On Hallucination, Intuition, and the Becoming of “O”

The other day, as I had a first session with a new patient, I became aware of how I was clinging to his speech, as though moving by touch along a surface. I was conscious of the way in which his sentences were constructed. They were put together like bits of mosaic. The joins between the mosaic bits might have been gaps, blurs, disappearances of themes, and half themes. Esther Bick (1968) and Donald Meltzer et al. (1975) have described a type of identification that they have called adhesive. My contact with this mosaic surface was adhesive.

At the same time, I recollected another type of response to a patient. Obviously there are many ways of responding to a patient but these two responses came together. I recollected how WR. Bion had said that it was important to put up with the experience of a session and to observe the facts in a state of not knowing until a pattern began to emerge. This is not clinging to a surface, this is letting yourself go into deep space, the “not knowing” of a session; sometimes, as though you were at one with a dying or dismembered being.

Later I thought — as I often had thought before — how important and how strange Bion’s formulation was. After all, he does not say you observe and observe until you see a pattern, which makes sense in a cause and effect way. He says: put up with something, and observe the thing you put up with, and then with luck and in time, and perhaps as a non sequitur, you may be aware of an emerging pattern. But a pattern that emerges from where?

Bion came to his view of how one should work by way of a crisis in confidence. The crisis brought about changes in his way of thinking. I shall illustrate this change with a fragment of clinical material. Over the years the meaning of this fragment underwent a change in Bion’s mind, or so I infer from the evidence I am going to present. I do not know whether Bion himself was aware of this particular process of transformation.

Bion (1979) describes the crisis in The Dawn of Oblivion, which is the third book in his novel A Memoir of the Future — or rather Bion has a character called “Psycho-Analyst” who describes a crisis that sounds not unlike Bion’s own experiences.
The character called “Psycho-Analyst” says:

I found it difficult to understand Klein’s theory and practice though — perhaps because — I was being analyzed by Melanie Klein herself. But after great difficulty I began to feel that there was truth in the interpretations and that they brought illumination to many experiences, mine and others, which had previously been incomprehensible, discrete and unrelated. Metaphorically, light began to dawn and then, with increasing momentum, all was clear [...]. One of the painful, alarming features of continued experience was the fact that I had certain patients with whom I employed interpretations based on my previous experience with Melanie Klein, and though I felt that I employed them correctly and could not fault myself, none of the good results that I anticipated occurred (1979, pp. 121-122).

The chance reading of three texts had him persist in his work. Let me list these texts quite summarily.

1.  He re-read Freud’s obituary of Charcot, in which Freud stated that he had been impressed by “Charcot’s insistence on continued observation of facts — unexplained facts — until a pattern emerged.”

2.  Elsewhere in Freud, he once more read Freud’s “admission that the ‘trauma of birth’ might afford a plausible but misleading reason for believing that there was a caesura [i.e. gap] between natal and prenatal. There were other impressive ‘caesuras’ - for example between conscious and unconscious - which might be similarly misleading” (p. 122).

3.  He re-read John Milton’s evocation to light at the beginning to the Third Book of Paradise Lost. “I re-read the whole of Paradise Lost in a way which I had not previously done, although I had always been devoted to Milton. This was likewise true of Virgil’s Aeneid” (p. 122).

A quotation from Milton gives the essence of what Bion calls the religious vertex. “The rising world of waters dark and deep [are] won from the void and formless infinite” (cf. 1965, p. 151).
The literary critic William Empson (1961) has written that Milton’s Paradise Lost put him in the mind of the brutal and splendid west African sculpture of Benin. “I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and I am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious” (p. 13).

How is it possible to move from Freud’s conception of mind and thought as arising out of the biological processes of body — as in his famous dictum that the ego is body ego —to the truly barbaric and patriarchal suppositions of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which it is claimed that the material as well as the ideal universe arises out of a void?

We put up with the void or silence out of which the session arises, as though faced by first creation. This might be evidence of a primitive civilization, a primitive catastrophe, or perhaps both.

Bion indicates that in every session there are at least two vertices, or points of view, of a global nature. The two vertices that concern him are the medical and the religious vertices. Both are essential to the creating of the dimension in which psychoanalytic thinking occurs. Transference will founder if the couple in therapy damage or degrade one or other of the vertices. If you can experience the two vertices in the room, you may experience them as creating the imaginative space out of which the thinking of psychoanalysis arises.
Both the vertices operate in the same way: they unfold like a chain. They resemble the ancient world’s view of the cosmos as a great chain of being, as in Arthur Lovejoy’s (1936) description of it.

They start at some certain point and move out to the edge of intuition — what the ancients thought of as the end of the world. In their chaining they are a rudimentary form of rationalism, although it may be more accurate to say that in their structure they are like music.

The medical vertex begins from an idealized conception of the body as a whole entity. (Actually, it begins as a way of coping with the crisis of epidemic.) Body discloses itself as male and female versions of itself. The religious vertex begins from the void; and the void emanates two types of hallucination. One type of hallucination represents being, the other type represents non being. Both vertices carry within them an intersection. Bion thinks of it as the contact barrier. It contains zero function. Zero function is auto destruct: definitions destroy themselves as they form.

In the religious vertex “gaps,” which is what I want now to focus on, have a different meaning from “gaps” in the medical vertex. They can be indications of the becoming of “O,” a mode of internalization that cannot “ be known and only inferred as a variable.