13th March 2008

A lecture on the work of Donald Meltzer
The enigmatic object: the relation of understanding to being and becoming.

A question that takes the reader into Donald Meltzer’s book The Apprehension of Beauty is: in what sense is the experience of love at first sight a form of knowledge (p. 35 ff.)? Love at first sight is inexplicable, and so is be hate at first sight, or failures in love and hate; but such events invite the need to attend to them as realisations. ‘A grandmother holds her distressed grandchild, waiting for its mother to return to feed it; thirty years drop from her visage as the bliss of success in calming the child spreads though her being’ (1988 p. 26).

One value in observing that love and hate are forms of knowledge is to realise that knowledge, in being linked to love and hate, is also linked to the unknowable variable that Bion calls O. In extending in two directions that otherwise are unconnected, knowledge as understanding reveals itself to be the imagination. It undergoes a mutative transformation as it moves from one type of link to the other, and its ontological base changes from being lodged in states of being to being lodged in states of becoming.

The hole in a piece of cardboard. Claudia, a brain damaged eight year old child in the third year of therapy, cuts out the shape of a clown in a piece of cardboard. At the end of the session her therapist, Mrs Fortunato, places the clown in Claudia’s folder. Claudia then asks Mrs Fortunato to add to her folder the piece of cardboard out of which the clown shape had been cut. In discussing this material, Donald Meltzer and Mrs Fortunato come to the view that the piece of cardboard with a hole in it is an image that Claudia has of her mother as being with a hole in her. Donald Meltzer thinks that Mrs Fortunato’s decision not to throw away the clown cut-out was crucial to this realisation. ‘She refuses, giving as her reason that the drawing represents the child’s striving for understanding. At that moment, I will contend, a new idea has been transmitted to the child, that the beauty of the individual, child or adult or even a baby, resides not merely in what is outside in its bodily being. There is something more, something that is inside which cannot be directly seen but can only be construed from evidence of its mind’s qualities’ (1988, p.54). Together Claudia, Mrs Fortunato and Donald Meltzer arrive at an imaginative conjecture concerning potentiality by way of an image, the hole in the piece of cardboard, that represents disappointment because of a failure in imagination.

Conceivably Claudia’s mother in pregnancy had some image of her future child. Her first meeting with the damaged child had failed to realise the image. The fact that a hole takes its place, rather than some experience of resonance in loss, suggests that to the child the mother’s expectation had been rigid, a Bickian muscular clenching against a state of hollowness, an idealisation perhaps.

I know from my own experience as a psychotherapist how pleasant it is to believe that an experience of the session will give rise to an image, similar to a potent dream image, that radiates meanings and in whose explication patient and therapist can share. This sometimes happens, but usually it does not. It When the misconception of an imaginative space in which dream thoughts take on a fullness of being does not occur, there is possibly a realisation that the misconception had been a defence against a fear of the unknown.

The idealisation is unimaginative and rigid and when it collapses its place is taken not by some resonant conception of a disjunction but by a condition of hollowness, an equivalent in thought and feeling to a hole in a piece of cardboard. The imagination operates by mutation, fundamental to its transformations is a zero function. The idea of the hole in the piece of cardboard is a damaged and disfunctioning representation of zero function; it is a heart’s death that is unrelated to the processes of mourning; it neither joins nor disjoins anything.

The misconception of imaginative space is an attempt to summon up an objective correlative where it does not exist. But the fact that an objective correlative does not exist is a fact about a dimension in the consulting room that neither patient nor therapist are able to monitor.

T.S. Eliot describes Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as deficient in an objective correlative - whatever transmitter of thought and feeling the play may have is inadequate in giving form to the passions implicit in the writing. In my understanding, an objective correlative is a transition concept that is counterpart to zero function, an alter ego to the void, as Eliot indicates in another context. ‘Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the shadow’ (1925 in 1951a p. 89-90). Again, a tripartite structure.

Eliot claims that ‘Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion that is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear’ (1951b p. 145). He adds ‘The intense feeling, ecstatic and terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something that every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a subject of study for pathologists.’ Conversely, ecstasy and terror are attributed to an object that thought and feeling cannot monitor and that has the power to annihilate thought and feeling.

A state in which thoughts and feelings cannot find an object to satisfy their hunger for self-realisation discovers its counterpart in the existence of an object that thought and feeling cannot monitor and that eradicates thought and feeling if it has contact with them.

The relating of an intuition concerning the existence of a non existent god to a reciprocating intuition concerning the inaccessibility of the god that does exist, for this is what the conflict entails, is informative about the aesthetic dynamics of the imagination. The imagination is a transformer that depends on zero function as a generator.

By day Prospero, as critic, elucidates the formal limitations of the play Hamlet, while by night Caliban cannot escape from enraptured dreams about it. Transformation depends on the existence of a transition concept and a zero function; but it can occur without either of them being defined.

Our only clue as to the disquieting failure to monitor a certain dimension in intimacy is the fact of disjunction. I think the disjunction and its implications is a key to many of the developments that have arisen out of Melanie Klein’s paper, The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. ‘The pain that results from the conflict between love and uncontrollable hatred’ can activate suicide and possibly murder (1935, in Money-Kyrle et al., p. 286).

In a culture of unremitting hatred there is no murder and no suicide. People just ‘disappear’. If a hint of love should enter the culture, then murder and suicide define themselves as existing, with perhaps uncontrollable force, in the consulting room. Here is one of the origins of the theory of catastrophic change. Its modality reflects Bion’s equation between understanding (K) and the passions (L and H). But why should love have so devastating a power? Because the K, L and H conjunction is bound to another conjunction of so different a kind that we can only grasp its meaning by assuming that the K of the first equation and the K of the second equation are related by way of a mutative transformation, a transformation that includes a zero function.

The second equation is between understanding (K) and O, which is an unknowable variable. What may at first sight appear to be evidence of a catastrophe determined by the fact that love sees clearly what hate sees obscurely if at all, may be an intimation to a dimension in meaning that otherwise is not accessible. It is not accessible because the mutative transformation between the two equations is fundamentally ontological.

In post Kleinian thought, understanding (K) is bound to the passions (L and H). It is also bound to O, which is an unknowable variable. In relation to L and H, understanding describes states of being; in relation to O, it is a vehicle for states of becoming.

One function in understanding can be transformed into the other by way of a mutation that I shall call zero function. I do not know whether zero function is an aspect of O or something other. The fact that O and zero functions are variable tells me that they belong to a theory of the imagination. We are not dealing with a hollowness or emptiness but a resonance that is related to an indefinable source; and there is no reason to believe that in this situation preconceptions are stable.

If I practise therapy under the sign of L, H and K, I may say that one of us, or both of us, has brought zero function into the room. Zero function at this point is a sense of disturbance that is possibly indefinable. There is a pressure to give the sense of disturbance a local habitation and a name. The linking of K to L and H binds K to the specific, to actual encounters in space and time.

But then by way of a disjunction K reveals its link to O, and the nature of the descriptions change. Zero function no longer has a local habitation and a name: it no longer exists ‘out there’. The consulting room becomes a psychic maelstrom, and the value that lies in relegating disturbance to points in space and time disappears. The disturbance is a response to zero function, which activates the psychic maelstrom.

States of being encourage the false conviction that preconceptions are stable. A therapist of Kantian inclination will assume that mind has formal rules or preconceptions that can be related to spatio-temporal extension. States of becoming allow for the inference that preconceptions are unpredictable transformers; there is nothing to hold onto.
Becoming is inimical to being. It weakens conviction in the value of aptitude; it sets little store on any claims that the subject makes to have mastered the object, or on spatialist conceptions of mind or on the concept of contiguity.

In Melanie Klein’s theory, the function of K in the PSD transformation is subordinate to the conflict between love and hate; at most, the presence of understanding intensifies the conflict. Bion’s observance that the PSD transformation centres on the entry into mind of truth, and that mind is constitutionally unequipped for truth, brings K as a mutative function to the forefront of attention.

The PSD transformation reveals the possibility that genuine enquiry, the exercise of the epistemophilic instinct, destroys the authority claimed by thought and feeling as to their fundamental role in enquiry. The nature of the journey invalidates the maps, or the postulates of identity, with which the traveller started.
Truth reveals a situation which belongs ‘to a reality that pre-exists the individual who has discovered it’ (Bion 1970, pp. 102-103). The PSD transformation is a paradigm of truth and this is why it communicates a sense of ‘spontaneous bleakness’(ibid.,). It discovered Melanie Klein, and not she it. In Bion’s view, her achievement was to have been able to tolerate the entry into mind of truth, for a while at least.

The entry into mind of truth threatens well-being. Truth destroys the preconceptive foundations to being: it obligates the possibility of the different metaphysic of becoming. Unpredictable preconceptions are reasonably categorised as psychotic misconceptions: but within the transference, conceived of as a transformatory torsion, they are functions in meaning. The PSD transformation reveals truth, goodness and beauty and the other Platonic forms to be unpredictable. Quote and the nature of hate.  and the psychogenesis and the idea of unremitting hate. Bion comes up with the idea that mind is unequipped to receive truth. Meltzer comes up with the idea that a disjunction gives a focus to potentiality and possibly activates its realisation.
Zero function operates in two ways. In relation to the feelings and in relation to the unknowable. Bion’s formula.

Melanie Klein Aristotle thought that the sun was dark to the eyes of the bat; conceivably a bat without sight might intuit an idea of the sun. Conjectures concerning disjunctions of this kind are informative about the nature of the imagination and about the forming of hypotheses. Various mystics - Baruch, St. Dionysus, St John of the Cross - pondered over the nature of Aristotle’s bat and on forms of communication that do not rely on perceptual knowledge. The transition concepts that they proposed have two characteristics: they are paradoxical even nonsensical in content and they effect a transformation that includes a mutation. One of their concepts, the beam of darkness, was later used by W.R. Bion.

Another such concept is the cloud of unknowing. Donald Meltzer turns around the assertion in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode that the soul of the infant comes from afar ‘trailing clouds of glory’ (Wordsworth in Merchant p. 577) and proposes that the clouds do not trail after the infant; they precede the infant as an emanation (Meltzer 1988 p.?). A mother’s capacity to realise the idea of potentiality in her infant depends on the existence of the transit concept of clouds of unknowing. Intimations of the unknowable are largely spaceless and timeless intimations of becoming. They belong to the K and O link rather than to the K, L, H link. Afflicted, moved by an intuition concerning the cloud of unknowing, undergoing a transformation in becoming, a mother is psychically disposed to intuit the new-born as a potentiality. She is able to ‘see’ it. Mind dreams while mind is awake; mind dreams all the time: by being able to travel through turbulence and to dream of the glowing reticulation, a mother is able to ‘see’ the tennis-net.

Imagine this bat who is sightless and yet intuits the idea of the sun. Does the bat invent or discover the sun? Did Freud invent or discover the unconscious? Certain hypotheses, arriving out of nowhere, have the power to turn into landscapes that await exploration.

The sun is essential to human existence and yet the intensity of its heat destroys people and the intensity of its light can blind them. Linking sightlessness to an idea of the sun raises the spectre of catastrophe, with some reason. The sun, so necessary to human existence, is able to blind people as well as kill them. The enigmatic object appears to stem from the theory of catastrophic change but in fact its intimation of catastrophe turns out to be an intimation of a range of meanings that would otherwise not be accessible. An initiate in Platonic ritual is brought out of a dark cave and forced to stare at the sun; but the idea of the sun might be reached by way of a structure in thought that is intrinsic to transference intimacy.
The bat’s intuition of the sun points in another direction; a sightless being may have an idea of the sun not because it has looked into the sun like but because of the existence of the enigmatic object as a structure in transference intimacy.

Intimacy in a session depends on symbols that sometimes generate and contain meaning and sometimes are no more than functions that operate by way of disjunction. The tendency to think of the disjunction diachronically - in terms of the present breast and the absent breast, say, has given way to a tendency to think synchronically in terms of ideas rather than in terms of symbols situated in space and time. The meaning of the enigmatic object is lost if I see it as an object that comes and goes. Its structure is similar to structure in myth and music. Transference setting, in Donald Meltzer’s description of it, is similar to the uses of form in art.

By its presence the symbolic function projects a potent appeal of continuity, absence of seam, unity. It appears to exist as a homeostatic control over catastrophe.
For Donald Meltzer the essential fact about the enigmatic object is that it does not fit together. But why should anyone expect it to fit together? Without the idea of an object that fits together, the pain in intuiting an object that does not fit together would remain dormant. The enigmatic object is a continuity that contains a disjunction. It does not fit together - in the same way as the bat’s abilities and conceptual apparatus do not fit together.

I may want to think about the not fitting together of the enigmatic object as a torment, even as an invitation into sado masochism. Or I may see it as an indicator to a presence in the consulting room that neither patient no therapist would otherwise monitor. The disjunctive nature of the enigmatic object is an essential structure to intimacy.

I might think of the enigmatic object as a tantalising or tormenting object, a fount of sado masochism, if I do not allow for another possibility. ‘It does not fit’ is the one clue that the couple in the consulting room has of an indefinable pressure that might destroy them both and that neither of them is able to monitor.

Not fit together means abandoning claims to be able to fit together the object by possessing it. The conviction that the object should fit is similar to the conviction that mind should have a unity. Idealisations of this kind inhibit understanding of potentiality and how potentiality might be realised.

The imagination depends on the relation of understanding to two types of objects that set up tensions of such a different kind with the understanding that it strains credulity to impose one definition on the understanding. This is the problem. I need to posit a discontinuity within a continuity. There is an object in psychic reality, possibly the principle transference mediator, which one feels should fit together but does not fit together. If I have the delusion that it does fit together, I annihilate the concept of potentiality.

Transition concepts. The description of understanding as entailing a mutative transformation requires the defining of possible hypotheses to correlate incompatible states. Transition concepts provide one such hypothesis. They make no sense; and they invite categorisation as mystical or crazy containers of unresolvable paradoxes.

Let me give two examples. One is a reversal of the other: both of them describe implausible ways of thinking about quantities of light and darkness. First, light as an immeasurable sensation, a transition concept that occurs in a certain Amerindian myth that Claude Lévi-Strauss has written about (1962 in 1964 p. 19).

A god lives in the sea. Presumably so long as he remains a sea god, he is an inspiration to poets. The non existent drowned king in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an instance of such an inspiration. Shakespeare’s king is still alive, but some of the characters think of him as drowned, and their image of him takes on the transformatory significance of imagination itself. The sea-change of eyes into ‘something rich and strange’, which is associated to the sound of a knell rung on a church bell, is a transformation generated by the zero function of the non existent drowned king. Drowned Lycidas has a similar generative function for Milton.

In the Amerindian myth the god steps out of the water: he no longer remains within the environment of the imagination. He yearns to make friends with the terrestrials and he unveils his eyes. But eyes formed in the culture of the sea are incompatible with eyes that exist in the culture of air. The god’s glance kills one of the terrestrials. The terrestrial dies because he has been afflicted by uncontainable sensations of sea-light: he drowns in an immeasurability of light. The god’s companions order him back into the sea. Covered in shame, he returns to the depths.

Donald Meltzer asks: why do some people fall to pieces when they make post-natal contact with their mothers?
Bion has a parable that reverses the motif of immeasurable light. Its transition concept is ‘beam of darkness’ - the implausible idea that darkness can be focused into a beam. (David Mayers informs me that astronomers have in fact described the existence of beams of darkness.) A tennis net exists that is a translation of the L, H, and K link into an environment. The tennis net is figure and ground - the uses of K, of understanding, reveal that love and hate oscillate in perspectival reversal. A beam of darkness obliterates the tennis net and elicits a glowing reticulation that otherwise would not be imperceptible. The figure and ground on this occasion oscillate between K and O.

The transition concept operates like the type of metaphor that Coleridge thought of as imaginative (cf. Richards p. 72ff.). It bridges incompatibles. It leaps across an abyss. Coleridge’s contemporary, Sören Kierkegaard, called it a salto mortale.

The significance of pain depends on the psychic environment from which it derives. The god’s glance that kills the terrestrial human being is lethal because the god has left one environment for another. If the drowned Lycidas were to have written a poem about Milton, it might have turned out to be William Golding’s novel Pincher Martin, in which Pincher, as he drowns, lives out the adage that the moment of dying enacts the entire life. A self incapable of psychic birth projects the extensions of space and time as though they were the spokes of a delusory wheel, whose hub is a void. Milton realised this conception of himself as alter ego to the void in lines from Paradise Lost that Bion liked to quote, concerning the ‘void and formless infinite’ out of which is won the ‘rising world of waters dark and deep’ (1965, p. 151)

Donald Meltzer writes that ‘The tragic element in the aesthetic experience resides, not in the transience, but in the enigmatic quality of the object’ (1988 p. 27).
If Bion’s transition concept occurs between two links that can take the form of two environments, then the enigmatic object practises a reversal in perspective. In place of two environments that are in a dislocated relationship to each other, there is an entity in psychic reality whose inside and outside do not fit together. The not fitting is the state of disjunction that brings together the dynamic of a conceptual transformation that depends on a zero function mutation.

Specific actual circumstances resonate through the enigmatic object, in the form of a life-long conflict, largely unconscious in formation, that can be realised in thought or that can be denied by thought. When the conflict is in part realised, the perennial infant within the self is perplexed by the nature of the intuitions it has about its mother as the psychic presence for whom actual mothers and other caretakers are agents.

The unconscious as philosopher ponders over the observation that objects in the psyche may have insides and outsides that do not fit together. A yearning to understand a failure in fit stirs a K and O type of desire to concede authority to the unknowable. Why is the world of the imagination so different and yet so similar to the plastic bucket that the infant holds? What connection does the infant fail to make if it assumes the existence of an object that is without an outside and is all inside (which is a way of describing three of the four situations that Donald Meltzer has described as the claustra). The perplexity concerning inside and outside is deepened by the prospect that the problem is an evolution out of the problem of the zero function in transformation that lies between the two environments of Bion’s parable.

Romeo and Juliet exchange glances, and a civilisation arises out of Verona’s culture of sado masochism; no one can account for this amazing transformation. Romeo and Juliet are the infant-mother dyad as well as the primal couple. In poetic conjecture, the infant-mother dyad is logically prior to the primal couple; and yet the mystery of the primal couple illuminates the meaning of the infant-mother dyad. Freud’s attempt to redefine psychoanalysis as the study of the basically unknowable primal scene is possibly the first attempt in this particular field to define understanding as a dual function between two types of linkage.

The enigmatic object indicates a hypothesis concerning the nature of L and H and K that draws together a wide range of clinical phenomena, associations in a session that are often stray and in themselves unsuggestive of linkage. The hypothesis brings them together. The object cannot be intuited directly. Its gravitational power as a metaphor draws attention to the link between K and O. Radiance glows through the interstices of interpretation. A glowing reticulation intimates the presence of metaphor. A bridging symbol comes into being between the types of pain represented by the paranoid schizoid position and the depressive position. The disjunction is a reciprocal to a conjunction that is at the core of Donald Meltzer’s optimism.

Intelligence given a spatial conception assumes a panoramic guise. In Meltzer’s discourse the metaphor is personified as two beings who, in meeting each other, know love at first sight. The vulnerability, the tenderness, the dissolving of exoskeleton, is exemplified by the meeting of mother and infant. Yet the visual reference is misleading: it dissociates K, L, H from K and O. A blind mother and infant may know love of this kind. The relationship of intuition to types of sense information is tenuous.

Understanding is mobilised by the recognition of some disjunction in psychic reality; mind in its apprehensions may be unable to integrate two modes of intuiting its mother. As a succession of outward phenomena, as a series of appearances, the mother in her emanations is not compatible with the mother as an inwardness, an ‘undiscovered country’ in which unconscious imaginative conjecture may proliferate. Outwardly she is a beautiful field that inwardly turns out to have been the site of a battle or a death camp.

Starbuck in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick - a novel of great importance to Donald Meltzer - rhapsodises over the golden sea as a ‘loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eyes. Tell me not of they teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways’ (Meltzer 1988, p. viii). But the denial will impress no one: the golden sea and the sharks alternate as possibilities in thought. It is not possible to love the world and to avoid being daunted by its suffering.

Outwardness is sometimes unequivocal, while inwardness is ambiguous. The mother’s presence translates oppositions of this kind into an immediate conflict that may on occasion generate insight. In Donald Meltzer’s view, the enigmatic object contains the schism. If there were no need to contain schism, there would be no need for works of art to exist. Art defines the nature of the conflict by the fact that it contains it.

The central experience of pain [in the aesthetic conflict] resides in uncertainty, tending towards distrust, verging on suspicion. The lover...is rescued by the desire to know rather than to possess the object of desire… [It is] essential to give the object its freedom (1988 p. 27).
An aesthetic object cannot be owned; insight has no claims over the object. An object into which jealous delusion has projected emblems of sado-masochistic alliance is in no way comparable to the object that contains tragic schism.

The relation of K and O. Embodiment is fitful: this is one definition of actuality. Love at first sight occurs, or it fails to occur. Inspiration is of its nature unpredictable. Why so? The fact that the K and O link exists suggests why.

Certain tribes among the Australian aborigines at one time, and possibly even now, were custodians of wrought wooden and stone objects called churingas. The churinga is a distillation and a charisma. It embodies the idea that all space and time is here and now. It contains and transmits the essence of the ancestral dreaming that created the world of nature. It has to be concealed for most of the year, often in secret caves. The fact of its seclusion draws attention to its relation to the unknowable, the link between K and O. On occasion, it is brought out of seclusion, and it then enters space and time and transforms space and time into forms of the sacred.

I came to this thought by way of an insight from a scholar in Byzantine studies, Ernst Kitzinger. In early Byzantium, emperor and icon functioned as intermediaries between the populace and the unknowable. In the sixth century AD a shift occurred: the emphasis moved from the link populace-emperor, spectator-artwork to the link between emperor/work of art and the unknown. It became clear then that the image need not narrate an event or convey a message, nor need the artist make it a primary aim to arouse in the onlooker a particular state of mind, such as awe or reverence, piety or compassion. Instead the artist [was] charged with the task of creating an image timeless and detached, in contact with heaven rather than humanity… Self sufficient vis-à-vis the beholder, the image [had] at the same time to be ‘open’ towards heaven (Kitzinger pp. 149-150).

The populace no longer revered the emperor and the icon for their own sake; emperor and icon were judged for their merit as agents for inspiration, as agents for the unknown. The authority of the emperor, although not of the icon, had been diminished. An outbreak of iconoclasm broke out shortly afterwards.

The seclusion of the churinga, as a way of emphasising an artwork’s relationship to the unknowable, is illuminating of other mysteries: as to why art was concealed in prehistoric caves - consider the beautiful drawings at Lascaux and Altamira - or as to why it was concealed in the burial chambers of the pharaohs, in which the dismembered and preserved body of the pharaoh was in itself a rudimentary conception of an artwork. Both art and death imply the theme of sacrifice: the giving over of the embodiment of selfhood to others. Consider how the word mandala describes a place of sacrifice as well as a type of artwork. Caliban dreams of these losses in possession; he cannot visit them.

In order to articulate the idea of zero function, mind discovers dream symbols that describe a negation of potentiality as well as an idea of potentiality. They may be of the ‘beam of darkness’ kind, or they may be crazy and lethal in effect. In the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States, Melanie Klein observed how a patient on the depressive threshold underwent extreme confusions in sensation - he did not know hot from cold - and his dreams contracted separate identities into ideograms of multiple meaning (urinals that were gas mantels that were washing bowls and cooking utensils). The onset of truth disrupts mental activity at many levels. Habitual forms of dream formation, and habitual modes of sensory perception no longer work with each other. Each appears to be a separate transformation.

A therapist in a state of rigidity, dominated perhaps by the idea of a negation in potentiality, may understand this endeavour as a regression and not as an attempt by someone in a state of ‘being’ to think about the process of ‘becoming’.

Aspects of mind that think in term of concrete equations can make no sense of the becoming of the K and O link. It thinks of zero function as hole, as gap, as a devouring. A mother may concretely conceive of her infant in this way.

A patient, entering an existential turbulence similar to the one that Melanie Klein describes in her 1935 paper, appeared to be confused with such a mother. He complained of an acute pain in his gums and in one of his ears. In order to please the therapist - he thought the therapist needed pleasing - he reluctantly went to see a doctor and made an appointment with a dentist. He was recommended medicine which he did not to take. He thinks that possibly a fragment of a wisdom tooth has lodged in his gum. If the pain were a foetus, he would not see its potentiality. He would not see it as a token of becoming.

He wonders how so small an object can cause so widespread a pain. He recalls the princess who sleeps on a dried pea. Is it possible to measure the distance between the cause of a pain and the site of the pain in terms of the number of mattresses on the bed? This is like asking: should I measure quantities of light in terms of beams of darkness? His understanding is shifting from the K, L, H link to the K and O link, with its loss of any sense of extension, but he has no means to conceptualise the nature of the change. He has no transition concept.
He enters states of depersonalisation; he projects phantasies of being a non person into others, like beams of darkness, as well as feeling that others project similar phantasies into him. He describes or enacts interchangeable transference relationships modelled on the torturer-victim or the client-prostitute link. He loses denominators. He does not know whether he is Saul or Paul, or whether he is being given a love or death potion.

Within the L, H and K link, he is in equation with a mother and infant who dream mutually of a failure in reciprocity: the hole in the piece of cardboard exists as the rigid expression of a disappointment in idealisation. There is an absence of an imaginative space where an actual baby might be.

As someone on the verge of the K and O link, he is impressed by the possibility that issues of being, of identity, are irrelevant. Zero function may be about to take on definition.
The Drowned Man. Indo-European culture has seldom challenged the belief that ‘being’ is an icon whose validity is endorsed by the existence of thoughts and feelings. Bion points to Descartes’s cogito as a celebrated example of this belief (ibid., p.103). I am because I think, feel, have consciousness. The empire of sensations, feelings and thoughts is objective correlative to the fact of being.

Bion’s description of truth and Donald Meltzer’s description of the catastrophe implicit in aesthetic conflict are akin. Bion’s theory isolates catastrophic change from biological naturalism and from culture. Most transference relationships will appear collusive in the light of this apocalyptic theology. Donald Meltzer incorporates the idea of catastrophe into a theory of nurture and attempts to rehabilitate the use of the transference as a process of development.

Exploding into nowhere. Oedipus, as patient or therapist, provides a prototype for therapy practised under the sign of K, H and K. He represents an unwelcome baby, whose existence is denied. As a child in therapy, Oedipus might make some equivalent of a dream image to represent his mother’s difficulty in allowing him an imaginative space in her thoughts. The representation exists in K, L and H. If it should intimate K and O, it will imply the indefinable threat of zero function.

In fact, the Oedipus legend restricts a possible investigation into the disjunctive nature of understanding to the scope of a detective story: it remains within the context of being; it does not extend into states of becoming. Oedipus investigates facts about the past and future. He uncovers evidence of psychotic behaviour ‘out there’. He thinks like a detective.

Investigations into states of becoming are different. Therapy under the K and O sign uncovers nothing and discards everything. It sees the categories of past and future as misconceptions, as a way of splitting the threatening onset of truth. It does not describe psychosis as a dangerous transmission from the ‘past’ or as some ‘future’ portent. The idea of O indicates that all preconceptions in deriving from it are unstable. Someone has to be blamed for the catastrophe. This theme is no more than implicit in the Oedipus legend.

Bion describes a patient - and a figure from classical legend - who represent the Oedipal situation in states of becoming rather than in states of being. In terms of the L, H and K link, the patient that Bion describes is psychotic. In terms of the K and O link, Bion’s double description of his patient’s state of mind is a description of types of temperament that are receptors to inspiration. The patient appeared to be capable of projection, but he had no idea of anywhere, let alone a sense of anywhere existing, in which to impel his projections. He exploded into nowhere. Bion writes that in place of mental space, the patient knew ‘an immensity so great that it cannot be represented even by astronomic space because it cannot be represented at all’ (1970 p. 12). Bion then gives his second description of the patient, which is more of an analogue to the first description than a description in its own right.

The ensuing state can be most easily expressed by using surgical shock as a model: in this the dilation of the capillaries throughout the body so increases the space in which blood can circulate that the patient may bleed to death in his own tissues (ibid.,).

It is conceivable that by contemplating the crazy and yet poetic transition concepts of ‘exploding into nowhere’ and ‘bleeding to death in one’s own tissues’ Bion moved from a consideration of psychosis as a disease to a realisation that the observation of a ‘disease’ generates metaphors that illuminate the relation between inspiration in states of being and inspiration in states of becoming.

Meg Harris Williams’ study of inspiration in Milton and Keats describes poets to whom I would apply Bion’s two transition concepts. The poets are joined and disjoined by their affiliation to the Shakespearean imagination. Consider how the drowned king in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an agent for the Shakespearean imagination. He does not exist as other than a thought in the mind of certain of the characters in the play. Ariel, who can ‘see’ in water as well as in air, is his messenger. If he should leave his watery kingdom and unburdens his drowned state into the poet, he will enter the poet’s mind as a truth that transforms being into becoming, and the poet will ‘explode into nowhere’.

Faced by a Lycidas who has risen from the deep, Milton must know himself as the alter ego of the void, in the same way as Bion has to translate himself into the ghost of Captain Bion in order to speak to the ghosts of his dead war companions (1977 in 1991 p. 422 ff.).

Keats did not bleed to death in his own tissues. He choked on his blood, his lungs turned to rags - no ghostliness in Keats, the drowning was actual. Keats emblemised his condition in terms of a prototype for the enigmatic object, la belle dame sans merci, who is analogous to Freud’s conception of Cordelia as a charismatic mother who imposes the rituals of human sacrifice on her children. A king cannot hope to dismember a kingdom, in lieu of his obligation to dismember himself.

For Keats, as for Donald Meltzer, inspiration is bound to steadfastness. Meg Harris Williams quotes Keats as writing that without knowledge ‘we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep’ (Williams p. 131). Gloucester’s imaginary cliff fall in King Lear is not far from Keats’ range of conjecture. The cliff fall, whose reality exists in Gloucester’s thought alone, indicates the zero factor in transformation. The idea of the cliff fall is no different from the reality of the non existent drowned king in The Tempest, or Melanie Klein’s conception of murder and suicide as phenomena of the depressive threshold.

At times, Keats doubts the benefits of erudition. He asks, ‘Did Milton do more good or harm to the world? (Williams p. 111), From the viewpoint of K, L and H, the watery wastes that arise from the void, the world of ghosts, angels and imaginary twins, are tokens of the arguable fact that the infant in Milton speaks as a revenant. A poet needs the psychic protein provided by a commitment to the actual. Drowning into blood entails drowning into a condition of kinship. Milk and faeces are organic facts, as well as possible symbols.

Knowing and living through embodiment, as though this were the whole case, entails saying ‘so much and no further’ to Bion when he casts doubt on the existence of any relationship between truth and spatio-temporal extension on the grounds that Euclid’s attempt to endorse the authority of a certain conception of space has been demonstrated to be false (1973 in 1990, p. 9).
The last sight the drowning man has of the sun is of a fluctuating network, a glowing reticulation that disappears through deepening water. How many mattresses are there between a pain and the one who knows the pain? How might he measure the intervening quantities in light and darkness?

More than once Bion recalled the incident in Virgil’s Aeneid in which Palinurus drowns. If Oedipus is the genius of the tennis net environment of L, H and K, then Palinurus is the genius of the K and O environment.

Somnus tricks the helmsman Palinurus into a state of disablement. He ‘hurls Palinurus into the sea with such violence that part of the ship is torn away at the same time’ (1973 in 1990 p. 17). Those who survive Palinurus think him of him as incompetent - in the same way as those who pass through the transformatory hiatus between the two functions of K must realise that they exist in a maelstrom of often hostile descriptions from ‘nowhere’. Oedipus takes on the significance of Palinurus when he is seen as a model for becoming.

The L, H, K interpretation of Palinurus’s drowning as a birth myth fails to realise its meaning as a communication about the wrenching turbulence of the K and O transformation. The exchange of phantasies in actual birth is an instance, and no more, of the relationship between being and becoming as a transformation that includes a zero function.

Discussion. In the topography of understanding there is a place ‘in between’, by which truth enters. Donald Meltzer’s describes the topography as occurring within a situation of containment. He posits the existence of a transferential object and indicates a disjunction in it.

In Dream-Life (p. 155), he describes the significance of the infant’s translocation across the gap between the two breasts. The tripartite structure of the two breasts and the gap in between them is a version of the tripartite conception of understanding - the two links with a hiatus in between them. It reflects, too, the tripartite nature of the enigmatic object.
I might imagine identification in the infant to occur as an alternation between three options - the two breasts and the gap in between them. This model is illuminating about the constantly shifting nature of perspective in myth-thinking, which is like moving through an environment of constantly varied layers of light. It is reminiscent also of the pleasure and anxiety that music can arouse in its use of syncopation and counterpoint.

The infant at one of the two breasts, or in between the breasts, might conjecture that it is Moses-Prospero the Egyptian prince feeding at one breast, or Moses-Prospero the Jewish leader who feeds at the other breast, or that it is Joseph-Caliban, who has been thrown into the pit because he has been granted the hazardous gift of dreaming the truth.

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