, and I think underestimates the significance of the sexual instinct, when he construes pleasure principle functioning as failed reality principle function; rather than a mode of functioning in its own right, as it is in Freud. If there is a link between the radical separation Bion makes between knowledge and sexual instinct in his earlier work; and again in his later work between ‘O’ and ‘sensual reality’, how might this affect the value of ‘late Bion’? My hope would be that awareness of a continuity between his earlier and later work - even if a problematic continuity - could contribute to an evaluation of the coherence of Bion’s work as a whole rather than its being divided in to two parts. I am doing this by focusing attention on the roots of the difficulty in his earlier work, rather than only considering difficulties in relation to ‘late Bion’. From Paulo Duarte Guimarães Filho (received 20/12/11) The introduction of Rachel Blass and the presentations of Rudi Vermote and David Taylor about the “late Bion” are very elucidating. They give us a clear idea of how Bion’s view of the relationship between “being” and “knowing” is an essential aspect of this controversy. Taylor gives us important elements of how Bion developed his ideas in this area and raises objections to some of them, permitting the expansion of our understanding of different aspects of this subject. Another contribution to this expansion could be obtained through a critical reflection about the participation in Bion’s conceptions of philosophical elements from Kant, particularly his notion of the “thing-in-itself”, unknowable. This notion seems to play a fundamental role in Bion’s “O” and his T(O), as well as for the distance between this and his T(K). A critical reflection of Bion’s theory is possible considering another philosophical way of thinking, that of Peirce, which in part was developed because he didn’t accept the notion of the “thing-in-itself”, unknowable, from Kant. Peirce didn’t accept that there is a “being” unknowable and basically separated from “knowing”. This philosopher developed conceptions that differentiated the ways (or categories) in which the “being” occurs and leads to “knowing”, with the participation of a singular system of signs, all this in a way in which “being” and different kinds of “knowing” are strongly interrelated. In the first clinical situation presented by Vermote we have a concrete and live example of how this could work in relation to the “late Bion”. Following principles developed in this phase, the Analyst try to have little interference with the patient so that his “being” goes on, not being disturbed by attempts of “knowing”. In the first session he also considers that the dream expresses something significant from the “being” of the patient, but that could not be object of “knowing” at that moment. Using Peirce’s tools we could ask, when we have the information that the patient lives without having pleasure, in the world like a kind of desert, and that the Analyst would be his last chance, as a kind of oasis, if in this situation it is possible to refer to a “being” of the patient that would be difficult to separate from “knowing”? If the patient lives in a kind of desert and has the Analyst as an oasis, how he comes to this? How to separate this “being-living” from “knowing”? In the same way, is the Analyst in front of a mystery, or is he also having all these elements of “knowing” about the “being” of the patient? Something similar can be said about the dream of the patient. His emotional situation, his life without pleasure and its associated pains (may be the belly full of threatening protrusions) is giving place to the dreaming, to the capacity of figuring something of his feelings to another person (may be the field in which the tulips are blossoming). To phenomena like these we can employ one of the most fruitful of Peirce’s notions to the psychoanalytic area. This notion is important because it refers exactly to how emotional situations have a special way of being represented by signs, because of the similarity between them. This processes represent what Peirce called “firstness”, the sensible qualities of phenomena, being represented by signs called by him icons, characterized by similarity. Regarding these elements, in this clinical situation instead of a mysterious “being” coexisting with a distant “knowing”, we have emotions that are “being” lived, influenced by the participants of the situation and that, in the case of the patient are being iconically figured in his dream, therefore giving rise to a special kind of “knowing”. We could, of course, think about this clinical situation in other ways, similar to those developed above, but without the elements of Peirce’s philosophy. However, the aim of my commentary is not properly the clinical discussion, but to shed light on how Peirce’s philosophy could help to clarify the role that the philosophical notions used by Bion could contribute to some difficulties found in the “late Bion”. Paulo Duarte Guimarães Filho,
Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo
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