12th March 2008

Does Mind Have Boundaries in the way that Body does?
WMIP Jungian 1995 Public Lecture. 21.01.95

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 unusually conscious of the way in which his sentences were constructed. They might have been put together like bits of mosaic. The joins between the mosaic bits might have been gaps, blurs, disappearances of themes and half themes. My contact with this mosaic surface was adhesive.

At the same time, I recollected a way of responding to the content of sessions which was the polar opposite of adhesive contact.  I recollected how W.R.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; as though you were at one with a dying or disappearing being.

Later I thought - as I often had thought before - how important and 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 - that emerges from where?

Bion came to his view of how one should work by way of a crisis in confidence. Let me tell you of Bion’s crisis and how it brought about changes in his way of thinking. I shall illustrate this change with a fragment of clinical material, whose meaning changes for him over the years. It concerns an experience of tactile continuity and of discontinuity - a dismaying encounter with the presence of gaps.

Bion 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 an analogous crisis.

The character called Psycho-Analyst says, “I found it difficult to understand Klein’s theory and practice though - perhaps because -I was being analysed by Melanie Klein herself. But after great difficulty I began to feel 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.”

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 re-read Freud’s “admission that the ‘trauma of birth’ might afford a plausible but misleading reason for believing that there was a caesura [ie.gap] between natal and pre-natal. There were other impressive ‘caesuras’ - for example between conscious and unconscious - which might be similarly misleading. Melanie Klein’s interpretation began to have a vaguely but truly illuminating quality. It was as if, literally a well as metaphorically, light began to grow, night was replaced by dawn.”
3. He re-read John Milton’s evocation to light at the beginning to the Third Book to 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” (1979, pp.121-122).

The literary critic William Empson said that Milton’s Paradise Lost put him in 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 am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious” (Empson 1961, p.13).

How is it possible to move from Freud’s biologically centred 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 and Bion invites us to ask: are we faced by a primitive civilisation, or by a primitive catastrophe, or perhaps by both a primitive civilisation and a primitive catastrophe?  The question is sometimes not easy to answer.

I now want to look at the clinical material concerning continuity and gaps and to describe how Bion’s thinking about this material changes as he works through his crisis.
At the Eighteenth International Psycho-Analytic Congress in 1953, Bion gave a paper called Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia. In his paper Bion referred to a patient who said to him. “I pick a tiny piece of skin from my face and feel quite empty.” Later the patient said, “I do not feel able to buy any new clothes and my socks are a mass of holes"(in 1967:28) Whether intentionally or not, the patient made a link between the idea of skin with holes in it and the knitting together of holes that may result in a pair of socks.

At the time the patient made these remarks, Bion was put in mind of one of Freud’s papers, The Unconscious (SE 14 p.198ff.). In The Unconscious Freud writes about a patient who presented similar worries concerning skin holes and other forms of skin disturbance. Freud refers to papers by two of his colleagues, whose patients had been preoccupied by holes in skins and socks.

Donald Meltzer has described this type of thinking as two-dimensional and he has related it to Esther Bick’s paper The Experience of Skin in Early Object Relations (1968), in which Esther Bick observes how certain people experience their skin as a holding system or musculature that sometimes fails, so that they may feel they spill out (Meltzer 1975, p.223ff.) Bion takes us in another direction, away from sensation and body centredness.

In order to describe Bion’s changing conception of the meaning of skin and holes, I shall describe skin and sock holes in two ways: as a surface continuity into which gaps enter and grow in size until eventually they destroy the fabric of continuity; and as gaps, immense gaps, gaps of cosmic size, into which bits of surface arise out of nowhere and spread, until they join up together, destroying any spatial presence of the gap.

Bion comes to the view that certain sensations about gaps are a primitive way of describing idols, gods and - most abstractly - the inconceivable. I think that behind this evolution in thought lies a model that Bion does not articulate, apart from talking about some possible reversal in meaning between the medical and religious viewpoints, as though they were sides of the same coin. I think that the reversable model can be put in this way. The idea of a tactile surface continuity with gaps in it belongs to the medical viewpoint - Bion calls it the medical vertex. The gap into which bits of surfaces arise from nowhere and take over all space belongs to the religious viewpoint - Bion calls it the religious vertex.

When Bion first heard his patient make the (perhaps) inadvertent link between skin holes and sock holes, he was inclined to take up the link - as Freud once had done - from within the medical vertex. Now the medical vertex operates from some notion of continuity, tactile skin continuity,if you like. It is opposed to knowledge derived from the void. It assumes that if there is a gap in knowledge this gap can be filled because somewhere there is a dictionary, call it history possibly, which can fill any gap.

Implicit in this vertex is the belief that everything can be answered. I think this belief to be false. At the same time I do not think that the falsity of the belief annuls the value of the medical vertex. The claims of the medical vertex as a coherent point of view do not depend on it.  In the world of the medical vertex, when idealised, skin and continuity never have breaks, only legalised boundaries.

In the medical vertex skin holes and sock holes are signs, whose meanings lie in some master dictionary. And the master dictionary is to hand - in the form of various types of classification: some being derived from psychiatry, from medical lore itself; others, like the theory of the complexes, being derived from Greek literature or from Greek idealism.

Working within this implicitly omniscient vertex, Bion thought that his patient had made a hypochondriacal or phobic assertion and had given voice to unconscious phantasies concerning the sensation of somebody’s body. He thought to ‘explain’ the patient’s experiences by referring to the psychoanalytic literature as though it were the dictionary.

But then Bion came into contact, or rather failed to make contact, with a patient to whom this approach made no sense. I do not want to go into this case, which Bion describes in his 1957 paper called On Arrogance, except to say that Bion found none of his uses of established theory had any effect in helping him make contact with the patient.

In the meanwhile, the patient had begin to find (in a comparable failure of reference) that his ability to use language in the sessions had lost any meaning. He began to speak in disjointed clauses, then single words, then stopped speaking. Both men were reduced to giving up any pre-established notion of skin as continuity. They just had to put up with each other; they just had to endure silence.

And of course the silence was a version of the skin and sock type of gap. A sophisticated person might have said that the gap represented the discontinuity implicit in the concept of continuity. Or that the gap represented the inconceivable, a truly metaphysical concept. But this is to jump ahead.

You have to wait and put up with considerable discomfort if you wish for the inconceivable to speak to you. In such a context, of waiting for the inconceivable to speak to you, the bodily centred thinking of the medical vertex has no relevance. In his later years Bion believed that the only person he could learn from was his patient, even though the patient might present himself as a void or gap or a text full of blanks. Theories concerning other patients could only get in the way. Bion thought that it was evidence of tiredness in a session if he got a rush of theories to the head. He had to put up with the facts until the pattern emerged.

Bion’s crisis begin to resolve itself when he made a discovery, whose momentous effect I think is still unrealised. Bion began to recognize that certain patients were using projection in their sessions not to intrude or to destroy somebody or something, but as a means of preverbal communication, sometimes of a pain that they could not tolerate; or they were entering into states of hallucinatory modulation between the senses in a way that put Bion in mind of mathematical computation, that is of high cultural achievement.

Bion began to realise that there were many ways of using the mind which are usually labelled psychopathological, which in fact are neutral forms of instrumentation that can be taken over by psychopathology.

To elaborate on Bion’s insight a little: there is an area of creative intuition in all of us which is exceptionally prone to be taken over by the destructive aspects of our nature. It is a truism that human nature tends to hate its own creativity; and this area of intuition is unusually enviable. It operates largely by way of a preverbal series of devices that psychoanalysis has discovered, or rediscovered, in its exploration of psychic destruction. I would mention not only projection and hallucination and fragmentation into little bits, but also two-dimensionality, which is often associated with thinking by way of concrete equation and other proto-identificatory states of linking. It is tempting to see the devices as part of the destructive impulse rather than as the means by which creativity fundamentally operates. The fact that the devices can be misused in no way reflects on the range of their possible uses.

Bion once said that it takes genius to use psychopathology in the service of development.  It probably takes genius to retrieve some of the earliest forms of intuition from the misuses of psychopathology - they often emerge in the gap-like silences of a session - and to see their importance as starting points to the emergence of processes of identification and symbolisation.

Fourteen years after his initial public reading of Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia, Bion republished the paper in 1967, in a collection of his papers called Second Thoughts. His change of outlook was immediately apparent. Adding a commentary to the paper, he asserted that there was ‘no satisfactory psycho-analytic model’ for the experiences of his On Arrogance patient. He felt that his patient’s “...’mental boundary’ had lost an important part of itself through his destructive attack on it. He was now attacked by the ‘hole’ which was part of his mental skin...[a] residual after he had wrought his destruction” (p.142).

Bion appeared to be thinking about psychic talion in terms of the drama and of myth. You attack your skin as though it were the skin to someone’s mind and the damaged object then attacks you. This conception of psychic interaction is familiar to anyone who knows the work of Melanie Klein, or indeed of Bion’s own container theory.

But then Bion made a claim that is quite astonishing and takes his thought out of the medical vertex. He asserts that in order to extend ‘psycho-analytic theory to cover the view of mystics from the Bhagavad Gita to the present’, he wishes to claim that his patient had ‘an attitude to the persecuting holes which ultimately showed features [that] we find in a religious attitude to idols’ (p.145).

Bion does not elaborate on the fascinating conjecture that for some people gaps might be idols. He seems to be saying that some patients respond to gaps or breaks in discontinuity as though they were non human personalities. Perhaps they seek to personify and name a nameless dread; perhaps the idol is like the fiend that Coleridge writes about who walks behind us and whom we dare not turn to see. For such people it is as though the world of tactile continuities and of gaps in continuity had begun to separate,so that tactile continuities are then related to the natural world; while gaps belong to a supernatural world.

It is as though gaps, and the links between gaps, exist in a radical discontinuity from the other. And why not? - at least on the level of sensation. The shock that you feel when your hand, moving along a surface, comes to a break in the surface is not purely a physical shock; it would seem to have metaphysical overtones. It is like falling through a crack between the paving stones and finding yourself in Hades.

Bion continues, “Failure to recognize this [religious] vertex makes a balanced view of the individual or group impossible and lies at the root of the supposition that there is a ‘negative therapeutic reaction’"(p.146).

I understand Bion to mean by this statement that the theory of negative therapeutic reaction, which presumes that a therapist’s failure to handle the content of the session correctly can lead to the patient going mad or killing someone when they have left the session, is a misconception of the fact that a cultural difference exists between patient and therapist and that cultural irritation may underline the patient’s disatisfaction. The patient is inclined to experience the therapist as a missionary who seeks to convert him from his terrified worship of gaps as idols, however sensitive and tactful the work of the therapist might be.

I quote Bion: “There is a field of emotional force in which the individuals seem to lose their boundaries as individuals and become ‘areas’ around and through which emotions play at will’ (p.146). In the same way as the currents of the river flow through the water-harp, making music, so forms of representation move through certain primal elements of the self and give them being. Supporters of the medical vertex would describe the forms of representation as hallucinatory. In popular thought, ‘being touched’ is a term that covers insanity as well as inspiration.

Elsewhere Bion writes “The thinker is of no consequence to the truth, but the truth is logically necessary to the thinker. [The thinker’s] significance depends on whether or not he will entertain the thought, but the thought remains unaltered. In contrast, the lie gains existence by virtue of the epistemologically prior existence of the liar. The only thoughts to which a thinker is absolutely essential are lies” (Bion 1970, p.103).

In terms of Bion’s theory of truth, a mediaeval theologian might have described thoughts as angels who are reluctant to be embodied, but who, when they are embodied, combine the function of being both skin and thoughts. (One comes close to this idea when talking about a radiant mother-infant couple and by extension, when talking about the radiant skin of the mother and baby.) Linking face holes and sock holes evokes a conjunction that belongs to the geometry of disembodied experience; it is not quite of this world. From one point of view, skin is the living integument known to touch - contact as a type of thought related to certainty; from another point of view, it is the emanation of a divine intelligence - contact as a type of thought related to states of not knowing. 

In Paradise Lost John Milton asserts that you can only apprehend psychic reality by first forfeiting sensation, that is bodily knowledge. As a ritual instance of this knowing of the gap, John Milton refers to the need for actual or symbolic blindness as a prerequisite for psychic knowledge. Are blind visionaries of the kind that he desctibes poeple who have returned to the state of knowledge of fetuses in whose optic pits eyes have not yet formed? This is a medical-vertex question that fascinated Bion in his later years.

In Bion’s thought the gap has now become the void, the formless infinite, something that he labels as the nameless ‘O’. He discovers this mode of thinking in the third book of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost - ‘the rising world of waters dark and deep [are] won from the void and formless infinite’ (cf 1965, p.151).

Let me look at the assumption that ‘the rising world of waters dark and deep [are] won from the void and formless infinite’. Someone who lives within the medical vertex and who does not agree that non intrusive projection and hallucination might be metaphysical actions of the mind that seek like Milton’s angels to traverse or fill some conception of cosmos as gap, would describe the wresting of forms out of a void as hallucinatory - and possibly would argue that Bion’s advocacy of symbolic self-blinding as a way to psychic truth is as mutilating as the initiation rites that the Australian aborigines once performed.

But if I suppose that an inner eye can begin to see the invisible when the outer eye is blind, or that an inner ear can hear the meaning in silence when the outer ear loses hearing, then theory of the infinite begins to take on coherence, if not sense. The absence where sensation had formerly been is the gap as idol. The idol gives issue to the world by way of forms that initially are transparent. They then increase in opacity - and become available to the senses.

A helpful way to approach Bion’s later thought is to tie back the John Milton quotation to the two themes taken from Freud: the need to tolerate the facts of a situation until a pattern emerges, and the belief in an implicit integrity between pre-natal and post-natal types of knowledge. In my attempt to tie together these three themes, I come to the phantasy that fetus and infant might in thought be removed from chronology and imagined to be timeless and mythic twin companions, like Castor and Pollux. The twins are joined and yet separated by a contact barrier that carries within it the contrary functions of insulation and conduction. Separated and yet joined to its companion by the contact barrier, the fetus lives within the orbit of the religious vertex, while the infant lives within the orbit of the medical vertex; an idea of selfhood arises out of a fundamental twin-like split in the constituents of being. Catastrophe, sometimes with creative effect, takes place if the contact barrier breaks down and the twins have direct contact.

John Milton’s notion of the infinite is not a Platonic theory. The Platonic abstraction or idea, on which the existence of particulars depends, is determined; it is formally limited in ways that John Milton’s notion of the infinite is not. But Bion’s theory is Platonic in so far as it centres on the idea of a gap. (The Delphic oracle stood over a chasm in order to be inspired.) Arguably, the relationship Plato indicates between ideas and particulars is invalid because logically the gap between ideas and particulars cannot be bridged. But this may be one of the strengths of the relationship as a religious conception. Two dissimilarities - skin and hole - came together in a way that thought within the medical vertex cannot relate convincingly. 

In discovering the contact barrier, Bion allows us to realize that Plato’s gap may (as a form of contact barrier) provide a contrary function of insulation and contact between idea and particular. The contact is of an unusual kind and quite unlike the linkages that mind discovers while working within the medical vertex. In the religious vertex, mind operates by yoking together dissimilarities often in ways that bring out their incongruity. This is like the violent yoking together of heterogeneous ideas in seventeenth-century ‘metaphysical’ poetry.

Milton’s theory yokes together dissimilarities in a manner that is incomprehensible to someone thinking within the medical vertex. If science is concerned with the relationships of similarities, let us say the relationship of grain and bread, which entails a knowledge of subtle and sometimes inaccessible processes related to biology, agriculture and cooking, then religious thought is concerned with radical dissimilarities, like the relationship of an incarnated and murdered god to a piece of bread.  If this is a phantasy that arises when you run your hand along a surface and the surface suddenly come to an end, then it must be said that the phantasy takes us far from the initial experience of contact. The forms that are wrested from ‘the void and the formless infinite’ do not differ from the embodied world of the medical world in terms of degree; they differ in kind.  And there is no dictionary, or corpus of established definitions, by which they can be squared with one another.

Any break in continuity of touch is disturbing enough, as Esther Bick’s theories have shown; but the state of disturbance is heightened by the fact that the discontinuity gives rise to a type of experience that continuity has in no way prepared it for: a primordial experience in which we may know gaps as idols rather than as absences.

Certain counter-transference responses need time; they may come to mind long after a therapeutic relationship has ended; and Bion continued to mull over the experience of the patient who related skin gaps to sock holes. Seven years after the publication of Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia in his book Second Thoughts - exactly twenty years after the first reading of the paper in public - Bion returned to the experience in his Brazilian Lectures, and he gave it an interpretation which owes as much to Milton as to Freud’s posthumous appreciation of Charcot.

He says ‘We might look at a pair of socks and be able to see a mass of holes which have been knitted together. Freud… said that the patient had a phobia which made it impossible for him to wear socks. I suggest that the patient did not have a phobia of socks but could see that what Freud thought were socks were a lot of holes knitted together’ (1973,in 1990 p.21.)

Bion then imagines ‘...a penetrating beam of darkness [which is] a reciprocal of the searchlight.’ (This is a version of John Milton’s act of self-blinding.) He continues, ‘The peculiarity of this penetrating ray is that it could be directed towards the object of our curiosity, and this object would absorb whatever light already existed, leaving the area of examination exhausted of any light that it possessed. The darkness would be so absolute that it would achieve a luminous, absolute vacuum. So that, if any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly. Thus, a faint light would become visible in maximum conditions of darkness...’

‘...Suppose we are watching a game of tennis, looking at it with increasing darkness. We dim the intellectual illumination and light, forgetting imagination or phantasy or any once-conscious activities: first we lose sight of the players, and then we gradually increase the darkness until only the net itself is visible. If we can do this, it is possible to see that the only important thing visible to us is a lot of holes which are collected together in a net.’ (1973, in 1990, pp.20-21.)

Losing contact with the world by way of sight, losing the ability to use eyes as though they were a way of touching or being touched arouses a premonition filled with dread. How can it be related to visionary truth? The premonition may be one of having to meet the psychotic element in ourselves (or others) without the intermediary of the contact barrier; or it may be concerned with acts of mutilation, again either of oneself or of someone other. Or it may be concerned with the act of falling asleep and of losing the world of sense knowledge for the world of dreams.

The couple who play tennis, the primal couple (our internal parents perhaps), disappears; or rather an image disappears, as its underlying meaning comes to the fore, a glowing reticulation, an indication of thought’s concealed syntax that the non psychotic parts of the mind do not see, a primal articulation that spills out of mind into the universe as a cosmology . In awe we release primal articulation into the significance and beauty of the night sky filled with stars.

More immediately the reticulation is the contact barrier - a means of making contact, or of touching, the inconceivable. In Dawn of Oblivion (p.122) Bion writes, “It was as if, literally as well as metaphorically, light began to grow, night was replaced by dawn.” The glowing reticulation is not secure and is liable to be de-stabilised. The world that I know spatially may not be the world as it is, because erroneously I derive phantasies of the world from my senses used as touch.  Bion reminds us that mankind for generations misguidedly believed that Euclidean space was the only type of space to exist. But the fact that sensation is used to realise a certain kind of space does not entail that it is the only type of space that might exist.

Bion refers ‘to the extreme capacity for observation which is natural to some patients. Just as it is natural for me in my gross, macroscopic way classically to see a pair of socks, this kind of patient has a visual capacity which is different, making him able to see what I cannot see...We must be able to see that it is a pair of socks, or a game of tennis, and at the same time be able to turn down the light, turn off the brilliant intuition, and see these holes, including the fact that they are knitted, or netted together...I would like to consider the category ‘psychotic’ and suggest that it is too gross, too macroscopic. If we look at it more closely, in detail, in the way we would have to look at a game of tennis, or a pair of socks, we can see that there may be insane psychotics and sane psychotics. It might be possible to help the insane psychotic to become an efficient psychotic.” He adds: “it depends on a certain flexibility of mind in all of us who concern ourselves with the human mind.”

The theme of reticulation is implicit in the On Arrogance paper. At the time when patient and therapist were most unable to be in touch with each other, Bion recollected the figure of the sphinx in the play of Oedipus. The sphinx is an other-worldly being who destroys stability in the human mind by the riddles it asks. As a persecuted representation of the contact barrier between patient and therapist, the sphinx exists on the interface between them both and shows a different aspect of itself to each of them.  “It is as if the psycho-analyst whom the patient is attacking had a ‘skin’ which floated off him and now occupied some position between the psycho-analyst and the patient” (1967, p.160).
In order to discover how Bion relates the figure of the sphinx to the theme of reticulation, and to see how he was able to evolve this relationship into a more significant order, we have to look to another image, possibly taken from another patient (although it may be the same patient). We have to relate skin, reticulation, sphinx and primal water to a certain conception of clouds as premonitions of thought. Bion invokes the image of ‘clouds of unknowing’ from the writings of a mediaeval mystic.
In his paper Attacks on Linking (1959), Bion describes a patient who intuits a blue haze in the room one day, and on the next day intuits two shapes in the room which he calls ‘probability clouds’. Bion believed that the patient was hallucinating. At this stage in his thought, working within the medical vertex, Bion conceived of hallucination as a means of evacuating mental rubbish; he did not think of the hallucinating as a form of vision; and maybe with this patient at this moment he was right not to do so. Nor did he relate the haze or the two shapes to some apprehension of a gap that might have been idolized.
Later in the same session the patient announced that a piece of iron had fallen to the floor. The patient entered into a series of convulsive movements which led, by way of an interpretation, to sensations in which he believed he was dying.(Was he falling into the void?)
Keeping to the medical vertex, Bion understood the clouds as marking the patient’s attempt to eject a capacity for judgment which he had smashed into pieces; the patient wanted to eject his own smashed-up understanding of the therapist as a persecutor. “His suspicion that the probability clouds were persecutory and hostile led him to doubt the value of guidance they afforded him...such as that a fact was an hallucination or vice versa...or would give rise to...delusions. The probability clouds themselves had some qualities of a primitive breast and were felt to be enigmatic and intimidating” (1967,p.100).

It is clear from a later (1963) book, Elements of Psycho-Analysis, that Bion’s conception of probability clouds then begins to change. He no longer emphasises their functions as representations of damage; he sees them as evidence of insight into the unconscious syntax of the mind. He relates them - by way of Elliott Jaques’s theory that an unconscious reticulation, or schema, forms the capacity to work - to the sphinx in Oedipus, whose meaning in ancient Greek sphinx is ‘tight-binder’. The ancient Greek understanding of riddles as being etymologically similar to woven rush-baskets brings out further the parallel between failures in knowledge and tightening reticulations (Onians,p.369).

At this stage in the evolution of his thought, Bion is concerned to see the clouds as factors in the symbolic transformation that may occur between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, in Melanie Klein’s formulation of the two positions. He writes of the clouds as made up of particles. The particles may come together, as depressive symbolisation begins to take shape, or they may be fragmented and dispersed (1963,p.42).

In Transformations, a book published in 1965, Bion takes further the idea of probability clouds. They are now like an understanding of skin as emanation.

Bion asks whether the ‘tension’ of an idea in a session is able to appear visually as a probability cloud, or whether such a view is a form of thinking by metaphor. I think that the distinction between hallucination and non-sensory intuition no longer has much meaning for him.

“As [the patient] lies on the couch and I sit [beside him], I imagine that a cloud begins to form rather in the way that clouds can sometimes be seen to form above a hot-point on a summer’s day. It seems to be above him. A similar cloud may be visible to him, but he will see it arising from me. These are probability clouds” (1965, p.117).

The clouds are like John Milton’s rising world of waters; they mark the first indications of material forms being wrested out of the infinite. Mind in certain of its intuitions is able to perceive these emanations.
Living within the medical vertex which for much of the time I am happy to do, I think I may set too much stoe on the reassuring tactility of bodies. But the importance I attach to touch and sensation as forms of knowledge and communication in the medical vertex can result in my over-valuing the idea of specificity in configuration - the idea that since I inhabit my body, as a people inhabits a country, I can lay claim to sovereignty over my body. And to some extent this is true. It is important to respect our right not to have our bodies violated. But where this argument falls down is in relation to the perception of truth. You have to violate your body to the extent of submitting to psychic blindness, thinks Milton, in order to see the truth. On this point mind is not bounded in the way that body is. True perception has to rely on faintness of impression and on a spatiality which is fleeting in conception and elusive of definition. Bion suggests that if you turn on the beam of darkness you may see the glow of truth. 

It is relevant to the contact barrier theory that all forms of space-time assertion should be of variables perceived - if such a perception is possible - from the viewpoint of the infinite. I should say that this is not Bion’s container theory, which belongs to the medical vertex, and is another story.

Bibliography
Bick, E (1968) The Experience of skin in early object relations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49. p.484.
Bion,W (1953) Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 35 (1954).  Also in Second Thoughts [see 1967 below].
(1957) On Arrogance. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39 (1958).  Also in Second Thoughts [see 1967 below].
(1959) Attacks on Linking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40 .  Also in Second Thoughts [see 1967 below].
(1963) Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: William Heinemann.
(1965) Transformations. London: William Heinemann.
(1967) Second Thoughts.  London: William Heinemann.
(1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications.
(1973) Brazilian Lectures 1. Rio de Janiero: Imago Editora, reprinted 1990 in Karnac Books.
(1979) A Memoir of the Future, Book Three: The Dawn of Oblivion. Strath Tay: The Clunie Press.
Eliot, T.S. (1921) ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ reprinted in Selected Essays (1953 edition). London: Faber & Faber.
Empson,W. (1961) Milton’s God. London: Chatto & Windus.
Freud S. (1915) Das Unbewusste. (Int Z.Psychoanal.,3) Translated as ‘The Unconscious.’ (S.E.14).
Meltzer, D.et al. (1975) Explorations in Autism. Strath Tay: The Clunie Press.
Onians, R.B. (1951) Origins of European Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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