Bion and Contemporary

Psychoanalysis

This book examines the importance and continued relevance of A

Memoir of the Future in understanding and applying Bion’s work to
contemporary psychoanalysis. Bion continued to innovate through-
out his life, but the Memoir has been largely overlooked.
Focusing on A Memoir of the Future is not only of deep interest in
terms of the author’s biography, or even only in function of a better
understanding of his theoretical concepts, but can also be considered,
for all intents and purposes, the final chapter of an ingenious creative
enterprise. While by some it was thought of as the evidence of Bion’s
presumed senility, this book challenges that perspective, arguing that
it represents the last challenge he issued to the psychoanalytic Estab-
lishment. In each chapter, the contributors explore this notion that
A Memoir forms an essential part of Bion’s theory, and that in it he
establishes a new ‘aesthetic’ psychoanalytic paradigm.
With an international list of distinguished contributors, this is a
key book for any analysts interested in a comprehensive understand-
ing of Bion’s work.

Giuseppe Civitarese, psychiatrist, PhD in psychiatry and relational

sciences, is a training and supervising analyst in the Italian
Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and a member of the American
Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and of the International
Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Previous work includes, The Inti-
mate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field, The Violence
of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis, Truth and the
Unconscious in Psychoanalysis and, with co-author Howard Levine,
The W. R. Bion Tradition Lines of Development – Evolution of Theory
and Practice over the Decades.
Psychoanalytic Field Theory Book Series

The Routledge Psychoanalytic Field Theory Book Series was initi-

ated in 2015 as a new subseries of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book
Series. The series publishes books on subjects relevant to the continu-
ing development of psychoanalytic field theory. The emphasis of this
series is on contemporary work that includes a vision of the future for
psychoanalytic field theory.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, forms of psychoanalytic
field theory emerged in different geographic parts of the world with
different objectives, heuristic principles, and clinical techniques.
Taken together they form a family of psychoanalytic perspectives that
employs a concept of a bi-personal psychoanalytic field. The Psycho-
analytic Field Theory Book Series seeks to represent this pluralism in
its publications. Books on field theory in all its diverse forms are of
interest in this series. Both theoretical works and discussions of clini-
cal technique will be published in this series.
The series editors are especially interested in selecting manu-
scripts which actively promote the understanding and further ex-
pansion of psychoanalytic field theory. Part of the mission of the
series is to foster communication amongst psychoanalysts work-
ing in different models, in different languages, and in different
parts of the world. A full list of titles in this series is available at:
https://www.routledge.com/Psychoanalytic-Field-Theory-Book-­
Series/book-series/FIELDTHEORY
Bion and Contemporary
Psychoanalysis

Reading A Memoir of the Future

Edited by
Giuseppe Civitarese
First published 2018
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Giuseppe Civitarese;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the
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British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data
Names: Civitarese, Giuseppe, 1958 – editor.
Title: Bion and contemporary psychoanalysis: reading A memoir
of the future / edited by Giuseppe Civitarese.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. |
Series: Psychoanalytic field theory book series | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017003252 | ISBN 9781138038844 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138038851 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Bion, Wilfred R . (Wilfred Ruprecht), 1897–1979. |
Bion, Wilfred R . (Wilfred Ruprecht), 1897–1979. Memoir of the
future. | Psychoanalysis.
Classification: LCC BF173 .B49185 2018 |
DDC 150.19/5092— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003252

ISBN: 978 -1-138 - 03884 - 4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978 -1-138 - 03885-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 -1-315-17708 -3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents

List of contributors vii

Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1
GI USE PPE C I V I TA R E SE

1 Why Bion? Why now? Novel forms and the mystical quest 9
L issa W ei nstei n

2 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland: reading and

literature in A Memoir of the Future 36
Sara B offito

3 Bion and the apes: the bridging problem

of A Memoir of the Future 49
Be nja m i n H . O gde n

4 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous 65

Mauro Ma n ica

5 A Memoir of the Future and the defence

against knowledge 79
A n ton i no F erro

6 Bion’s razor: reading A Memoir of the Future 85

Giova n n i Foresti
vi Contents

7 Memories of the future, realisations in the present.

The oneiric destiny of pre-conceptions that turn up in
the minds of dreamers 101
V iolet Pietra n ton io

8 The ineffable 120

Av n er Bergstei n

9 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’: trauma, history and

paronomasia as ‘a flower of speech’ in A Memoir of
the Future 147
C lara Mucci

10 The ‘Memoir’ experienced from the standpoint of

contemporary art: a chronicle of a death foretold 168
A dela A bella

11 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 179

Du nca n Cartwright

References 203
Index 215
Contributors

Adela Abella is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst working with chil-

dren, adolescents and adults. Training analyst of the Swiss Psy-
choanalytical Association (SSPsa/SGPsa). She is past-president of
the Centre de Psychanalyse de la Suisse Romande. Member of the
board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Amongst her
publications: papers on the interface between psychoanalysis and
art, interdisciplinary and theory of technique, and books such as
La construction en psychanalyse. Récupérer le passe ou le réinventer?
(with J. Manzano, 2011), Précis de technique psychanalytique, (with
J. Manzano and F. Palacio Espasa, 2016), and Conviction, séduc-
tion, suggestion (in press).
Avner Bergstein is a faculty member and training and supervising psy-
choanalyst with the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. He is in private
practice with adults, adolescents and children, and has worked for
some years at a kindergarten for children with autism. He is the
author of several papers elaborating on the clinical implications
of the writings of Bion and Meltzer. He has also translated and
co-­edited the Hebrew translations of a number of psychoanalytic
books, including works by Bion, Tustin and Ogden.
Sara Boffito is a psychologist and a candidate at the Italian Psychoan-
alytical Society (SPI), works in private practice with children, ad-
olescents and adults in Milano. Her theoretical interests touch the
relationship between adult and children psychoanalysis and Con-
temporary Art, Cinema and Literature. She published many works
in Italian and international journals and collected books. Among
viii Contributors

them are papers on aesthetics and contemporary art co-authored

with Giuseppe Civitarese (Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic
Conflict, and Psychoanalytic Criticism, 2015) and on Nina Coltart’s
contribution to psychoanalysis published in American Imago and in
the book Her Hour Come Round at Last. A garland for Nina Coltart
(2011). She collaborates with the Rivista di Psicoanalisi and trans-
lates into Italian several Anglo-Saxon psychoanalytic authors.
Duncan Cartwright, PhD, is head of the Centre for Applied Psychology,
Psychology, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.
He serves on the editorial board of Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy
in South Africa and is a member of SAPC. He is the author of
Murdering Minds: Psychoanalysis, Violence and Rage-Type Murder
(2002), and Containing States of Mind: Exploring Bion’s Container
Model in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2010).
Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD, is a training and supervising an-
alyst and member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), of
the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and of the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He lives, and is in
private practice, in Pavia, Italy. He is the past-editor of the Riv-
ista di Psicoanalisi, the official journal of the Italian Psychoana-
lytic Society. He has published several books, which include The
Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (2010),
The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanaly-
sis (2012), The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of
Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (2014), Losing Your Head: Abjec-
tion, Aesthetic Conflict and Psychoanalytic Criticism (2015), The
Analytic Field and Its Transformations (with A. Ferro, 2015), and
Truth and the Unconscious (2016). He has also co-edited L’ipoco-
ndria e il dubbio: L’approccio psicoanalitico [Hypochondria and
doubt: the psychoanalytic approach] (2011), Le parole e i sogni [The
words and the dreams] (2015), The W. R. Bion Tradition: Lines of
Development—Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades
(2015), and Advances in Psychoanalytic Field Theory: International
Field Theory Association Round Table Discussion [with M. Katz
and R. Cassorla)] (2016).
Giovanni Foresti, MD, PhD, lives in Pavia, Italy. He is a training and
­supervising analyst of the SPI (Italian Psychoanalytic Society),
 Contributors ix

works in private practice as psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and or-

ganizational consultant, and teaches at the State University of
Milan (School of Psychiatry), at the Milan Catholic University
(Psychology of Organizations and Marketing) and at the SPI Na-
tional Institute for Training. He is member of OPUS, London, and
the Scientific Committee of IL NODO group, Turin. Co-chair for
Europe of the Committee ‘Psychoanalysis and the Mental Health
Field’, he is now in the IPA Board as European Representative. His
interests are focused on clinical issues, institutional functioning
and group dynamics.
Mauro Manica is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and is a full
­member of the SPI (Italian Psychoanalytic Society) and the IPA
(International Psychoanalytic Association). He published several
books: Guardare nell'ombra. Saggi di psichiatria psicoanalitica
(1999), Psicoanalisi in situazioni estreme (2004), Il suicidio. Amore
tragico, tragedia d’amore (with E. Borgna and A. Pagnoni, 2006),
La musica della psicoanalisi (Rome 2007), Fare psicoanalisi, viv-
ere la clinica, sognare la teoria (2010), Ogni angelo è tremendo. Es-
plorazioni ai confini delle teoria e della clinica psicoanalitica (2013),
Intercettare il sogno. Sviluppi traumatici e progressione onirica nel
discorso psicoanalitico (2014), and L’arte di guarire. Breviario di psi-
coanalisi contemporanea (2016).
Antonino Ferro is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, past-president of the
Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) and member of the American
Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and the International Psycho-
analtytic Association (IPA). He supervises and gives lectures inter-
nationally. His publications include Psychoanalysis and Storytelling
(London 2006), Mind Works (London 2009), Avoiding Emotions,
and Living Emotions (2011), and Torments of the Soul (2014). In
2007, he received the Mary Sigourney Award.
Clara Mucci is a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist
practicing in Milan and Pescara, Italy. She is Professor of Clinical
Psychology at the University of Chieti, where she has been until
recently Full Professor of English Literature and Shakespearean
Drama. She received a PhD in Literature and Psychoanalysis from
Emory University, Atlanta, USA, and was a Fellow, in 2005–2006,
at the Personality Disorder Institute directed by Otto Kernberg, in
x Contributors

New York. She is the author of several monographs on Women's

Literature, Shakespearean drama and literary theory; more
recently she has published on trauma and its intergenerational
transmission: Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma. Intergener-
ational Transmission, Psychoanalytic Treatment and the Dynamics
of Forgiveness (2013).
Benjamin H. Ogden is Assistant Professor of literature and humanities
at Stevens Institute of Technology. He is co-author, with Thomas
H. Ogden, of The Analyst’s Ear and the Critic’s Eye: Rethinking
Psychoanalysis and Literature (2013). He is completing his second
book on the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature, entitled
Where We Most of the Time Are: Writing and Thinking between
Disciplines.
Violet Pietrantonio is a psychologist, specialized in Clinical Psychol-
ogy; psychoanalyst; and member of the Italian Psychoanalytical
Society (SPI) and of the International Psychoanalytic Association
(IPA). She lives and works in Bologna, Italy. She is particularly
interested in clinical and theoretical developments of the oneiric
model of the mind as proposed by Bionian Field Theory. Among
her publications are as follows: ‘At the Origin of Psychic Life: In
a Grain of Sand the First α Wailings of a Newborn Dreamer’,
Ital. Psychoanal. Annu., 9:25–49; ‘Borderline’ (pp. 131–159) and
‘Gelosia: la perfidia di una sorella dimenticata’ (pp. 283–303),
both in A Ferro, ed., La clinica psicoanalitica oggi, Rome, 2016.
Lissa Weinstein is a professor in the Doctoral Program in Clinical
Psychology at the City College of New York and the Graduate
Center, a faculty member of the New York Psychoanalytic Insti-
tute, and a fiction writer. Her interests include the interrelationship
of neurobiology and psychoanalysis, the function of repetition, as
well as film and literature studies. She won the Heinz Hartmann
Jr. Award winner with Dr. Arnold Wilson for their papers on
the work of Lev Vygotsky and psychoanalysis and was given the
Margaret Marek award from the International Dyslexia Associ-
ation for Reading David: A Mother and Son’s Journey through the
Labyrinth of Dyslexia (2003). Recent publications include The
Neurobiology of Personality Disorders: Implications for Psychoa-
nalysis and Personality Disorders, Attachment and Psychodynamic
 Contributors xi

Psychotherapy, both with Larry Siever, Physiological and Devel-

opmental Contributions to the Feeling of Reality, and Towards a
Clinical Integration of Theoretical Perspectives with Steven Ellman,
PhD, and Between Forgetting and Remembering: Two Films of Alain
Resnais.
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 is based on ‘Why Bion? Why Now? Novel Forms and the
Mystical Quest’, by L. Weinstein, Reprinted by permission of Rivista
Psicoanal., 61: 93–118, 2015.
Chapter 2 is based on “‘Psychoanalysis, I Believe” in Wonderland.
Reading and Literature in A Memoir of the Future’, by S. Boffito,
http://www.funzionegamma.it/psychoanalysis-believe-­wonderland-
reading-literature-memoir-future/
Chapter 4 is based on ‘A Memoir of the Future and Memoir of the
Numinous’, by M. Manica, http://www.funzionegamma.it/memoir-
future-memoir-numinous/. This chapter was translated from Italian
by Andrew Ellis.
Chapter 5 is based on ‘A Memoir of the Future and the Defence
against Knowledge’, by A. Ferro, http://www.funzionegamma.it/
memoir-future-defence-knowledge/
Chapter 6 is based on ‘Wilfred’s Razor: A Reading of W.R. Bion’s
A Memoir of the Future’, by G. Foresti, http://www.funzionegamma.
it/wilfreds-razor-reading-w-r-bions-memoir-future/. This chapter was
translated from Italian by William Cooke.
I thank Claudio Neri for having inspired this book.
Introduction
Giuseppe Civitarese

There is a growing interest in Wilfred R. Bion, as demonstrated by

the increasing number of papers in the best psychoanalytic journals,
meetings and books about his thinking, but there is not much on
A Memoir of the Future.1 So, the idea of a book on this topic is to fill a
void in the area of Bion’s studies. MF is exceptionally interesting be-
cause, while by some it was thought to be evidence of Bion’s presumed
senility, on the contrary it represents the last challenge he issued to
the psychoanalytic Establishment. The three books that make up MF
are admittedly the recounting of a long uninterrupted dream in which
Bion deals with very important theoretical matters in a narrative way,
showing once again how he was establishing a new paradigm in psy-
choanalysis, which can be named ‘aesthetic’.
Focusing on MF means the undertaking of a theoretical activity. MF
is not only of deep interest in terms of the author’s biography, or even
only in function of a better understanding of his theoretical concepts,
but rather can be considered, for all intents and purposes, the final
chapter of an ingenious creative enterprise – not a mere summary or
appendix, but a whole new chapter. In MF, Bion once again shows his
diabolical ability to disorient his readers, forcing them to wrack their
brains and thus to think with their own minds. ‘Diabolical’ because,
in this tenaciousness there is something infernal, a quality that psy-
choanalysis must always possess, and also something provocative –
but what Bion aims to generate is courage.
We must always remember this key aspect in his thinking – a think-
ing that is never static – all the more so now that it has finally started
to be embraced (and even normalised). There is always the risk of
2 Giuseppe Civitarese

making it into a sterile collection of formulas, with the resulting loss

of its pervasive deconstructive impetus. Thus, what MF highlights is
the notion of the dream as a narrative activity. We are called upon to
dream with him in a swirling vortex of images, stories, characters and
quotations. It is the mind at work, the space of dream, peopled with
presences, at once shadowy and hyper-luminous.
Both conceptual thinking and imagination protect the individual
from the terror provoked by the immense forces of nature. As in any
Romanticist painting inspired on the sublime, while never ceasing
completely to cause some anguish, these forces are now at a safe dis-
tance. The subject can contemplate them without being overwhelmed
by fright.
Nevertheless, if we judge the text according to the categories of
fictional narrative, we could not consider it successful. The echoes
of Beckett, in some places inspiring, are not enough. On the other
hand, if we read it as analysts, i.e., as persons with a passion for the
field of science invented by Freud (analysis, Ogden (2005b) writes,
is a form of human relating that did not previously exist, something
both simple and enormous), these pages become an infinite fount
of precious suggestions. The field of psychoanalysis feeds deeply on
writings, but it is also the empirical field of encounter and of a caring
practice, and cannot do without this duality. If we stop and think
about it, the purely narrative works of even famous analysts almost
always bore and disappoint us because they are not nurtured directly
on the analysts’ lifeblood, their experience or efforts to frame that ex-
perience in theory – that lifeblood that, on the other hand, circulates
abundantly in MF.
In the first chapter, ‘Why Bion? Why now? Novel forms and the
mystical quest’, Lissa Weinstein writes that Bion’s elegant, complex
and ‘bottomless’ memoir perfectly melds form with function, using
the form of a postmodern novel to offer the reader a living experience
of the function of reverie and the need to tolerate not knowing during
the meandering, often confusing path of an in-depth psychoanalytic
exploration. The paper offers a more personal and affective reaction
to the material than is usually presented in a scholarly work, attempt-
ing not so much to explicate the text as to respond to it through link-
ing several seemingly disparate literatures – Bahktin’s work on novel
 Introduction 3

structure, postmodern literature, and mysticism. Weinstein argues

that Bion’s choice of a novel format and the use of a radical, ‘precisely
obscure’ language are necessitated by his concept of O, which differs
significantly from the Freudian unconscious. It is only through a mul-
ti-voiced context that the ‘real’ of the affective contents of O and their
ultimately mystical nature can be approached.
Instead of calling his trilogy MF, writes Sara Boffito in her
‘“Psychoanalysis, I believe” in Wonderland. Reading and literature
in A Memoir of the Future’, Bion has chosen to call it A Memoir. The
word used for the Italian translation, memoria, is more ambiguous
and omits the distinction. In English, the title alerts the reader as to
what is to come – a memoir – that is, an account of personal recollec-
tions. If we investigate what exactly a memoir is as a literary genre,
the paradox merely gets deeper. For instance, G. Thomas Couser has
devoted several publications to defining the genre, starting with his
Memoir: An Introduction (2011), in which he expounds on the differ-
ences between novel and autobiography, identifying one of the dis-
tinctive traits of the memoir as a ‘commitment to the real’, and adds
that such a genre indicates the fundamental human activity of narrat-
ing our life story on its own terms.
Just what constitutes reality and truth, and what might right be
considered ‘facts’, is one of the chief arguments underpinning the dia-
logues between the characters of the Memoir and involving the reader
so deeply. It may seem paradoxical, but the author reckons we can
surmise that Bion wrote these books for reasons akin to this ‘com-
mitment to the real’, even if the reality to which he felt committed is
neither historical nor material but psychic, emotional truth, and the
‘facts’ and ‘actual events’ under discussion are far more complex than
those that may be observed with one’s eyes. From this starting point
in this paper, Boffito explores further Bion’s relationship with narra-
tion and literature.
Literature is also the perspective chosen to approach MF by
Benjamin Ogden (in ‘Bion and the apes: the bridging problem of A
Memoir of the Future’). A Memoir of the Future is difficult on its read-
ers. It asks them not only to figure out what the book means, but also
how it can be fairly evaluated. On what criteria is it appropriate to
judge the merits and failures of A Memoir of the Future? How does
4 Giuseppe Civitarese

one read, or write critically about, a work that was plainly written to
frustrate attempts at making sense of it? The goal of this paper is to
establish criteria for evaluating Bion’s least understood work. It does
this by demonstrating that Bion’s theory of thinking is in many ways
similar to the theory of thinking developed by Wolfgang Köhler while
studying the behaviour of apes on the island of Tenerife, described
in his monograph The Mentality of Apes. In Elizabeth Costello, the
novelist J.M. Coetzee discusses Köhler’s experiments and in doing so
proposes some ways of evaluating not only Köhler’s work, but also
A Memoir of the Future. Much as Köhler tried to cross the bridge
from psychology into the ‘poetics’ of thinking, Bion tried to cross the
bridge from psychoanalytic epistemology into literary aesthetics. This
paper considers these crossings, drawing from Coetzee’s insights.
In his ‘Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous’, Mauro
Manica starts with the comparison between Jung’s Red Book and Bion’s
MF trilogy. He suggests the hypothesis that similarly to what happens
for the individual personality – where the eruption of underground
experiences confronts us with the emergency of parts of the mind that
have not fully come into being or have been precociously miscarried,
as they have not found any space within the mind of the object – there
seem to be models and theories that did not find enough space in
Freud’s mind or in that of the scientific community he created and
thus sank into the underground galleries and dungeons of psychoan-
alytic conceptualisation. In Jung’s reflection, the contexts that antici-
pated the most current developments of post-­Freudian psychoanalysis
seem to have been split or dissociated and stored there – that is to
say, he offered a further perspective on the unconscious that was not
only formed as a depository of repressed childhood memories, but
could also overlook the infinite (Matte Blanco, 1975), as it is driven by
the truth instinct (Bion, 1977a), an impulse to representation (Bollas,
2009) and the knowledge instinct (Odgen, 2011).
We would have plausible reasons to think that Jung’s unknown has
been absorbed, in Bion’s reflection, in the empty concept of O and in
its numinous definition: fascinating (as it refers to fascinosum) and
dreadful (as it concerns the tremendum). However, in Bion’s version,
the concept of O, the unknown, seems to have expanded and allowed
for an evolution of the model of the mind to which we can refer. In ex-
tending and overcoming Freud’s and Jung’s conceptions, Bion seems
 Introduction 5

to have succeeded in conceiving a mind that overlooks the repressed

and the numinous but is forced to be confronted, since its origin, with
the nothingness of O, its lack of meaning.
In his paper ‘Memoir of the Future and the defence against knowl-
edge’, Ferro seeks to show how psychoanalytic work allows the
continuous opening of different possible worlds and the threat of
dogmatism.
For his part, Foresti claims that MF is a text that through aesthetic
and narrative means develops the reform that conceptually had al-
ready been introduced in Experience in Groups and in Learning from
Experience. The epistemological continuity between the Bionian texts
is seen as a realisation of the theoretical precautions and the method-
ological preoccupations that have been peculiar of nominalism and
British empiricism: the avoidance of speculative excesses and the on-
tological distance between objects and concepts.
In a very creative contribution, ‘Memories of the future, realisa-
tions in the present. The oneiric destiny of pre-conceptions that turn
up in the minds of dreamers’, Violet Pietrantonio not only tells us
about MF, but also shows what it means to take Bion seriously. In the
après-coup of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, MF could reveal itself
as a sort of Guernica, an avant-garde manifesto that calls Psychoanal-
ysis to new tasks; it would incarnate new languages necessary to give
psychic figurability to what remains still unnamed in psychoanalytic
common sense. The author tries to show how this phantasmagorical
work can serve as a sort of reference book of a future psychoanaly-
sis, in which it is possible to trace, in the form of intuitions and pre-
conceptions, the seeds of many elements that make up contemporary
theories. In the brood of newness that swarms between chapters and
lines of this futuristic mythopoetic text, it is possible to breathe and
experience the analytic method O → K, to glimpse blossoms of those
oneiric properties of narrative function developed in all the work of
Antonino Ferro, to detect innovative analytic concepts that help an-
alysts to become receptive to the psychic facts that emanate from the
so-called inaccessible unconscious.
According to Avner Bergstein (‘The ineffable’), Bion often ad-
dresses the paradoxical nature of the relationship between language
and truth whereby linguistic expression is the path by which truth
can be glimpsed, while at the same time hiding and distorting it. In
6 Giuseppe Civitarese

a trance-like state, Bion seems to try to seize the multidimensional,

elusive truth through the multitude of characters portrayed in the
Memoir. Reading the Memoir is an emotional experience of captur-
ing glimpses of an ineffable, hidden reality, and awakening the realm
of noumena, the juxtaposition between psychoanalytic thinking and
mysticism. In fact, Bion drew a parallel between psychoanalytical
and mystical states of mind. Mystical thinking maintains that truth
is hidden from the senses, from language and from thought. It is con-
cerned with the unknown, concealed, and zero-ness. Bion borrows
words such as God and Godhead, to try to depict an emotional truth,
or ultimate reality, existing beyond the possibility of human knowl-
edge and consciousness. Throughout the Memoir, P.A. and PAUL/
PRIEST (representing both religion and the mystical tradition) come
to realise the affinities between them. The present paper explores this
affinity, suggesting that the mutual work of analysis facilitates the
development of an intuitive, mystical capacity in both analyst and
analysand.
In her ‘Psychoanalysis “at the mind’s limits”: trauma, history,
and paronomasia as “a flower of speech” in A Memoir of the Fu-
ture’, the following chapter, Clara Mucci tries to prove that there is
a parallel between the explosion of language (in the sense of paro-
nomasia, as explained by Roman Jakobson, 1960, about poetic lan-
guage) in MF and the traumatic scenery on the ruins of which Bion
is writing. A parallel is also shown in the psychoanalytic theory
Bion is taking to its extreme, between ‘wakeful dream thinking’
and the language of disguise typical of poetry and literature, i.e.,
figurative language (defined as a ‘flower of language’ in MF), in so
far as they are structurally similar expressions of a kind of trau-
matic reality, therefore by definition ineffable and at the margins
of representation.
Therefore, in MF, Bion provocatively acts out what happens ‘at
the mind’s limits’, to echo Jean Amery’s book on his survival after
the trauma of Auschwitz. The deconstructive language of the pun,
or paronomasia, eludes and escapes one-to-one correspondences to
privilege the multiplicity of references and resonances, so that, in the
wake of Freud’s model of the joke, is the perfect correlative of a world
where ‘the center does not hold’, to echo W.B. Yeats.
 Introduction 7

In the next chapter, ‘The “Memoir” experienced from the standpoint

of contemporary art: a chronicle of a death foretold’, Adela Abella
states that a striking convergence is described between the Memoir
and some trends in contemporary art, best represented by Marcel
Duchamp, John Cage and Christian Boltanski. This artistic trend
seeks to question traditional boundaries and accepted taste in order
to open up new ways of perceiving and thinking about the world, en-
hancing the personal appropriation and creativity of both the artist
and the public. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, the enlivening
capacity of works of art is irremediably used up, leading to its death
through habit, idealisation and canonisation. The author suggests
that this might also be the fate of Bion’s Memoir.
The next chapter seems to be a comment on, as well as an answer
to, this issue. In ‘Reflections on “nonsense” in A Memoir of the Fu-
ture’, Duncan Cartwright sustains that reading Bion is as much an
experience as it is an attempt to grapple with his ideas. Perhaps like
no other psychoanalytic author, Bion engages his audience in a way
that provokes and challenges the reader to seek ‘personal truth’ as an
essential part of reading or learning. In this way, it could be said that
he is more concerned with ‘infecting’ the reader or interlocutor with
the problem itself – the experience rather than the accumulation of
facts or rationalisations.
MF represents Bion’s final and most audacious attempt to explore
the nature of psychic reality as a here-and-now living experience. To
do so, he employs a host of literary devices, characters, personages,
presences and registers of experience to represent a ‘science fiction’ of
psychoanalytic experience. From the beginning, the reader is plunged
into a world of multiple reciprocal relationships, unresolved paradox-
ical tensions and reversed perspectives that generate confusion, un-
ease, disorientation and turmoil. The provocative narrative and style
appears to contain an implicit imperative: dismiss the trilogy as non-
sense or engage, fall to sleep or tolerate ‘something’ that is unknown
but ‘becoming’, choose oblivion or wisdom. From this perspective,
the trilogy is framed by an appeal to ‘not understand’ and an attack
on comfortable certainties, both generally and within psychoanalysis.
Taking this as one of many possible perspectives on MF, this
chapter explores the trilogy as a meditation on ‘non sense’ – psychic
8 Giuseppe Civitarese

reality – and its interminable, unresolvable, relationships with the

sensory world, facts and articulate language. As a ‘true’ representa-
tion of psychic reality, the work is necessarily unsuccessful, deliber-
ately obscure and unresolved, a platform that creates the ‘roughness’
for dreaming one’s own dreams against the background of the form-
less infinite. As well as exploring entangled representations of facts
and fiction in the trilogy, Cartwright explores Bion’s appeal to not
understand him in the context of the trilogy. He also explores some of
the trilogy’s ‘evocations’ or ‘dream thoughts’ in terms of our most re-
cent ‘fashionable’ solution to psychic uncertainty: cyberspace. Here,
the immediacy of ‘making sense’ poses new challenges in the journey
towards ‘mental oblivion’ or wisdom.
Will the reader make the mental effort, take the time, to not under-
stand? As a largely dismissed piece of work, perhaps Bion’s intensions
remain as alive today as they ever were, still awaiting a thinker.

Note
1 From now on indicated as MF.
Chapter 1

Why Bion? Why now?

Novel forms and the
mystical quest
Lissa Weinstein

Introduction
I order my copy of A Memoir of the Future on a Tuesday night last
February, having been asked to write something by September.
Knowing little about it, I vow, with true superego severity, not to read
too much of Bion’s other writings, not to dig into secondary texts or
the more directly autobiographical memoirs, but rather to approach
the text as one does a patient—without memory or desire. I wonder, is
it even possible to forgo the comfort of theory?
‘Beckett-y,’ friend Jamieson tells me. 1000 pages.
Expensive. Even on half.com at eBay, over 100 dollars. I buy it used
from someone in the States, not wanting to wait for Karnac to ship
from England. To my astonishment, it arrives by the next afternoon,
left in a plain brown wrapper, like pornography, in my vestibule.
Looking at the package with no return address, the dreamy fog of
reverie already clouding the corners of my eyes, I imagine the person
who wanted to get rid of it. Quickly. Perhaps it has driven him or
her mad. Uncannily unable when people ask, to remember the work’s
proper, though paradoxical, title. A Memoir for the Future? Of the
Future? The Past of the Future?
I find myself simply calling it ‘The Book,’ after Bruno Schulz’s
(1937) story in which a boy remembers, the ‘Authentic,’ a book so
magical that the Bible is only a mere ‘clumsy falsification,’ a book
whose script ‘unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all
currents and ­fluctuations.’ Although told by his father that the book
is a myth ­children believe and then forget, the boy knows that it is both
10 Lissa Weinstein

‘a postulate and a goal.’ Finding evidence of its pages in some wrin-

kled, discarded papers used to wrap meat at the butcher, he under-
stands that within the imperfect fragments he has retrieved, one can
still find ‘the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels’ (p. 13).
I decide to engage the Memoir in the manner Schulz advises one
to approach the ‘Authentic,’ with ‘imagination and vicarious being’
(p. 14). Recent writing on the constructivist nature of reading (Bruner,
1986; Ferro, 2006; Ogden TH and Ogden BH, 2013; Greene and Duisit,
1980) allow me the leeway to author the Memoir as well as read it, to
treat it as ‘scriptable’ as opposed to a ‘lisable’ text (Barthes, 1975) and
to absorb its form as well as its content. In this paper, a record of my
journey with Bion, reactions to, reveries about, and struggles to ‘be’
with the text are inseparable from my understanding. Given Bion’s
equation of fact with feeling in the analytic situation, I imagine that
he would have approved, as it mirrors his choice of an artistic rather
than an expository format, one in which the sense and rhythms of
words and the affects they evoke as well as their dictionary meaning
could be contained.
This approach, however, dictated a rather meandering path for a
scholarly paper, an emotional response to the Memoir before attach-
ing these reactions to a wider context, in this case an attempt to un-
derstand the necessity of a novel format as the way for Bion to express
his ideas about O as they differ from Freud’s unconscious. A reversal
of sorts, thesis last not first, a paper that will not so much provide
answers as attempt to bring a few seemingly disparate literatures into
conjunction, in this case a Bahktinian perspective on the novel, post-
modern theory, and the search for a mystical and unifying experience.
Like Bion, we will start in the middle with intuition and only later
find concepts.
There are, undoubtedly, numerous other productive ways to ap-
proach this complex and ‘bottomless’ text whose structure mirrors
the ultimate unknowability of O, for example, as self-analysis (Harris
Williams, 1983), an autobiographical resolution of Bion’s war experi-
ences or as metaphor for a revolutionary effort to shake up the com-
placency of psychoanalytic theory. However, the focus of my reading
will not be on the content of Bion’s self-examination except insofar
as it exemplifies his search for a universal discoverable only through
 Why Bion? 11

examination of the particular; nor will the cogent discussions of

analytic morality and technique that flow through the third section
receive their due. No attempt will be made to provide a sequential
summary of Memoir’s plot or explication of the characters. Instead,
my reading will focus primarily on the first section as it is within The
Dream that one sees most clearly Bion’s discontent with articulate
language and his efforts to traverse the caesura between language
and the event. Both the struggle and his disappointment determine
Bion’s search for a new expressive form rather than the use of the
standard expository presentation common to analytic papers, engen-
dering Memoir’s stylistic and substantive similarities to postmodern
fiction. A final section will attempt to understand the renewed inter-
est in Bion and Memoir in particular.

Entering the text

The dream
A brief introduction warns the reader of what is ahead—we will un-
derstand some meanings that are ‘obvious, communicated and inter-
pretable according to the rules of grammar and articulate speech’;
we will come to understand other things if we try hard to ascertain
subtle changes in rhythms, and then there will be ‘modes of thinking
to which no known realization has so far been found to approximate’
(MF, p. ix) and so may remain unobserved, like a star that exists far
from the purview of our most powerful instruments.
We begin in media res, told only that it is a fictitious account of
psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream. However,
the superior reality of artifice is immediately evoked as we are asked
to consider whether a well-drawn fictitious character is not more ‘real’
than the drab and conventional unlived lives that surround us. The
question of the authenticity of imagined characters will preoccupy
Bion, just as it has Pirandello (1921) and Unamuno (1928) before him;
for Bion, the existence of realer-than-real imagined characters will
encapsulate his belief in psychic reality. As in Ferro’s (1992a) play on
the title of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Bion is
an author in search of characters that will allow him to articulate his
12 Lissa Weinstein

history and trace processes of development. A bidirectional process

between author and text, the creation of characters, and their reality
will inevitably touch on questions of identity:

Every novel, every work of fiction, every poem when it is live is

autobiographical. Every fictional being, every poetic personage
whom an author creates helps create the author himself.
(Unamuno, 1928, p. 415)

In truth, Bion is already a character created by his minions. Like

Jorge Luis Borges who documents this dissociation in Borges and
I (1960), Wilfred Bion is a different being from the public Bion, the
recipient of worship and/or hatred and different still from the psycho-
analyst Bion, represented in the memoir by P.A. How can he possibly
give voice to a disorganized mind, when he is already an icon, reified
in the minds of those who look toward him? Only through a fiction, a
self-reflexive and self-conscious fiction that allows for the representa-
tion of fragments of his identity through numerous characters who
can then comment on their own creation.

The whole of this book is so far printed can be regarded as an

artificial and elaborate construct. I myself, here introduced into
the narrative can be regarded as a construct artificially composed
with the aid of such artistic and scientific material as I can com-
mand a and manipulated to form a representation of an author
whose name appears on the book and now, for the second time, as
a character in a work of fiction. Is a convincing portrait? Does it
appear to ‘resemble’ reality?
(MF, p. 86)

The memoir will suggest that there is no answer, or to be more precise,

no single answer, only an approximation of the truth as the question
is explored from numerous vertices.
My reading starts out pleasurably. After all, it is a novel, with dia-
logue, interaction, and characters in place of topic headings and dried
prose. The characters are vivid enough: the maid, Rosemary,1 with her
earthy language and practical wisdom; Roland, the weak and desic-
cated lord of the manor; and his wife, Alice. Recognizable characters,
 Why Bion? 13

roles we can identify, emotions easy to name if not understand—­

jealousy, competition, cruelty. Mimesis providing its comforting mir-
ror of the real. The sound of distant gunfire, an undefined danger,
always enticing, signals that the world that the characters have known
is about to be shaken. An auspicious beginning, as it so often seems to
be in analysis, the resistances still in abeyance as the new, hoped for
object is approached.
As the section progresses, there is a complete dissolution of all
structures of temporality and space. A dream, but whose dream?
Who is awake? Who asleep? Are we in daytime or in darkness only
dreaming of light? Which of the characters named exist in the novel’s
created external reality and which in our reality? Day–night bounda-
ries abrogated; social positions are quickly reversed; ‘fictional’ char-
acters mingle freely with internal objects and self-representations, as
well as the sensibilities and sounds specific to animals and primitive
species. The style is a sharp contrast to Freud’s orderly approach to
the study of mental phenomena; we are literally ‘in’ someone’s mind.
Theoretical concepts, alpha and beta, come alive and mock the reified
status of psychoanalytic jargon. As the dream deepens, all bounda-
ries are lost.

[T]he ‘facts’ of daytime and night were defective, mutilated. They

were having dreams – mutilated dreams – lacking a dimension
like a solid body that casts no shadow in light. The world of re-
ality, facts, was no longer distinguishable from dreams, uncon-
sciousness, night. Thoughts with and thoughts without a thinker
replaced a universe where discrimination ruled. Dreams had
none of the distinguishing characteristic of mind, feelings, mental
representations, formulations. The thinker had no thoughts, the
thoughts were without thinkers.
(Ibid., p. 33)

A new character, Paranoid-Schizoid who is not embodied like the oth-

ers, complains that the language he hears is excruciating, a babble,
leaving him unable to distinguish memory from premonition; per-
haps in this universe we have suddenly entered, where time and space
no longer provide coordinates of meaning, the two perspectives are
identical. Is this how words are perceived by the newborn, not quite a
14 Lissa Weinstein

self who can receive meaning as we conceive it from a mature perspec-

tive, yet still fully responsive to the stimuli around him? The world of
a new Depressive Position wonders, ‘What are the rules in this domain
of pure thought and how can we ever represent the experiences that
take place there … What are the counterparts of disturbances, per-
turbations, turbulences that are violent, invisible, insensible?’ (p. 51).
It is clear Roland states that ‘Time as a concept is as inadequate as
topological space to provide a domain for the play of such enormous
thoughts as those liberated by freedom from dependence on a thinker’
(p. 70) and from the ‘polarization of “truth and falsehood.’” Commu-
nication then becomes a problem of form far more than of repressed
content. The task seems almost insurmountable:

If you think the problems that we have to solve can be solved in

a framework where ‘things’ happen in time and space, with ideas
taken from the vocabulary and grammar invented for the senses,
we shall fail. It is not unlike solving the problem of joining nine
dots, arranged on a plane to form a cube, with four straight lines.
You cannot do this and stay within the pattern of the cube.
(Ibid., p. 188)

The Dream section is nearly incomprehensible, obstinate in its assault

on our usual structures of understanding. No matter what time of
day I pick up the book, I fall into a dreamless sleep after reading
only a few pages and awaken with no memory. Like an analyst with
a psychotic patient, I wonder, ‘What did I sign on for? Rudderless,
insensible, can’t he explain himself? Is it worth all the work it will take
to comprehend this?’ I search for familiar terms to cover the experi-
ence, but Bion has undermined that soothing trick:

(More bloody metaphors! Who ever could sort out a mass of verbi-
age like this?) You could try calling it ‘Paranoid Schizoid’ after–a
long way ‘after’–Melanie Klein. Good idea. Good dog paranoid
schizoid here, here is a nice piece of jargon for you.
(Ibid., p. 59)

I am beginning to truly understand Freud’s (1915/1955a) statement

that ‘Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love’ (p. 139). Instead
 Why Bion? 15

of thoughts, I have a visceral sense of being tormented by this bizarre,

fragmented universe and an aversion to ever opening this book again.
Bion, now entering the narrative as a character (sometimes called
Captain Bion or alternately Myself ), suggests that it is a problem of
perspective, or from which vertex one is viewing:

The poet or genius can look at the scientist or genius and the rev-
elation, as at the opposite ends of the telescope, are too large and
too small to be tolerable or even to be recognizably related. It
is felt to be the ‘fault’ of the instrument that brings such differ-
ent objects together. But it might be the ‘fault’ of the objects for
being so different–or is it the human animal that has to ‘use’ its
accumulations of facts, that it has not the experience that would
enable it to ‘understand’ what it sees, blind or sightful?
(MF, p. 57)

My capacity for tolerating not knowing is sorely tested. As I type my

chosen quotes, they return to the impenetrable, their meaning de-
leted, evading my grasp. I begin to feel the dread of the paper due, the
terror of my colleagues’ reactions. I call upon my analytic faith that
it will come to me, that something will come to me; it always does,
that terror does not last forever. I think of my analyst remarking that
everyone writes a bad paper, most people more than one; a writing
teacher who tells me that dread is part of every writing experience,
you just have to push through it. But what is the purpose of this book?
Autobiography? Something else?

This book could be hailed as bearing, in itself, resemblance to its

paternity—that it could not be mistaken for someone else’s ‘brain
child’. But I may have a different aim; say, that of writing a de-
scription of psycho-analysis. To me, that the book bore witness to
its mental origins might be an unwelcome irrelevance, a feature
additional to the main component of my wish to communicate
and your wish to receive.
(Ibid., p. 86)

‘Show, don’t tell,’ the first axiom of every creative writing teacher. If
not an answer, the idea of an induced experience at least allows an
16 Lissa Weinstein

approach to the material. More than a self-portrait, Bion wants to

communicate a mode of thought—the inarticulate, the indescribable.
This can only be accomplished through the reader’s (in this case, my)
phenomenological experience of the reception of the disorganized,
terrified fragments he presents. Through its artificiality, its lack of
fidelity to consensual reality, Memoir aims to create a ‘real’ emotional
truth. As incomprehension is at the core of analysis, Bion also wants
to convey the practice of psychoanalysis, to immerse the reader in its
‘feel, rather than write (another) a paper about psychoanalysis, whose
reified terms have lost their life and now function to provide a defense
against knowing.
Unable to actively impose a structure I already understood on the
material, with little option, I allow a state of passive (or is it active?)
receptivity and find myself responding less to content or symbolic
meaning, but resonating with fragments, tempos, rhythms, shapes,
thoughts without a thinker. After a while, islands of sensibility
emerge from the flood. Recurring themes become recognizable, sec-
tions repeat accruing new meaning and form rudimentary patterns:
the near ubiquitous inclusion of something and its opposite made
identical except for their position along a continuum, repeated refer-
ences to Plato’s cave, the concern with the real versus the imagined/
created, the difficulty linking one way of thinking to another, the
inherent paradox of language—that once communicated, thought is
no longer ‘alive,’ but ossified, hence the need for constant new begin-
nings, new vantage points once something has been grasped, how
every seeming solution brings us to the start of a new problem, the
same questions asked again, each time beginning from a new vantage
point. If the text does not quite make ‘sense,’ at least my sense of
dread retreats.
I allow myself the freedom of incomprehension that I tolerate when
approaching an experimental novel; only this time, it is a novel whose
other reality is a way of thinking and not, for example, as in Henry
James ‘Jolly Corner,’ a ghostly world where the self that his current
life has eclipsed continues to exist. From this vantage point, each
character in Memoir need not be understood for his or her individual
dynamics, but for the part he or she plays in a larger puzzle, the lit-
erary critic’s question: why does the author create this character this
way? Why now?
 Why Bion? 17

Something else happens. I begin to notice the beauty of the

language, for example, the passage where Rosemary is answering a
series of questions repeatedly posed as ‘Who are you?’ She answers,

I am a funny story. I am a child’s book. I am wonderland. I am a

children’s story. You are laughing in your sleep. You are waking
up. The funny story which makes you laugh will make you cry.
The child’s dream will grow up to become adult, the night mare
will carry you, like Shakespeare’s sonnet, sluggishly away from
home, but fast, back to where you came from: which is the same
one you go to.
(Ibid., pp. 37–38)

Why had not I noticed before how poetic and funny some of the writ-
ing was? Too busy, as Bion might say, trying to ‘catch up with an
answer’ (ibid., p. 239), listening for, not listening to.
Out of the mist, new characters enter the dream—more real and un-
real than ever: Sherlock Holmes, his brother the indolent, do-­nothing-
but-think, brilliant Mycroft whose ‘specialism is omniscience’
(Conan-Doyle, 1893, p. 914). Detectives, followers of arcane clues,
tout their superiority both to their creator and to Bion, who keeps try-
ing to dismiss them as mere fictions. Mycroft will suggest a way that
thoughts might find a thinker. Perhaps, as Freud suggested in the Pro-
ject (1895/1955), the mind might be able to perceive psychic quality,
and through a process of ‘probing and reacting’ to the grosser, senses
reveal (like an x-ray) previously unnoticed patterns and connections,
which could then be transformed. In a long soliloquy, Myself reiter-
ates the limitations of the observing instrument to know or to com-
municate the experience of an event, no better than a photograph
that, despite its putative reality, lacks the feeling of the event it is
meant to capture, providing, at best, a screen memory. Thus, what we
believe we know as analysts, the very structures of our psychoanalytic
world view, depicted in already-made jargon that falls authoritatively
from our lips (psychosexuality, the Oedipal crisis, hysteria), are only
outcroppings of another, more fundamental, truth:

… patterns, configurations, insignificant in themselves, but, if de-

lineated, indicative of an underlying reality by their perturbations,
18 Lissa Weinstein

regroupings, shifts in pattern and colour; they reflect a category

and kind that the human mind cannot formulate or conjecture in
their presence …
(MF, p. 112)

They reflect something about the psyche, and it is the psyche that
needs to be studied …

Psychoanalysis itself is just a stripe on the coat of the tiger.

Ultimately, it may meet the Tiger – The Thing Itself O.
(Ibid., p. 112)

How then can language, our central symbolic system, relate to the
thing-in-itself, be it the psyche or the unmetabolized sensory images
that constitute it?

It is analogous to expanding the domain of arithmetic to contain

irrational numbers, negative numbers, compound conjugate num-
bers. The domain which is adequate for the operation of natural
numbers cannot contain these other numbers.
(Ibid., p. 188)

One possibility is parallelism, a kind of linguistic isomorphism.

Much in this book has been described in narrative terms. The

constructions employed could be understood if the language were
known to conform to the conventions of spelling, orthography,
print, grammar. Are those rules to be understood as applying
only to the domain of articulate speech, or is it possible that they
derive from and apply to some domain of which we are unaware?
Are the rules to which I conform also to be understood to be a
part of the representation to which some yet undisclosed realiza-
tion approximates?
(Ibid., p. 117)

The problem, however, is more complex. Perhaps a listener is not

only hearing the spoken words but is instead primarily responding
 Why Bion? 19

to the rhythms of breath or changes in prosody; perhaps the words

are experienced through another sense, such as vision or propriocep-
tion. Myself argues that it is more elusive still—even if we assume
that there is a mind, perhaps there is a domain ‘as approximates to,
but is not identical with the mind’ (ibid., p. 118)—then the problem
is not just between the two people, but also one’s ability to appre-
hend this other domain. Comprehension would require an exten-
sion of Freud’s theory of consciousness to the whole human mind,
and taking whatever lies ‘beyond’ as an object of attention (ibid.).
It is possible that things might appear nonsensical not only because
we cannot bear what they represent, that is because of our need to
defend and ward off specific contents, but also because what ap-
pears as nonsense represents the outcroppings of a different form
of thought prior to any language. Making an analogy to the field of
mathematics, Bion proposes,

If the world of conscious thought is not suitable for playing

‘Oedipus Rex’, the ‘universe of discourse’ must be enlarged to
include such plays. If serious psycho-analytic discussion cannot
take place in the domain that Freud found adequate, it must be
enlarged. In fact, Freud did enlarge it when he found that he could
not believe what his experience with patients seemed to suggest–
that they had been all assaulted sexually. He had to entertain the
idea that events which had never taken place could have serious
consequences. If I cannot ‘believe’, I cannot act or think. I need
‘thoughts without a thinker’.
(Ibid., p. 176)

How then are these unmetabolized elements, these undigested things-

in-themselves, sensory elements, transformed into something that
can be grasped? One answer is through relationship, through com-
merce with another mind that can contain the chaos they engender
and its related terror. However, aspects of O will remain unknowable,
although at moments thoughts can be apprehended at the moment
that they develop.
In Memoir, Bion depicts his own transformation, as the group of
characters, both the actual ones such as Rosemary and Roland, the
20 Lissa Weinstein

creatures Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus and the fictitious ones

(‘This place is thick with fictitious characters,’ ibid., p. 122) begin to
cohere as a group and function as a container. The characters them-
selves transform, as Myself notes that ‘the mental diet of entertain-
ing fictitious characters has contributed greatly to his mental health’
(ibid., p. 124). Further, transformation can only occur in the present,
and the critical nature of the present, as both past and future are hid-
den from us, but are ‘in fact, as opposed to verbally and grammati-
cally, not separable from the present.’
We see one example of this transformation as Bion’s war experi-
ence is mentioned for the first time, in a poignant description of his
experience of the loss of fear, the sweet smell of death, and the fact
that ‘Love had died, love for anyone and anything’ (ibid., p. 150). His
language has changed; the visual and sensual nature of the scene is
clear, as well as the emotion, portraying for the first time in Memoir
a scene capable of being visualized. Bion is able with the help of the
group to begin to think,

The darkness deepens. The skull-crushing and sucking object is

overwhelmed by depression at the failing supply of nutriment from
the dead ♀ and the failure to restore it to life. He formulates in stone
an arti-factual representation, easily seen by Plato to be a lying rep-
resentation of, a substitute for, pro-creation, substitute for creation.
The lying substitution is transformed into a prelude to action. This
whirling, swirling chaos to infinite and formless darkness becomes
luminous, and a Leonardo da Vinci robs the hair, the brooding waste
of waters, of its formless chaos.
(Ibid., p. 161)

The momentary clarity is followed by new confusions, not surprising,

as glimpses into this other reality are brief, albeit profound in their
implications and life-giving potential. Thought will always oscillate
between more integrated understandings of objects and events and
the fragmentation that must accompany any new learning.
The problem remains not just the awareness of a visual scene, but
also how it relates to the body, to the emotions. Something must be
felt as real, and what determines that is the vertex or perspective of
 Why Bion? 21

observation. Thought, as Bion defines it, is ever changing, free from

restraint. But as soon as it is given written or spoken expression,
‘freedom of thought has been eroded. The freedom of communicated
thought cannot at any time be absolute’ (ibid., p. 170).
One possible answer for how to apprehend this other reality lies in
the realm of the artistic.

‘Articulate’ communication is the dominant method of communi-

cation between the self and the self; insofar as communication takes
place between what psycho-analysts call the ‘unconscious’ levels of
different individuals. I think the prevalent methods of communica-
tion between painters, poets musicians conform to rules which are
very different from those of ‘articulate’ communication.
(Ibid., p. 208)

Although ‘non artistic methods of communication are less accurate

than those used by artists’ (ibid., p. 110), many do not feel that they
have the requisite skill to communicate as poets and artists. The
Dream section will end with little resolution of the problem, with Bion
asking which is more real, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of hair or
the creation of a hairdresser, the evocation of the underlying pattern
that is capable of stimulating feeling or the actual hair. Bion will con-
clude that it depends on the vertex of observation. In addition, it is
at least conceivably possible that the observation of mental events
changes them, as Heisenberg suggested that observation alters the
physical world. For these reasons, language remains a limited system.
Yet, despite this, as Alice observes, we still talk, continuing to behave
as though language was serviceable.
The Dream section introduces all of the elements and questions
that will be reworked on ‘higher’ levels in the next two chapters. Bion
seems humorously aware of the incomprehensibility of this section
and creates a final, impatient character/commentator who admits he
has not read the section but is simply looking this far ahead ‘to see
how it ends.’ While these later sections are more comprehensible, The
Dream section offers the closest look into the other reality by creating
an experience of its apprehension in the reader, an invaluable contri-
bution although not necessarily an always enjoyable one.
22 Lissa Weinstein

The past presented; the dawn of oblivion

The title of the second section continues to mirror the inclusion of
paradox for which Bion searches in language. Does he mean that the
past exists in the present or that the reader will be shown the deter-
minants of prior events? What can pairing the dawn (the beginning)
with oblivion (the end) mean? Destabilized, we are forced to create
our own meanings. Both sections will alternate between ‘sense’ and
a plunge back into non-sense; episodes that can be comprehended in
our usual language are interrupted by a carnival of language, mul-
tivoiced dialogues, puns, and jokes. While The Dream section depicts
the creation of thought, the next section presents interpersonal con-
flict; The Dawn of Oblivion will focus on internalized conflict, guilt,
and responsibility. The most immediate shift in the second section is
the introduction to time, as Alice awakes and immediately attempts
to locate herself temporally as well as spatially. Along with this, the
group of characters narrows. Dropped are those without any corpo-
rality, present or potential, as well as our dinosaur friends; now, the
characters have relationships with each other, a history that can be
traced, rather than behaving as kinetic molecules that form and re-
form, randomly bumping into each other.
The next two sections are far easier; falling asleep reading, I dream
of Clarisse’s first visit to Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs,
a dangerous meeting, but one that awakens her to the possibilities of
transformation. My reveries become more compassionate; I begin to
fantasize writing ‘Bion and I,’ a parallel to a Borges short story where
Borges split into himself and his public persona observes that he can
never be free of ‘the other one’ whose ‘sound pages … no longer be-
longs to any individual … but rather to language itself, or to tradi-
tion. Beyond that, I am doomed—utterly and inevitably—to oblivion’
(Borges, 1960, p. 324). I imagine Bion shrinking horrified from the
adulation in which he is held, retreating to the private and magical
world he tried to articulate, a source of great terror as well as the
fount of his awesome creativity. How hard he struggled to break the
barriers of language. By the end of The Dawn of Oblivion, I nearly
burst out laughing when Bion said that he had failed completely at
what he had set out to do—write a book of non-sense. There is no fi-
nal resolution, no Valhalla at the end of any journey, just a new vertex
from which to begin again.
 Why Bion? 23

From metapsychology to metafiction

The novel form

Bion has penned an amazing, at times infuriating and hateable, but
ultimately exhilarating text, one that demands to be read at least
more than once to assure even the slightest chance of understanding
(or the false hope of understanding), a book that demands the for-
titude and optimism of the analyst who chooses to work with more
disturbed patients, patients who do not immediately form a recog-
nizable transference. His book, chaotic and meandering, with its end
turned round like a Moebius strip that brings us back to the begin-
ning, stands in contrast to the standard psychoanalytic tome that
will reach a clear conclusion after marshaling its arguments in near
stultifying outline form.
The first question when confronted with A Memoir of the Future is
why Bion chose to write a paper on psychoanalytic theory in the form
of a novel, soon followed by the second: why this particular form of
novel? One of the central problems Memoir addresses is the means
through which other modes of thinking can be accessed, modes that
are critical for our understanding of development, psychotic states,
and the psychoanalytic process. Like Schulz, and other experimental
writers both before and after him, Bion struggled to communicate the
unrepresentable and ineffable, the ding-an-sich that can be felt, but
not known, graspable only for moments through shadowy fragments,
imperfect shards, ‘won from the void and formless infinite’ (Milton,
quoted in MF, p. 180). One of these fragments is the very language
with which we try to communicate, a paltry tool for understanding
primitive elements of thought, as this articulate language was ‘elabo-
rated later for other purposes’ (ibid., p. 229) and often functions as an
opaque shield that precludes entrée into this other reality. Complicat-
ing the insuperable difficulty of articulation to the self is the further
complexity of bridging the gap between two minds, inherent in the
polysemic nature of language and the fact that any chosen word shuts
out others vying to be heard, literally splitting off alternate coexisting
meanings.
These problems necessitated Bion’s choice of a novel format be-
cause it is only through the use of a multivoiced artificial structure
that one can approach the ‘real’ of the affective contents that form the
24 Lissa Weinstein

core of O. Conceptualized this way, the structure of Memoir perfectly

matches Bion’s intention, to use language in a ‘precisely obscure’
(ibid., p. 191) and ambiguous way to trigger associations and reactions
in the reader that may allow a brief light to penetrate the darkness.
Further, the dialogic structure of the novel creates an analogue to the
process of containment.
Bion’s choice of the novel format is best understood within the
framework offered by Bahktin (1981a, 1934/1981b, 1986). One could
make a number of interesting personal comparisons between Bahk-
tin and Bion, their originality, their strangeness, their interest in di-
alogue, their tendency to circle back around to consider a question
from numerous vantage points and think through problems in mul-
tiple texts, a penchant for expressing themselves using a variety of
aliases. Despite the fact that Bahktin, a confirmed Marxist, did not
share Bion’s reverence for psychoanalysis and had, under the name
Volosinev, published Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, they shared a
conceptual framework, as both are deeply relational in their formula-
tion of meaning. In their introduction to Bahktin’s Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays, the editor Michael Holquist notes,

If there is something like a God concept in Bahktin, it is surely

the superadressee, for without faith that we will be understood
somehow, sometime by somebody, we would not speak at all. Or if
we did, it would be babbling.
(1986, p. xviii)

Bahktin posits the novel as the sole still developing literary genre ‘that
is as yet uncompleted’ and still full of plastic possibilities. In contrast
to the epic form, whose tradition bound heroes and plot are grounded
in the past, the novel ‘comes into contact with the spontaneity of the
inconclusive present’ (Bahktin 1981a, p. 27), where the end of the
story has not already been told and is not known to the reader. Using
Bion’s terminology, the novel takes place fully in the present, the one
tense that is capable of being experienced.
In addition to its relationship with the present, the other essential
characteristic of the novel is its multi-languaged consciousness and its
inherent heteroglossia because of its reliance on characters, each of
 Why Bion? 25

whom has his or her own language expressed in dialogue, letters, and
narration. In the novel,

… the plot itself is subordinated to the task of coordinating and

exposing languages to each other. What is realized in the novel
is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is per-
ceived in someone else’s language, coming to know ones own
horizon within someone else’s horizon. There takes place within
the novel an ideological translation of another’s language and an
overcoming of its otherness.
(Bahktin, 1981b, p. 365)

Although generated from a completely different ideological vantage

point, the parallels to Bion’s notion of containment are striking. Like
Bion’s group, the characters modify each other as they speak.
Bahktin associates the multiple languages of the novel with the end
of sharply delineated national culture; in the novel, different dialects
both will affect each other and shed light on each other. This allows
for the development of new relationships between language and the
real world. One could, of course, see the unconscious (as Lacan im-
plies) as another language or as an immigrant culture, infiltrating and
altering consciousness. These immigrant languages work against the
centripetal forces that try to consolidate a language. Even without
that perspective, one could easily see the affinity that Bion would find
for a form in which multiple perspectives were central.
To Bahktin, the novel will always be a revolutionary and scrappy
form that ‘gets on poorly with other genres’ (ibid., p. 5) and is both
‘critical and self-critical’ (Bahktin 1981a, p. 10). The novel exposes
conventionality of the forms of other genres rather than harmonizing
with them; instead, it transforms them by forcing an expansion of
their boundaries. The other genres become

more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorpo-

rating extra-literary heteroglossia and the novelistic layers of
literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laugh-
ter, irony, humor, elements of self parody and finally, this is the
most important thing, the novel inserts into these other genres
26 Lissa Weinstein

an indeterminacy a certain semantic open-endedness, a living

contract with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the
open-ended present).
(Ibid., p. 7)

The progressive, radicalizing push of the novel by itself would support

Bion’s use of this format, as a force against the deadly ossification
of the language of psychoanalytic papers, rote in their presentation.
The dialogic stance is also inherent in his search for a language that
can traverse the gap between the unmetabolized and the symbolized.
What Bion will call articulate language Bahktin will discuss as a sys-
tem of linguistic norms. These norms struggle to overcome the in-
determinacy, the private constructions of language and attempt to
centralize thought. In Bahktin’s conception, this is a struggle over
ideology, but it translates well into Bion’s notions of a ‘crust’ that will
obstruct entry into more primitive modes of thought or the pressure
of the unconscious. Thus, the common language can become a con-
straining force. Both Bahktin and Bion had considerable respect for
the vulgar languages of the street (the ‘cuntish’ language of Bion, the
carnival of Bahktin) and their communicative powers.
The dialogic context is ever changing and unstable, never fixed but
instead reaching back into the past and forward into the future. The
forgotten past contextual meanings of an utterance may at any time
be recalled and evolve again in a new context. Bahktin ends his last
journal with the words, ‘Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning
will have its homecoming festival’ (Bahktin, 1986, p. 170).

The postmodern
A Memoir of the Future stands in contrast not only to the corpus of
psychoanalytic literature, but also to the well-plotted modern novel
where even when language takes experimental forms, the novel will
represent a world that is historically conceivable. For example, we
never doubt the presence of the actual Dublin in Joyce or the South
in Faulkner (Butler, 2002). In contrast, in the postmodern novel The
Third Policeman (O’Brien, 1967/1999), the hero finds himself in a
hallucinatory world, a two-dimensional police station where people
come to resemble or even fall in love with the bicycles they ride. In
 Why Bion? 27

‘The South,’ Borges (1944) realistically described a locale that turns

out to be an imagined land where the hero lives out his ideal romantic
death while he simultaneously lies dying in a sanatorium. In Memoir,
creatures of every ilk, fictional and historical personages, prenatal
and postnatal beings, and extinct animals exist simultaneously on an
English farm.
While modernist fiction follows the recognizable prescriptions of
the drive with its rising excitement, peak and denouement, postmod-
ern novels, like Memoir, tend to ignore the conventions of plot, their
structure only emerging after several readings that allow initially
disparate fragments to cohere. The constructions possible from the
given fragments are variable; interpretation demands active partici-
pation on the part of the reader.
Postmodernism can best be defined in pluralistic terms (Hassan,
1986), at times referring to sociocultural phenomenon specific to
late-stage capitalism (Jameson, 1991) including an increased self-­
consciousness reflective of a changed experience of, and questioning
about, traditional views of knowledge and truth (Lyotard, 1979), to
an ‘attitude’ about a historical period from the 1960s to the present,
to a theory related to and defined sometimes defined in opposition
to modernism (Hassan, 1971), and sometimes as a literary or artis-
tic manifestation. Lodge (1977) noted the formal properties of post-
modernist fiction; these structural characteristics will be immediately
recognizable to readers of Memoir and additionally bear a strong
resemblance to the grammar of imagery provided by Freud’s (1900)
chapter ‘The Dream Work.’
As in ‘The Dream Work,’ where ‘and’ replaces ‘or’ so that both
alternatives in an either-or statement might be equally valid and neg-
atives can coexist, contradiction will play a central role. Clauses may
cancel each other out through reversal, as in Leonard Michael’s state-
ment that ‘It is impossible to live with or without fictions’ (Michaels 9,
cited in Lodge, 1977). Mist (Unamuno, 1928) is built entirely on the
dizzying logic of reversals. Permutation, a literary variant on the
theme of negation, offers competing alternatives awaiting a read-
er’s construction. Fowles (1969) offers three possible endings for The
French ­Lieutenant’s Woman; in Hopscotch, Cortazar (1966) proposes
alternate orders in which to read the chapters; perhaps the most
radical example is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, an imaginary world
28 Lissa Weinstein

where ‘Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable
­ ermutations’ (Borges, 1941). Bion’s concept of vertices offers a simi-
p
lar refusal to choose a singular interpretation of reality.
Similar to Bion, postmodern fiction rejects the idea of a stable tem-
poral order; everything takes place in a ubiquitous present. Eras col-
lapse into one another; shifts in the representation of historical time
allow past events to be incorporated into present action. Thus, a novel
about the atomic bomb can be written in the language of Mallory
(Barthelme, 1990) and superimposed on the tale of the Knights of the
Round Table; in Barnes’ (1990) fragmented and unrelated collection
of episodes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, the woodlouse
narrator telling his experience of stowing away on Noah’s Arc clearly
knows just how the world turned out.
Ideas need not be presented in any logical order. A collage of unre-
lated, seemingly irrelevant facts can follow one another in the text; at
times, the sound of the text will be as important as the words.

Nothing is not a nightshirt or a ninny-hammer, ninety two or

Nineveh. It is not a small jungle in which near a river a stone table
has been covered with fruit. It is not the handsome Indian woman
standing next to the stone table holding the blond kidnapped
child. Neither is it the proposition Esse est percipi, nor any of the
refutations of that proposition.
(Barthelme, 1993, p. 245)

Both condensation and its opposite, fragmentation, are central to the

creation of characters. As one of Barthelme’s narrator’s states ‘frag-
ments are the only forms I trust.’ Nabokov’s last work The Original
of Laura is printed with removable index cards in Nabokov’s hand in
case the reader wishes to rearrange the fragments themselves. Multiple
characters can be used to represent a single figure in a manner sim-
ilar to Bion’s use of Bion, Myself, P.A. and Captain Bion as multiple
self-representations and Priest and Paul as object representations.
Coherence only becomes possible (if at all) through multiple read-
ings when thematic continuity is literally constructed by the reader,
who, because of the text’s purposeful ambiguity, takes a more active
role as a co-creator. As important as the content is the induced disori-
enting effect as, for example, in Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur when the
 Why Bion? 29

reader, following the protagonist’s detailed observations, suddenly

becomes aware that he or she is in the mind of a madman. All of this
destabilizes the position of the reader, so that he or she is forced to
participate in an experience (of confusion, irritation, boredom, terror)
rather than observe it. It is equally disorienting when characters step
out of role with metafictional asides to readers or comment on their
own process. For example, Augusto, the protagonist of Unamuno’s
Mist, goes to his author to protest the decision that he will be made
to commit suicide. Arguing for the reality of his existence now that he
has become able to feel through a fictional love affair, Augusto turns
the tables on his author. Like Mycroft and Sherlock to Bion, Augusto
will assert his superiority over his creator.

Look here, Don Miguel, it is quite possible that you may be a

creature out of fiction … it may be that you are the mere vehicle or
pretext for my story and other stories like mine … And when you
are dead, it will be we, your creatures, who keep your soul alive.
(Unamuno, 1928, p. 263)

Because the boundaries between fiction and the world blur, the reality
of the world is called into question. The novel will constitute its own
sovereign verbal universe, while reality begins ever more to appear
like a fictional world.
By this point, the parallels between aspects of O and the structure
of the postmodern novel, namely its collapse of temporal specificity,
its lack of a sensible order, its elevation of the use of form to evoke
an emotional effect rather than content, and its playfulness with
language, should be obvious. However, in addition to sharing these
structural and semantic characteristics, Memoir shares what Barthes
(1975) sees as its subversive intent, namely to induce a crisis with the
reader’s relationship with language and reality. The playfulness with
language has a multiple function—to induce an emotion, be it bore-
dom, terror or amusement, but also to make the reader more aware
of the limitations of language; the conjunction of alternate meanings
forces one to question the meaning of a word, bringing to the fore-
front the falsity of language and its capacity for dissemination. The
purpose is the very antithesis of jargon—each word now confronts
one almost as a stranger.
30 Lissa Weinstein

Barth (1967) in his seminal essay refers to postmodern writing as

‘[t]he literature of exhaustion … the used-upness of certain forms or
exhaustion of certain possibilities’ (p. 29). One could easily draw a
parallel to the ‘used-upedness’ of our ossified psychoanalytic con-
cepts, not just the problem of the jargon-y use of terms, but that of
the theory itself having become stultified. Fascinating in the individ-
ual case, the abstractions have ceased to be a living language. Thus,
Bion’s choice of linguistic form mirrors his intent—to move us away
from our preformulated answers.

Approaching transcendence
Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the
Unimaginable which Modernism glimpsed only in its most
prophetic moments … We are, I believe, inhabitants of another
Time and another Space … the best of them [postmodern artists]
brilliantly display the resources of the void … Yet moving into the
void, these sometimes also pass to the other side of silence, and
discover the sacrament of plenum.
(Hassan, 1971, pp. 22–23)

Beyond their structural and stylistic similarities, both Memoir and

postmodern fiction reflect a longing for the sacrament of plenum and
contain a search for, and tentative efforts to traverse, a pathway to an
ineffable reality prior to the development of an articulate and sensible
language. The conception of the beyond in both is quasi-­religious,
a search for a transcendence. This spiritual vision constitutes the
essential difference between Bion’s vision of O and the Freudian
unconscious.
For postmodern writers, the search for another reality is almost
ubiquitous. It can be found in Ozick’s (1971) ‘The Pagan Rabbi’ where
a devout scholar of the Mishna commits suicide after falling in love
with a dryad whose voice was a ‘diffuse cloud of field fragrances,’
whose meaning he understood with ‘an immediacy of glee.’ A similar
quest is found in Borges’ (1949a) ‘The Aleph,’ where in an ordinary
basement could be found a ‘point in space that contains all points …
the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the
world, seen from every angle, coexist’ (p. 281). In ‘Sanatorium under
 Why Bion? 31

the Sign of the Hourglass,’ Schulz’s character searches for his de-
ceased father in a sanatorium where ‘time has been turned back’ and
the dead may be encountered in a liminal world to which sleep offers
partial entry. Despite his wish to be with his father, the hero begins to
fear being trapped in madness. He escapes, but never fully, remaining
forever on the train that brought him, a marginal character. All three
stories, although quite disparate in topic, are marked both by longing
for another reality simultaneous with an awareness of both its elusive
nature and potential danger. It can be touched intermittently, intrude
in dreams, but never completely known; at the same time, it is never
completely absent but remains an originary source of our actions.
Language is limited in its capacity to express this experience. Borges,
not unlike Bion, will suffer the writer’s despair of trying to communi-
cate in language the infinite Aleph, whose ‘enumeration, even its par-
tial enumeration … is irresolvable’ (Borges, 1949a, p. 281), an event
whose multitudinous components happened simultaneously but had
to be described as if they were successive.
Ultimately, the quest for both Bion and the writers to whom we have
compared him is a mystical one to the extent that mysticism is distin-
guished from other religious forms because of the centrality of an in-
tense, immediate, and urgent awareness of a living relationship with
God. This ‘tasting and seeing’ of God provides a privileged knowl-
edge that can only be acquired through felt experience as opposed
to scholarly contemplation (Scholem, 1946). As mysticism arises only
after a monistic conception of man and nature has been superseded
by an awareness of the gap between Man and God, its presence serves
as manifest evidence of the void.

Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss, on the contrary

it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to
a quest for the secret that will close it, the hidden path that will
span it. It strives to piece together the fragments broken by the
religious cataclysm, to bring back the old unity which religion has
destroyed …
(Ibid., p. 8)

This caesura can only be traversed by way of the aforementioned,

deeply felt, though difficult to communicate, experience. The
32 Lissa Weinstein

traversing of the various breaks, between prenatal and postnatal lives,

between the primitive minds of animals and humans, between that
which seems unthinkable and that which can be articulated, between
sleep and waking, between one mind and another, is similarly a central
focus of Memoir. The personal relationship to God comes through a
kind of self-knowledge, which exists potentially in every man, in toto,
in the present tense. Essentially timeless, it contains in one moment
all past religious events; Christ eternally on the Cross; the sands of
the desert forever beneath the feet of the wandering Jew. Like O, the
mystical realm may intrude into the world as we know it, but is not
usually an object of consciousness and not unlike the quandary Bion
faces in his effort to communicate the nature of O, the mystic finds
it difficult to give linguistic expression to his or her contact with the
divine, a private event that ‘by its very nature is related to a sphere
where speech and expression are excluded’ (ibid., pp. 14–15).

For it must be said that this act of personal experience, the sys-
tematic investigation and interpretation of which forms the task
of all mystical speculation is of a highly contradictory and even
paradoxical nature. Certainly this is true of all attempts to de-
scribe it in words and perhaps where there are no longer words of
the act itself. What kind of direct relation can there be between
the Creator and His creature, between the finite and the infinite;
and how can words express an experience for which there is no
adequate simile in this finite world of man … It will be wiser to
assume … that the religious world of the mystic can be expressed
in terms applicable to rational knowledge only with the help of
paradox.
(Ibid., pp. 4–5)

In Memoir, the P.A. (psychoanalyst) character’s dialogues with the

Priest (whom he seems to identify as a fellow seeker of truth and as
someone who understands the difficulty in attempting to express an
essential experience) highlight the parallels that can be drawn be-
tween the spiritual experience and the ineffable O. While Bion is re-
lentless in his dismissal of religion, he is unable to reject the idea of
the Godhead. Further, the experience of knowing God is described in
similar terms as the experience of knowing the psyche, knowing the
 Why Bion? 33

tiger as opposed to merely observing its stripes. One can ‘talk about’
either, but a distinction exists between talk ‘about something’ and the
something itself, the ‘thing-in-itself, the ultimate reality, the noume-
non we can never know’ (MF, p. 305). Touching the noumenon is akin
to a mystical experience of an ultimate reality.

Why Bion? Why now?

Written in the late 1970s, A Memoir of the Future enjoyed a mixed,
and at times hostile, reception. Why is there then, such a resuscita-
tion of interest in Bion and in Memoir in particular? Here, some of
the more theoretical sociocultural writings on postmodernism may
be helpful. Jameson (1988) writes that our machines, for example the
computer, are no longer machines of production, but of reproduction,
and have the capacity to transcend the mimetic versions of reproduc-
tion more tied to earlier art forms. Baudrilliard (1994) notes the su-
periority of the representation over the real in a society where the
ubiquity of simulation dissolves ‘the difference between true and false
and real and imaginary’ (p. 3). These societal conditions inevitably
alter the delicate balance that supports the ego’s autonomy both from
the environment and from an influx of internal stimulation, further
fragmenting any sense of cohesion (Rapaport, 1951; 1958). It is a sit-
uation that calls out for containment, one source of which is found
in mysticism. Jameson (1988, p. 37) notes that postmodern texts ‘tap
the networks of the reproductive process and thereby afford us some
glimpse into a postmodern or technological sublime.’ Bion taps into
a similar longing for something beyond; he allows us to once more
believe in something beyond ourselves.
Bion’s O differs from the unconscious, as defined by Freud, as O is
not organized around notions of pleasure and unpleasure, which Bion
saw as tied to bodily experiences requiring a rudimentary self. Bion
placed less stress on dynamically repressed content than on the sig-
nificance of the unconscious as a cradle of thought. Its unknowable
quality emanated not only from the inadequacy of our language, but
also from the limiting structures of time and space within which our
current thinking apparatus functions. If postmodern writers made
transcendent reality a ‘place’ outside the self, Bion has articulated
a transcendent reality within, one that may speak to dilemmas of
34 Lissa Weinstein

our time and the longing for relationship and containment, an im-
aginary construction that is somewhat absent in Freud, who admits
that the ‘sensation of “eternity,” a feeling as of something limitless,
unbounded—as it were, “oceanic”’ (1930, p. 64) was not one that he
had ever experienced. Poignantly, Bion will end his effort on a note of
failure; his hope of writing a book unspoiled by common sense and
reason dashed, and by implication unable to fully enter this other re-
ality as he was unable to cleanse his language of the ghosts of sanity.

Postscript
My reading of Memoir did not provide many answers, or even a true
thesis, merely bringing together a few literatures, which ended up il-
luminating each other. However, linking these works allowed me en-
trée into a difficult and confusing text and taught me a great deal
about method, the essential nature of reverie, the need to tolerate not
knowing, and the workings of intuition. It was necessary to imagine
Bion before he could be comprehended, necessary to enter the world
of the other before thinking about it. For this reason alone, Memoir
must be seen as an invaluable text. A theoretical paper, no matter how
detailed, could not provide a ‘living’ experience of these concepts.
Bion’s greatest contribution is a way of being with patients that is not
inundated by the classical rules and prescriptions about what to listen
for or how. If I could not quote aspects of Bion’s theory, I ended up
feeling that I understood it; if I did not know, I might still believe.
Returning to the postmodern texts that I had loved, I was able to
see them differently; beyond their self-reflective and ironic stance, one
could hear the pathos and sadness beneath the fragmented texts of
Barthelme, the longing for existence in Unamuno’s characters (and
ourselves), the centrality of mourning in the pornographic altered re-
ality of Schulz. In the end, like Memoir, my paper came back to the
beginning—to Schulz’s search for ‘The Authentic,’ which ends on a
note that might well describe Bion’s quest. Able to find no more than
fragments of the cherished text, the author notes,

And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and

integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations.
This is the phenomenon of imagination and various being. An
 Why Bion? 35

event may be small and insignificant in its origin and yet, when
drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and
radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to
express itself in it and irradiates it violently … We shall recreate
piece by piece what is one and indivisible – the great era, the Age
of Genius of our life.
(Schulz, 1937, p. 14)

Note
1 Characters’ names in Memoir are written in italics, to differentiate them
from their external counterparts.
Chapter 2

‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’
in Wonderland
Reading and literature in A Memoir
of the Future
Sara Boff ito

A memoir, an enigma
Q Can you give me an idea what this is about?
A Psycho-analysis, I believe.
Q Are you sure? It looks like a queer affair.
A It is a queer affair–like psycho-analysis. You’d have to read it.
(MF, p. 2)

From whatever perspective it is approached, Bion’s Memoir trilogy

comes across as something of an enigma. Those who have attempted to
parse its riddles vary greatly in their definitions of the work, their expla-
nations sometimes alarmingly different: after discussing the psychoana-
lytical elements contained in Memoir, in his preface to the Italian edition
in the first of the three books, Francesco Corrao deems it to be ‘also a
dramaturgical text’ (1993, p. xiv); while in her preface to the Italian edi-
tion of The Past Presented, Anna Baruzzi specifies that the text should
be ‘considered a psychoanalytical work’ written ‘in an unusual style,’
at once ‘a stage play, a novel of manners, and a science-fiction novel,
dotted with dialogues, monologues, poetical passages, and scientific
discourse’; she sees it moreover as a work that defies borders, belonging
to that ‘experimentalism that closes one era and opens another’ (1998,
pp. xi–xiii). In her essay entitled ‘“Underlying pattern” in Bion’s Memoir
of the Future’ (1983) and in her book Bion’s Dream (2010), Meg Harris
Williams explores the trilogy from a purely literary angle, considering
it to be a pioneering work in which the author’s self-analysis and inner
autobiography overlap with the creation of a new genre of expression
of the Self, namely ‘a reverie now’. By this, Harris Williams claims that
 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland 37

Bion’s Memoir is a dream autobiography, as it were, to be set alongside

the author’s ‘official’ autobiographies – The Long Week-End (Bion, 1982)
and All My Sins Remembered (Bion, 1985).
Meanwhile, in his review of Harris Williams’s book, James
Grotstein notes his agreement with her conviction and adds that these
two autobiographies and Memoir together constitute ‘not simply a
myth but an epic, not unlike the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid’; through
these five texts, claims Grotstein, Bion teaches us that ‘to the extent
that dreaming imparts ever-evolving meanings to the emotional expe-
riences of our lives, the more these experiences become mythic-epic
narratives that unite, integrate, contain, and transcend each living
moment they process’ (2011, p. 467).
These, then, are just some of the attempts to pin down the genre of
Memoir, as proposed by various authoritative (and fond) readers of
Bion’s works. From this array of such highly diverging impressions, it
becomes clear that the text eludes classification and shuns all labels.
That said, it comes as a consolation to learn that this was the express
wish of Bion himself, as evidenced by the declaration he penned to
close the last book of the trilogy:

All my life I have been imprisoned, frustrated, dogged by com-

mon sense, reason, memories, desires and – greatest bug-bear of
all – understanding and being understood. This is an attempt to
express my rebellion, to say ‘Good-bye’ to all that. It is my wish,
I now realise doomed to failure, to write a book unspoiled by any
tincture of common-sense, reason, etc. (see above). So although I
would write, ‘Abandon Hope all ye who expect to find any facts –
scientific, aesthetic or religious – in this book’, I cannot claim to
have succeeded … However successful my attempt, there would
always be the risk that the book ‘became’ acceptable, respectable,
honoured and unread. ‘Why write then?’ you may ask. To prevent
someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space – but I fear
I am being ‘reasonable’, that great Ape. Wishing you all a Happy
Lunacy and a Relativistic Fission …
(MF, p. 578)

I believe that, ultimately, the A Memoir of the Future is a conflation of

these various definitions, all of them covering some aspects, but none
quite achieving a proper match.
38 Sara Boffito

What is often forgotten – and which can elude the Italian reader – is
that the title itself defines the work’s literary genre: instead of calling his
trilogy Memory of the Future, Bion has chosen to call it A Memoir. The
word used for the Italian translation, memoria, is more ambiguous and
omits the distinction. In English, the title alerts the reader as to what is
to come – a memoir – that is, an account of personal recollections. If
we investigate what exactly a memoir is as a literary genre, the paradox
merely gets deeper. For instance, G. Thomas Couser has devoted several
publications to defining the genre, starting with his Memoir: An Intro-
duction (2011), in which he expounds on the differences between novel
and autobiography, identifying one of the distinctive traits of the memoir
as a ‘commitment to the real’, and adds that such a genre indicates the
fundamental human activity of narrating our life story on its own terms.
Just what constitutes reality and truth, and what might right be
considered ‘facts’, is one of the chief arguments that underpin the
dialogues between the characters of Memoir and involve the reader
so deeply. It may seem paradoxical, but I reckon we can surmise that
Bion wrote these books for reasons akin to this ‘commitment to the
real’, even if the reality to which he felt committed is neither histor-
ical nor material but mental reality, emotional truth, and the ‘facts’
and ‘actual events’ under discussion are far more complex than those
that may be observed with one’s eyes. Bion is faithful to this mental
reality, and rigorously so: for this reason he abandoned logic, mem-
ory and desire, and in these three volumes gave voice to the multi­
coloured variety of characters harboured in his Self, a panoply of
individuals ranging from the highly evolved to the ordinary, the
transgressive to the mystical, and even the more primitive, the rejects
and outcasts.

A proper mental diet

The narrative style matches the challenge of this commitment, mul-
tiplying itself in the infinite nuances of mental reality; the language
follows suit, with its wealth of neologisms and quirky invented terms.
The language and style offer another salient feature of the dia-
logues between the various characters of Memoir. Keenly aware of
the lurking ‘Satanic Jargonieur’, Bion took great pains to avoid its pit-
falls [the pitfalls of psychobabble], and to my mind Memoir is Bion’s
utmost exertion in this direction, a means to narrate his inner life in
 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland 39

terms most suited to his disposition, to speak with his own voice – or
better, with his own voices.
In the second book the character known as P.A., that is the Psycho-­
Analyst (who frequently expresses the view of the author/Bion himself),
declares this war on jargon as the reason for his recourse to fiction:

P. A: I am no poet, but I succumbed to the temptation to compose a pa-

triotic anthem, almost a New World symphony, using the theme –
‘borrowed’ of course without acknowledgement – ‘My Mind to
Me A Kingdom Is.’
ROL AND: How very apposite. Just right for the psycho-analyst!
P. A: Alas, no.
ROLAND & ROBIN: Really? How was that?
P. A: His Satanic Jargonier took offence; on some pretence that psycho-­
analytic jargon was being eroded by eruptions of clarity. I was
compelled to seek asylum in fiction. Disguised as fiction, the truth
occasionally slipped through.
(MF, p. 302)

Reading this passage, I recalled the poetic words that Thomas H.

Ogden devoted to the role of the voice in psychoanalysis: in the third
chapter of his Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming (2001), Ogden
explains the difficulty of speaking with one’s own voice, a voice that,
while changing according to the context and listener, remains indi-
vidual and unique. This uniqueness and individuality is by no means
easy to achieve, and at times helping the analysand to speak with his/
her own voice can be the outcome of the analysis. When rereading
those pages with Bion’s work in mind I found myself thinking that
Ogden’s Conversations offer such an apt description of the contents
of Bion’s Memoir that it is surprising that the trilogy is nowhere men-
tioned in Ogden’s essay or in his other main works. Yet so often while
reading Memoir, this author came to mind, not only because Ogden is
certainly one of the most brilliant contemporary analysts to have cre-
atively developed Bion’s ideas, but also because he is the most literary.
In his recent book on creative reading, Ogden himself demonstrates
how a text can provide a starting point from which each reader draws
his/her personal baggage of meanings and ideas. While this is true for
any book, the fecund ambiguities inherent to A Memoir of the Future
and its dialogic – and elusive – style allow ample margin for an expo-
nential multiplication of meanings and readings. What I am inquiring
40 Sara Boffito

into with regard to the trilogy and its author is the rapport between art
or literature and psychoanalysis, a rapport central to the very nature
of Memoir but also to its contents. Because, while it is true that Bion’s
trilogy may be termed a literary/artistic work of psychoanalysis, it is
nonetheless clear that the model of rapport between analysis and art
on which it hinges (or defines) is not the classic retrospective historical
study or interpretation of the events involving the narrative’s charac-
ters according to psychoanalytical theory – that is, the ‘application’ of
analysis to literature. What happens here is effectively the opposite:
literature is being applied to psychoanalysis. As we have seen, here
psychoanalysis ‘finds refuge’; the power of literary fiction defends it
from the pitfalls of jargon and allows truth to establish a foothold.
In his trilogy, Bion presents himself to the reader as being a reader
himself, a literary omnivore with a vast appetite, devouring the likes
of Shakespeare and Blake, Joyce and Pound, Milton and Wordsworth,
Keats, Shelley and Browning, Tennyson and Hopkins, Rimbaud and
Conan Doyle, and not least Lewis Carroll.
For Bion, it is vital that reading and literature form part of our
daily ‘mental diet’. The characters and goings-on in the novels we love
come to inhabit our interior world, and for Bion, they are therefore
vividly ‘real’ elements in our mental makeup. Thus, his A Memoir of
the Future is populated with characters from his favourite works of
fiction, who dialogue and interact with ‘Myself’, Bion’s alter ego, P.A.,
and with the other players featured in the work, such as Alice, Rose-
mary, Roland, Robin, and so on.
Bion and Myself engage in a series of conversations that are at once
witty and serious with such fictional figures as Sherlock Holmes, Watson,
and Mycroft, debating on their nature, whether they are real or not, but
also speculating on their usefulness in aiding the reader’s mental health:

BION: But, my good man, are you not aware that you are entirely fic-
titious characters? I am a qualified doctor! …
(MF, p. 91)

WATSON: (contains his mirth with difficulty, but manages to be civil)

Excuse me, sire, but I must admit that I have never heard of your
existence. I do not want to hurt your feelings or to appear to boast,
but although Mycroft has always been of a retiring disposition,
Sherlock, and to a lesser extent myself, has a world-wide following.
 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland 41

You yourself were admitting that there are imaginary characters

who are infinitely better known than countless generations of non-
entities. Now excuse me. I am a very busy man – allow me to sug-
gest that you get on that couch there and sleep it off quietly …
(Ibid., pp. 91–92)

MYCROFT: I think you are ‘murdering’ it if I want to emphasis your

crime. Just because I shall still be entertaining long after you have
disappeared, you have no hesitation in calling Sherlock and Wat-
son and me imaginary characters and claiming a superior status
for yourself and your bloody books.
MYSELF: Oh no, I don’t. Excuse me; but you have got me mixed up
with Bion; and what about the blood you have just detected on
my books?
MYCROFT: Don’t you acknowledge any responsibility for your books?
Or do you disclaim your brain children? …
(Ibid., pp. 123–124)

MYSELF: I should have thought that during the course of your sojourn
in my mind – if that’s where it and you have been – you would have
become transformed from a relatively minor, fictitious character
into a somewhat major part of your more useful characteristics.
If there were such a thing as a mental digestive system, I could
say that the mental diet of entertaining fictitious characters has
contributed greatly to my mental health.
(Ibid., p. 124)

But our mental health does not rely solely on entertainment; we enjoy
art because it moves us; it makes us feel in unison and thereby trans-
forms us. As Bion notes, if the performance of a play by Shakespeare
is ‘an experience which is emotionally stirring; it effects a change – In
Wilfred R. Bion – that is durable’ (MF, p. 87). In the closing pages
of the Dawn of Oblivion, the character P.A. relates a dire period of
self-questioning that was catastrophic for his professional career: he
was no longer confident about the interpretations he had made un-
til then, and now seriously doubted his judgement. At this point, he
turned to literature, which turned out to be his salvation:

it was as if, literally as metaphorically, light began to grow, night

was replaced by dawn. I was aware, with a new comprehension, of
42 Sara Boffito

the passage of Milton’s invocation to light at the commencement

of the Third Book of Paradise Lost.
(Ibid., p. 560)

Darkness and fiction

One can surmise that the crisis related by Bion’s character P.A. is the
one he himself traversed in the early 1970s and which prompted him
to leave London and move to Los Angeles. This is the period in which
traces of mysticism begin to creep into Bion’s writings and he starts
talking of O, ‘the unknown, unknowable, “formless infinite”’, of the
kind that had never cropped up in writings on psychoanalysis before
then. This part of his output is usually referred to as ‘late Bion’; it
begins with Attention and Interpretation (1970) and culminates with
A Memoir of the Future. The creative instance of the trilogy there-
fore coincides with the author’s existential impasse, and we might see
this output as an attempt to articulate this state, to relate and reason
it through. As such, these writings offer a kind of salvific outlet for
Bion, a subjective and personal purpose, as with all narratives.
Regarding the clinical and theoretical utility of the said Late Bion
works, there is still much debate. In 2011, the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis devoted an ample section to the ongoing controversy,
which arose in response to the noted article by Edna O’Shaughnessy,
‘Whose Bion?’ (2005). The author claims the theoretical continuation
of the work of Melanie Klein by Bion’s early writings and refers to
them as the only ones having scientific validity. To her mind, Bion
is not the ‘revolutionary genius’ touted by those who lay such store
in his writings (Ferro, 2005; Tabak de Biankedi, 2005; Symington
and Symington, 1996; Eigen, 1998; Grotstein, 1981a; Vermote, 2011),
but one who fell prey to the lure of the paradox and lost sight of the
boundaries by making ‘the texts too open, too pro- and e-­vocative,
and weakened by riddling meanings’ (O’Shaughnessy, 2005, p. 1525).
Bion found himself at odds with the orthodox Klein set in London,
who shrank from the novelties of his own writings, which can be
grasped only if read or heard with other eyes and ears. The cast of
The Past Presented converses about music and the instruments the
enable us to hear it.
Certainly, to digest Bion’s later works, in order to grasp the music
beyond the noise one must yield to the allure of the paradoxes, savour
 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland 43

the richness of the text, and ignore the weaknesses of the said ‘riddled
meanings’. In any event, this is what the author intended: to be ‘de-
liberately’ and ‘precisely’ obscure (MF, p. 189). For Bion, therefore,
ambiguity is a goal, a mission. It almost seems that he devotes himself
to seeking ambiguity with the same passionate dedication as he uses
in his quest for truth or that they stand for the same thing. As noted
by Civitarese (2011, p. 36), Bion picks his terms according to their
‘quotient of ambiguity’:

most of Bion’s concepts can be ordered in terms of a light/dark

binary, or of insight/blindness. Take for instance his notions of
‘reverse perspective’, ‘vertex’, or ‘binocular vision’; his idea of
truth as phós (Gk., light), and the darkness as a negative force;
the unsaturated mind; preconception; the invisibility of total or
transcendental reality. The same words Bion uses might equally
apply to a sceptic’s frantic fumbling: conjecture, hypothesis, spec-
ulative imagination, uncertainty, supposition, doubt, wandering/
roaming/rambling, and so on.

Because, it is only through blinding oneself with a ‘beam of intense

darkness’ (Grotstein, 2007) that one can get closer to ‘O’; the truth
may be reached only through falsification.
For Bion, the quest for truth is also an ethical imperative, perhaps
the only moral aspect on which he clearly pronounces himself. In
this, he presupposes a certain fellowship with his reader, which he
declares outspokenly in a note in The Past Presented, whereby Alice,
Rosemary, Roland, Robin, and P.A. discuss truth, lies, science, and
art; in a note, Bion inserts,

Artistic: Whether a scientist, a painter, composer, the person to

whom this book is addressed is assumed to be driven by an urge
to the truth. I cannot conceive of a drive to untruth as being sep-
arable from what is evil.
(MF, p. 586)

If, as mentioned above, literary fiction ‘filters’ the truth, enabling it

to come to the surface, A Memoir of the Future is the work of Bion’s
that is most pellucidly dedicated to the quest for truth, because it is
openly declared to be ‘fiction’. It is when truth is deemed absolute
44 Sara Boffito

that it becomes dangerous – and this often occurs in analysis, Bion

warns:

P. A: Allow me to conduct you round the cages of my psycho-analytic

zoo. Of course the names are somewhat forbidding, but the crea-
tures themselves are beautiful and ugly. Ah! Here is Absolute
Truth – a most ferocious animal which has killed more innocent
white lies and black wholes than you would think possible.
ROL AND: You muddle it with your puns.
ROBIN: Call it paronomasia – more scientific.
ALICE: It sounds like a very attractive flower.
P. A: Only a flower of speech.
(Ibid., p. 239)

The truth Bion cleaves to and searches with such exacting com-
mitment is the opposite to this ‘ferocious animal’ inhabiting his
‘psychoanalytic zoo’: the emotional and personal truth is a ‘truth of
fiction’ that sits more comfortably in narrative than in psychoana-
lytical theory. The conversion to fiction, Grotstein avers, is a step
both requisite and fundamental to the individual: ‘The “true thinker”
must seek the truth, though in vain, only being able to approach it
obliquely or tangentially because of its “blinding glare”’ (2007, p. 149).
Such ‘well-wishing falsehoods’ are those that govern our dreaming
and primary processes. To dream reality, to digest it, entails making
it personal and emotive, incarnate. ‘Thinking is bearable because of
its sensuous component’ (MF, p. 160), affirms wisely the Man in his
dialogue with Bion. Passion, it turns out, is a fundamental element for
keeping thinking alive, but to do this another mind is needed:

BION: Most people experience mental death if they live long enough.
You don’t have to live long to have that experience – all you have
to do is to be mentally alive.
ALICE: … You have to have a partner for one thing – even in opposition.
(Ibid., pp. 178–179)

The dramatic/dialogic structure of A Memoir of the Future not only

showcases the sheer mental vitality of Bion but also reveals his urge
to find ‘a partner, even an opponent’ to appeal to, another person to
assist him in his thinking, because only thus can the mental life truly
 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland 45

come alive. This putative partner may be the reader, even, who may
detect through the discourse a living interlocutor (or better, several)
capable of helping him or her think.
While on the one hand it is vital that readers who decide to im-
merse themselves in these texts must in some way be attracted to
the same siren’s call, the same appetite for ambiguity that spurred
the author, on the other hand the problem of deciphering the texts
remains for all: Bion manages to be now playful, stimulating, and
gladly irreverent, but also abstruse, unfathomable, and exasperating.
So, one might ask, how should Bion be read? Fortunately, an attempt
to answer this question has been made by Thomas H. Ogden, whose
own writing is contrastingly of great natural clarity and ease of style.
In his article entitled ‘An introduction to the reading of Bion’ (2004),
Ogden describes Bion’s Learning from Experience (1962a) as follow-
ing along the lines of Alice in Wonderland and then proceeds to the
later works, observing that the reader needs to be armed with all
his negative capability, to be open-minded and welcome whatever
emerges, ready for the unexpected, not rush to interpret the text,
but instead wait as the ‘actual events’ manifest themselves in the
text. In Attention and Interpretation Bion compares his reader to the
psychoanalyst:

the reader must disregard what I say until the O of the experi-
ence of reading has evolved to a point where the actual events of
reading issue in his interpretation of the experiences. Too great a
regard for what I have written obstructs the process I represent
by the terms ‘he becomes the O that is common to himself and
myself’.
(1970, p. 28)

Curiously, once again Ogden does not include A Memoir of the Future
in his essay on reading Bion, yet his advice seems to me particularly
apt for approaching these texts.

Exit to α
To my mind, Meg Harris Williams’s definition of Bion’s texts as ‘a
reverie now’ is strikingly appropriate because it comprises all the
actors employed in the experience of reading. As we said, the three
46 Sara Boffito

books have a dream-like quality, written in the language of dreams,

and the author’s capacity of reverie is what he has created through
maieutics and is a unique substance. To my mind, in Memoir Bion
has gone further: it seems to me that these books offer their reverie to
the reader, easing him through any aesthetic conflict arising from the
experience of reading [them]. All three books both seduce and alarm
the reader with their impenetrable and unnerving style that eschews
mollifying the reader with the weapons of rational knowledge or com-
mon sense.
Like the child that delights in the body of its mother, the reader
of Memoir also has a ‘dubious experience’ and can be compared to
someone who has ‘come into a strange country where he knows nei-
ther the language nor the customary non-verbal cues and communi-
cations’ (Meltzer and Harris Williams, 1989, p. 41). In order to break
out of this dubious experience, he must meet the gaze of its mother
who absorbs and transforms its anxiety and supplies the child with
other indicators for facing the unknown experience without rushing
to make it known too soon; someone who supplies the child with its
alpha function so that it can develop a ‘function of creative imagi-
nation’: she is the partner necessary for becoming ‘mentally alive’,
as Alice observes. It is true that often enough one loses one’s way in
these texts, but Bion does not leave his reader alone: he supplies (al-
beit sometimes hidden) clues and indications that provide the reader
with bearings for navigating the unknown world. By this, I mean the
nearly constant presence of a figure among the various viewpoints put
forward by the speakers who voice scepticism and appeal to common
sense, or doubts, or the fragility of the characters, with whom it is
easy to identify, but also to the notes and scattered ‘stage directions’
inserted in brackets, as with a play script.
What is most striking, however, is the appearance in such a com-
plex text of notes that offer extremely concise and precise definitions
of concepts that are otherwise barely decipherable, whose explanation
elsewhere might occupy considerable space in his theoretical writings.
The notes introduce a viewpoint that might be considered ‘external’
to the dialogues underway and help the reader find his bearings and
offer the occasional summary. Take, for instance, the concept of the
‘beta element’ described so directly in one such note: ‘Beta Element:
as a convenient method of referring to something which may exist;
 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland 47

not a thought, but that might become what thinkers would describe
as a thought, e.g. if a dog comes when it is called’ (MF, ch. 3, p. 14).
Among the ‘stage directions’ he uses, one in particular that comes
to mind the way Bion closes the monologue of Myself (ibid., ch. 13,
p. 57), who, after getting ensnared in a tangle of ideas on the power
of the mind and its revelations, decides to turn in: ‘Time to I went to
sleep. Excuse me … (Exit to α)’ (ibid., p. 59). It is almost as if Bion is
asking the reader for help proceeding in the said direction, towards
this α: ‘something which is not, and is not like, but is becoming’, as he
defines in a note when the character Alpha looms into view.
Certainly, while such directions usher the reader along a somewhat
tortuous and inaccessible trail that is barred to anyone expecting
straightforward answers or a well-beaten track, the same route of-
fers new panoramas and revelations to those willing to apply their
patience: ‘Exit to α’ sounds like the kind of direction Carroll’s young
Alice might come across on the way through Wonderland, like when
she encounters the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said
the Cat.
“I don't much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“… so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you're sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long
enough.”
(Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, ch. VI, p. 75)

Another tool Bion adopts to provide bearings for his reader through-
out the trilogy is the hyperbolic use of quotations, by means of which
the author sets his reader in the glad company of many a popular
figure, creating an oasis of familiarity as it were, making the reader
feel at home and free to roam among the many beloved characters​
he has conjured up, and offering comfort even in this ‘back-to-front
world’ of his.
I wish to end these reflections by taking Bion’s lead in evoking
a beloved author, whose verses seem to me to echo in the pages of
48 Sara Boffito

A Memoir of the Future. After ploughing my way through Bion’s lyri-

cal adventure, I like to imagine Bion the clinician as an analyst with a
bent for fiction, a figure of that kind that W.H. Auden evokes in these
verses:

The novelist
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.
For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
W. H. Auden, 1940

One might conclude from this reading that perhaps the analyst like-
wise ought to give birth to the novelist lurking within him as a means
of helping the patient discover his own bent for fiction. In this way, the
patient can give voice to the multitude of characters that will emerge
in the course of that analytical adventure.
Chapter 3

Bion and the apes

The bridging problem of
A Memoir of the Future
Benjamin H. Ogden

Tenerife is the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands. It sits fewer than 200
miles off the coast of West Africa, nearest to Morocco. In 1912, at
the behest of the neurophysicist Max Rothman, the Prussian Acad-
emy of Sciences agreed to establish there the Anthropoid Station for
the study of the thinking capacity of apes. Rothman, in a paper out-
lining the conditions that would need to be met for the creation of
such a station, proposed Tenerife because it ‘can be reached in six
days from Europe; African anthropomorphs can be transported there
without issue straight from Cameroun. Asian anthropomorphs can
be transported there fairly easily via Tangier, where large German
steamships dock en route to Asia’ (qtd. in Ruiz and Sánchez, 2014,
p. 3). By J­ anuary of the following year, the first director of the pro-
ject, Eugene Teuber, had arrived on the island, tasked with getting
the station up and running. Teuber was very young (not yet 24 years
old), and was still working toward a doctorate, so he agreed only to a
one-year position.
Working quickly, Teuber leased an estate on which he and his wife
could live and constructed the necessary living quarters for seven
chimpanzees and the ‘playground’ on which experiments could be
conducted. The playground extended for 1,000 square meters and was
enclosed on all sides (including the roof) by wire mesh, which hung
from a 5 m high support pole in the center of the yard. Inside the
enclosure were a few banana trees, shrubs, and a jungle gym. Before
his one-year term was complete, Teuber was able to use the complex
to conduct experiments into the gestural language of chimpanzees as
progenitor to human language.
50 Benjamin H. Ogden

It was not, however, until the arrival of Teuber’s successor, the

psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, in December 1913 that Tenerife
would become the unlikely setting for among the most important,
arguably the most ruthless, studies to have been conducted on the
nature and conditions for thinking. These studies, conducted from
1913 to 1917, are described in Köhler’s monograph The Mentality of
Apes, one of those rare books that are both little known and classics.
Köhler would later become one of the principle elaborators of Gestalt
psychology, and several Gestalt tenets already underlie the experi-
ments on Tenerife, namely that perception of a whole is required for
intelligence, that the whole is different from the elemental parts, and
that stimulus-response theories of behavior are imperfect (simian in-
telligent behavior was not merely a matter of trial-and-error learning,
as Thorndike had proposed).
The goal of Köhler’s research was, in his words, to establish
‘whether [animals] do not behave with intelligence and insight un-
der conditions which require such behavior’ (p. 1). To determine
whether apes could exhibit evidence of thinking, Köhler devised a
series of experiments that shared a basic pattern: an ape would be
faced with a situation in which an objective (a piece of fruit, usu-
ally) is visible to the ape; however, in each case ‘the direct path to
the objective is blocked, but a roundabout way left open’ (p. 4).
­Example: the male chimpanzee Sultan is led into the yard. He is
hungry. Surveying the entirety of his environment, Sultan sees that
from the wire mesh ceiling of the yard hangs a bunch of bananas;
an out-of-reach prize. Into the yard comes Dr. Köhler, dragging be-
hind him two wooden boxes, which he drops at different places in
the yard. Köhler then leaves the yard, but continues to watch from
somewhere outside the compound.
So: the man who feeds me unaccountably stopped feeding me; now
my food is clearly hanging up there, where it has never hung before;
there are now boxes at my disposal that were not available previously;
the man remains close by, watching me with great interest. The exper-
iment has begun. Maybe, so has thinking.
Consider this description of Sultan’s state of mind: ‘Sultan knows:
now one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are
about. The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the
 Bion and the apes 51

limits of one’s thinking. But what must one think?’ (p. 72). This is
Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character of J.M. Coetzee’s quasi-­
novel Elizabeth Costello. She is delivering a lecture on ‘The Lives of
Animals.’ For Costello, and in this case, I believe for Coetzee too,
thinking emerges in response to a circumstance in which thinking is
plainly expected—in which an environment is animated to make one
think. Thinking is, first and foremost, due to the pressure of the spe-
cial arrangement of the environment, which supplies the desire and
the frustration of the desire. However, based on Coetzee’s rendering,
more is required than desire and frustration for thought to come into
being. The environment must additionally invest in us a feeling of
‘supposed to.’ This feeling of ‘supposed to’ leads to a recognition that
there is someone or something that wishes us to think. ‘That is what
the bananas up there are about.’ They are about some wish the world,
as well as the world’s designer, has for us to think. Just as beauty
would like us to look and to continue looking (to stare), the world
wants us to think about it. How does the world, and its designer, con-
vey to us that it would like us to think? By presenting the world to us
in the form of a problem, the solution to which is the answer to the
question: but what must one think? The world is designed not for our
general contemplation, but to draw out of us the solutions to the prob-
lems it poses. The world calls to us as a problem to be solved.
In Learning from Experience and ‘Theory of Thinking,’ Bion’s con-
ception of thinking is similar in several ways to Coetzee’s conception
of thinking. For Bion, thoughts exert a pressure, which is experienced
as the pain of the feeling of ‘supposed to think.’ In response to the
problem of this pressure, thinking develops. Most importantly for
my purposes, which will eventually be to consider his experimental
work of fiction A Memoir of the Future, Bion conceives of thinking
as the outcome of the demand we feel the world places on us to think
the correct thought, to provide a solution to the emotional problem
that it poses. Thinking, for Bion, is the product of the problem posed
by thoughts. That Bion formulates thinking as a problem is every-
where in the language of Learning from Experience: ‘Envy aroused
by a breast that provides love, understanding, experience and wis-
dom poses a problem that is solved by destruction of alpha-­function’
(p. 11); ‘The theory of functions offered a prospect of solving
52 Benjamin H. Ogden

this problem by assuming that I contained unknown functions of

his personality’ (p. 21); ‘But the problem stimulates the thought …’
(p. 63); ‘the model is then found to be insufficiently similar to clar-
ify the problem for which the solution is sought’ (p. 80). The word
‘problem’ appears at least 30 times in the slim book.
Attached to these problems, we find the same pressures and feel-
ings Coetzee finds in Köhler’s experiment: a feeling of ‘supposed to’;
an environment that exerts a pressure that ‘require[s] an apparatus to
cope’ (Bion, 1962b, p. 306) with it; a sense of design inherent in the en-
vironment (the environment is designed as a persecutory or pleasure-­
giving object); a sense that the design of the environment is one of
a problem to be solved by thought. These are the conditions for the
coming into being of thinking.
For both Coetzee and Bion, thinking can develop only when one is
placed into a situation that one experiences as a problem, when one
knows one is supposed to think, and when one knows that the world
has been arranged to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking. Coetzee,
however, goes further than Bion in that he links the conditions for the
coming into being of thinking with the conditions for the coming into
being of literature. Consider how the opening of Elizabeth Costello puts
into conversation the problem of thinking and the problem of literature:

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get
us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank.
It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together
a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them,
and having solved them push on. Let us assume that, however it
may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is
built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left
behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory,
where we want to be.
(2004, p. 1)

For Coetzee, literature comes into being much as thinking does.

Upon opening a book, one finds oneself in a world that resembles
reality (it is familiar) but also feels to us designed to provoke thinking
(it is unfamiliarly provocative). One is faced with a problem posed by
the book, a problem that exerts a pressure.
 Bion and the apes 53

We could say that the reader is like Sultan, the author like Köhler,
and the text (particularly those aspects that seem to call out for inter-
pretation) like the boxes and the bananas hung out of reach. Much as
Sultan must learn to build a bridge from the ground to the bananas
by stacking the boxes, we must learn to build our bridge into the ‘far
territory’ in which we have left behind the non-literary and accepted
the conditions for literary experience.
Depending on whether we are reader or text or author, we will play
a different part in the mysterious bridging problem. However, despite
the different roles each may play, we (a pronoun that repeats many
times in these lines) are all interested in a solution to the problem
presented by the work. The solution will take the form of an ability to
read the work so that reading becomes a process of experiencing and
working out a solution to the language and life of the work. There are,
then, two kinds of reading: reading that is simply the passive com-
prehension of language (reading without thinking) and reading of
a higher order that would be akin to what Bion means by ‘learning
from experience.’ A pre-conception (an instinct for reading as well as
problem solving) is mated with its frustration (how does one read at
a level at which the problem of reading is solved?) to create thinking,
which may involve not only interpretation but also a tolerance for the
frustrations of difficult literature. This is all to say that Bion’s theory
of thinking also says something about reading—something that goes
beyond what Bion himself ever knew, or said, about the relevance of
his own thinking to literature and aesthetics.
For Coetzee, Köhler’s experiments not only lay bare a theory of
thinking and a theory of literature, but also give us a means of eval-
uating the experience of thinking and the experience of reading.
Coetzee supplies an ethics by which to regard the humanity or inhu-
manity, the success or failure, of the problems of thinking and art. He
affords us criteria for estimating literary achievement. Here is a fuller
account of Costello’s description of Sultan’s response to Köhler’s ex-
periment, wherein Costello gives an ethical reading of Köhler’s exper-
iments through a depiction of Sultan’s mind:

Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the

bananas up there are about. The bananas are there to make one
think, to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking. But what must
54 Benjamin H. Ogden

one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What
have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why
does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the
right thought. Even a more complicated thought – for instance:
What is wrong with him, what misconceptions does he have of
me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana
hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor? – is
wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates
to reach the bananas?
(Ibid., p. 72)

Coetzee introduces here an ethics of thinking, and of literature, which

he summarizes shortly thereafter in poignant terms:

At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought.

From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?)
he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumen-
tal reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards
acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite
that needs to be satisfied.
(Ibid., p. 73)

What is Coetzee’s assessment of Köhler ethically, even aesthetically?

In devising tests for the apes, Köhler has played his part insofar as
he presented the conditions for thinking. This is equivalent to saying
that he has presented a problem that can evoke thought. Furthermore,
he has played the game fairly insofar as he has only posed problems
that indeed have solutions. He has not tricked the apes. He has not
set them impossible or unfair tasks. To do that would have been to
torture them, to make them feel, as Bion describes in Learning from
Experience, like the patient who ‘feels that he has feelings, but cannot
learn from them; sensations … but cannot learn from them either.
A determination not to experience anything can be shown to co-exist
with an inability to reject or ignore any stimulus’ (1962a, p. 18). Put
in such a position, Sultan could not reject any stimulus for interpre-
tation, and so would be left in a state of intolerable effort to solve a
problem that is unsolvable. These are the rules of war, whether you are
a research psychologist, a psychoanalyst, or a fiction writer: pose fair,
 Bion and the apes 55

tolerable problems; provide the implements necessary for something

that the subject would recognize as solution, as success, as a bridge.
However, Köhler, Coetzee tells us, lost his way ethically the moment
he forced Sultan to at every turn ‘think the less interesting thought.’
As Costello puts it, ‘In his deepest being Sultan is not interested in the
banana problem. Only the experimenter’s single-minded regimenta-
tion forces him to concentrate on it’ (p. 75). This is not simply a limi-
tation placed on Sultan that keeps him trapped in his apedom; it is a
form of sadism in that it trains Sultan to hate thinking. Thinking is a
burden that he can only experience as bizarre and labyrinthine, much
like the beta elements that Bion tells us beset the psychotic mind. The
lesson taught to Sultan is the same lesson learned by the simpleton or
fool in so many works of literature: thinking will get you nowhere in
life because you are not good at it; if you can give it up completely,
you should. Now that you can think, all you can think is: I am a fool.
This lesson is born not of love or knowledge, but of hate and scientific
devotion. Against this cruel lesson, literature usually grants the fool
some justice: he is in the end revealed as a font of wisdom, and the
world to have been the fool all along.
On these grounds, Costello concludes that ‘Wolfgang Köhler was
probably a good man. A good man but not a poet’ (p. 74). He lacked,
she says, ‘a feel for the ape’s experience’ (p. 74). I take this to mean
that Köhler failed to grasp the aesthetic dimension of his science. As
a psychologist, he worked justly, breeding the miracle of thought in
a way that science would consider humane. Aesthetically, however,
he failed. Köhler was not able to recognize that, just as Sultan had
been tasked with crossing from apedom into humanity, he himself
had been tasked with crossing over from the scientific to the poetic,
from the practical to the lyric. While Sultan was stacking his boxes,
Köhler was traversing the bridge that, Coetzee tells us, is ‘the problem
of the opening,’ not just the opening of the novel, but also an opening
through which one can find one’s way out of practical reason and into
higher forms of thought. Sultan and his brethren managed, in the
end, to think, learning to pile boxes up to reach the bananas. Köhler,
for his part, was unable to think, for he did not recognize the problem
that his own experiments posed to him, as a psychologist and scien-
tist. He had no feel for Sultan’s experience and so could not traverse
the bridge connecting psychology and art.
56 Benjamin H. Ogden

Coetzee’s reading of Köhler, combined with the theory of liter-

ature proposed in the opening of Elizabeth Costello, can be read
both as a cautionary tale of the fate of the psychologist who ventures
haphazardly into the poetic realm (and fails to realize it and conse-
quently fails) and as a guideline for evaluating a work of literature
that poses its aesthetics in the terms of thought. I will summarize
these guidelines: literature very often invites thinking by presenting
the reader with conditions in which thinking is called for. This is not
incidental, but rather central to the aesthetic function of literature.
The aesthetics of literature work by making a particular kind of ap-
peal to the intellect. This appeal is made in the form of a problem
(just as epistemological appeals are made by Köhler and Bion in the
form of problems). However, there are ethically inflected rules of en-
gagement that govern these problems. First, a problem must have a
solution—in other words, the subject (the reader, in our case) must
be capable of interpreting the problem in a way that alleviates the
frustration of the problem. (Torture should never masquerade as a
problem.) Second, a problem must lead toward the more interesting
thought, never the less interesting thought. We should never be led
to hate thinking or to concentrate on a problem that cannot interest
us. The purpose of the problem should not be to make the reader feel
a fool. Lastly, literature must make it possible, as Costello says, ‘to
think ourselves into the being of another’ (p. 80). We must be able
to press ourselves sympathetically into the mind of the one who is
attempting to solve the problem being posed and so be capable of
facing everything that the ape, the reader, the patient, faces. For we
are responsible for what they face; we have designed the dusty yard
of bananas and boxes, the novel, the consulting room. They are on
this island because of us.
Late in his career, Bion attempted to write memoir and fic-
tion. His most ambitious project in these areas is the philosophical
novel A Memoir of the Future, a very long book whose primary goal
seems to be to cross the bridge from psychological epistemology to
aesthetics. More specifically, the book is an attempt on Bion’s part
to discover what, if anything, happens to theories of thinking and
dream work when they are contained in literary aesthetics. What hap-
pens to the problem of thinking when it is transformed into a problem
 Bion and the apes 57

of literature? In this respect, Bion is on the same journey as Köhler,

though Bion was more adventurous than Köhler. Bion was willing to
see to the end, in his own way, the aesthetic dimension of his scientific
work, to investigate the aesthetic function that inheres in the thinking
function.
There are different methods of evaluating literature, but it seems
to me that the only fair method of evaluation is one that judges the
work according to the terms it sets for itself. This method has the
advantage of refraining from imposing a standard that is external
or irrelevant to the work and also the advantage of allowing us to
judge the work on the basis of how well it executes according to
its own goals and procedures. It is extremely difficult to know how
best to read a work like A Memoir of the Future, but I believe I have
demonstrated that Bion’s fiction must be evaluated according to the
guidelines described above. This makes sense, as these guidelines
are suited for works that span science and art and that are explicitly
couched in epistemological terms. Just as Köhler’s exploration of
thinking extended into, and became refashioned into the terms of,
literature, so does Bion’s fiction place the contained of epistemology
into the container of literature. So, in what follows, I will apply each
of the tenets presented in the guidelines above to Bion’s A Memoir
of the Future as a way of considering the relative success or fail-
ure of Bion’s attempt to recast the coming into being of thinking in
literary terms.

First rule: problems posed must have

solutions
It is easy to be misled by the first rule. The first rule is not support-
ing the notion that literature has a solution. Art has no solution; it is
always in the act of expressing that aspect of itself that is irreducible,
and of opposing any tendency of criticism to reduce it to formula-
tion. However, literature must also grant the reader some way of in-
terpreting it such that the reader is able to feel that he or she is in the
process of solving the problem of the work. The act of solving the
problem must give the reader the satisfaction of progress, must make
the reader feel that his reading is truth-directed. The reader must be
58 Benjamin H. Ogden

able to learn from the experience of reading, even without any hope
of coming to the end of that learning experience.
The flaw of A Memoir of the Future is that it poses a problem to
which there is no solution. At every turn, it presents the reader with a
bridging problem: it presents characters that amount to beta elements
exerting a pressure to which the reader wishes to develop the appara-
tus for reading. In the introduction, Bion asserts that in what he writes
significant meanings and rhythms are ‘communicated and interpret-
able’ (p. ix), and that there is a set of ‘rules’ to which the language of
the work ‘conforms,’ and though difficult to follow they can indeed
be followed. However, it seems to me that Bion here does not under-
stand the transformation that occurs when the problem of thinking
becomes the problem of literature. Bion seems to believe that, in psy-
chological epistemology, an ability to tolerate frustration leads to the
development of an apparatus for thinking and that, transferred into
the aesthetic realm, the same will occur. However, reading requires
a sense of being in the process of solving the problem posed by the
work. Reading is not a coping mechanism, but rather a motivated
sense of building an interpretive bridge that functions as a solution.
The reading apparatus does not develop in precisely the same way as
the thinking apparatus. The reading apparatus solves the problem of
reading: it transforms reading from a desperate response to the frus-
tration of confusion into an active knocking together of a bridge into
the aesthetic territory.
A Memoir of the Future is thinkable, but it is not readable. It offers
no aesthetic solution to the problem it poses. It trades in frustration,
with the expectation that frustration will inevitably breed thought.
As the character Man says to the character Bion, ‘I am not going to
do your thinking for you’ (p. 161). In other words, the book will offer
no relief from frustration—solve the problem of the book yourself
or starve. But the frustration, in the absence of a solution, becomes
a form of torture in which the reader, as a substitute for Sultan, is
led into situations in which the experiment is designed to give the
sense that there is a solution to the problem when in fact there is no
solution. This would be as cruel as leaving Sultan starving in a cage,
bananas hung from the wire ceiling, with boxes that he could never
stack or arrange to reach his prize.
 Bion and the apes 59

Second rule: a problem must lead toward

the more interesting thought, never the less
interesting thought
One of the respites of the death-by-a-thousand-cuts that is A Memoir
of the Future is the fact that it leads the reader toward the more inter-
esting, not the less interesting, thought. The book is, in many ways, a
machine devised to draw one out of practical or instrumental reason,
and push one toward creative and metaphysical thinking. Despite all
the frustration that the book foists on the reader, it does not engen-
der in the reader a hatred, or distrust, of thinking precisely because,
where it does permit lucid thought, it does so in a way that leads the
reader away from apedom and toward higher intellect. We see how
this happens in the following selection:

MYSELF: What is the difference that you seem to make between ‘theo-
rising’ and what you call ‘practising’ psycho-analysis? It seems to
me that practising psycho-analysis consists of theorizing.
BION: ‘Theorising’ is, I admit, a part of practising psycho-analysis.
MYSELF: I think what you have just said sounds as if it makes some-
thing clear, but almost at once the illumination either turns out
to be illusory and your explanation meaningless, or perhaps you
have clarified a problem and the ‘clarification’ is at once replaced
by a further series of ‘unknowns.’
BION: Both are possible. That is a difficulty about ‘learning’. The mo-
ment of illumination is also the moment at which it becomes clear
that there is a doubt about the ‘clarification’ itself and about the
‘matter’ which it is hoped to comprehend. I think this must be a
familiar experience to Sherlock Holmes.
SHERLOCK: I am not a philosopher and I don’t think I can even guess
what a psycho-analyst is, but since you appeal to me as if I were
experienced I take it you are referring to something of which I
have experience. I remember an occasion when I saw a client and
I detected a strong smell of cigar about his clothes. It proved to be
a valuable clue and later I wrote a monograph on ash which also
turned out to be valuable, though in a way that I never expected.
(MF, pp. 201–202)
60 Benjamin H. Ogden

The passage reflects the deep structure of the novel: a concept

(theorizing) is raised, after which it undergoes a process of inter-
rogation that simultaneously clarifies and mystifies the concept.
When one concept is tentatively proposed as equivalent to another
(here theorizing is proposed as analogous to psychoanalysis), it
is immediately subjected to processes meant to cast doubt on the
comparison: theorizing is presented as just one ‘part of’ psycho-
analysis, but this refinement (rather than leading down a path to-
ward further clarity) is immediately accused of being a charade
(clarification is undone by a ‘series of unknowns’). Every clarifica-
tion is negated by the fact that the clarification only serves to in-
troduce unknowns. This dialectic of elucidation and mystification
functions as a motor by which the less interesting thought (what
one believes is true) is transformed into a more interesting thought
(what one believed was true is now revealed to be only partially
true), and then into an even more interesting thought (that eluci-
dation and stupefaction are in fact two side of the same coin, each
bringing the other into being). The entire book is a kind of ma-
chine for spurring the thinking apparatus to greater and greater
heights. The thinking function proliferates even as the aesthetic
function falters.

Third rule: He who designs the problem of the

book must be able to think his way ‘into the
being of another’
Coetzee calls the capacity to think one’s way into another’s being
the ‘sympathetic imagination’ (2004, p. 80). This is not simply the
ability to picture oneself behaving like Sultan, but the ability to in-
habit Sultan such that one would know what it was like for Sultan
to be Sultan. Though a human can never be an ape, he can inhabit
the mind of an ape if he can spur himself to exercise the sympa-
thetic imagination. Much as Sultan is drawn into human thinking
(made to think as if he were a human, not just behave as if he were
thinking like a human), so must the author be able to follow Sultan
backward, so to speak, as he leaves the human territory and returns
into his ape being.
 Bion and the apes 61

A Memoir of the Future is an interesting test case with regard to the

third rule. The book opens with a dialogue that speaks to the rela-
tionship between author and reader:

Q: Can you give me an idea what this is about?

A: Psycho-analysis, I believe.
Q: Are you sure? It looks a queer affair.
A: It is a queer affair—like psycho-analysis. You’d have to read it.
Q: How much does it cost?
A: It says it on the book. You would have to read it as well though.
Q: Of course. But I don’t think I can afford the time or money.
A: Nor do I.
Q: But haven’t you read it?
A: Yes, in a way.
Q: You’re a queer salesman. I’m only wanting to know …
A: I’m not the salesman. I only wrote it.
Q: Oh, I beg your pardon! I quite thought …
A: I’m flattered, but I’m only the author.
Q: May I have your autograph?
A: No.
Q: Oh.
(MF, p. 2)

Bion is right to insist here that a writer is a reader but in a way that is
different from how a reader who is not a writer is a reader. A writer
reads what he writes ‘in a way.’ He reads as writer. Bion is establishing
from the outset that a reader (‘Q’)—particularly one who is so naïve
as to think that a work is about some idea—will never be a reader in
the way that the author (‘A’) is a reader. Q is, really, every reader who
is not A, and Q is decisively excluded from the possibility of reading.
Another way of putting this is that Bion is both A and Q. Bion is not
trying to think his way into another’s being, but into his own being.
His sympathetic imagination extends not outward, but rather inward.
We, as readers (as ‘Q’s) are on the outside looking in—we ask the
wrong questions; we want something from the book that it can’t give
us. We are not so much readers of Bion’s book but witnesses to Bion’s
reading of himself—his attempt to inhabit himself imaginatively.
62 Benjamin H. Ogden

A Memoir of the Future is not really a problem posed to the reader,

but a problem posed by Bion to himself as reader. If there is a touch
of genius in the book (along with many touches of failure), it is in
how Bion has taken the age-old task of empathizing with another’s
experience and transformed it into perhaps the more novel task of
inhabiting one’s own mind, of imagining what it is like for I to be I.
Bion speaks directly to this challenge here:

MYSELF: Since I cannot, for all my experience, analytic or other than

analytic, say who I am, I know now that it is very unlikely that
I shall know any better at some future date. It is impossible to
believe anyone who is not me will know better. I am sure it would
be useful if I knew who that person is that I am compelled to be
as long as I exist.
(MF, p. 131)

The philosophy of self here is convoluted, but amounts to the self-­

acknowledging that it is both its own sole author and sole reader, both
A and Q. The mind is a problem posed to itself, just as for Bion the
literary work is a work written for the writer who reads. Though there
is an auto-destructive cleverness to a work that presents itself in this
way, there is also an exhaustive solipsism. After the prefatory dia-
logue between A and Q, the novel opens with the statement, ‘I am
tired’ (p. 3). And, it seems that there is, for nearly 800 pages, a weari-
ness born of the torment of being asked to read a book we are told we
cannot read, and of being asked to solve a problem for which there is
no solution. Led again and again into the yard, Sultan no doubt felt
as the reader does when faced with so much self-flagellating thinking:
‘I am tired.’
At one level, A Memoir of the Future falls short of its purported
goal of submitting psychoanalytic epistemology to aesthetic episte-
mology. As I have tried to demonstrate, Memoir creates a reader only
to punish or exclude him, which if we follow analogous theories of
thinking (the cognitive behavioral theory of Köhler and the aesthetic
theory of Coetzee) is a violation of the contract that holds sway over
researcher and subject, or author and reader. And yet, at another
level, Bion’s work, as entrapped as it is in the ineluctable conventions
of thinking and literary aesthetics, also is able to serve as a rebellion
 Bion and the apes 63

against pre-existent rules and expectations. The Epilogue to Memoir

speaks to this aspect of the book:

All my life I have been imprisoned, frustrated, dogged by

common-sense, reason, memories, desires and—greatest bug-
bear of all—understanding and being understood. This is an
attempt to express my rebellion, to say ‘Good-bye’ to all that.
It is my wish, I now realize doomed to failure, to write a book
unspoiled by any tincture of common-sense, reason, etc. (see
above). So although I would write, ‘Abandon Hope all ye who ex-
pect to find any facts—scientific, aesthetic or religious—in this
book’, I cannot claim to have succeeded. All these will, I fear, be
seen to have left their traces, vestiges, ghosts hidden within these
words; even sanity, like ‘cheerfulness’, will creep in. However suc-
cessful my attempt, there would always be the risk that the book
‘became’ acceptable, respectable, honoured and unread. ‘Why
write then?’ you may ask. To prevent someone who KNOWS from
filling the empty space—but I fear I am being ‘reasonable’, that
great Ape. Wishing you all a Happy Lunacy and a Relativistic
Fission …
(MF, p. 578)

Bion here identifies as central to Memoir the concerns, feelings,

and problems that I found in his work via Köhler: the problem of
being ‘imprisoned,’ a sense of doom and dread borne of unceasing
frustration, a steak of sadism (captured above in the allusion to
Dante), and an awe-inspiring pointlessness that is the heart of an
800-page book that cannot be read. But Bion here announces that,
though he is forever haunted by the traces of established formulae
and conventions, he will do his best to live as outlaw—to live out-
side of all the laws and boxes and camps. The ‘great Ape’ for Bion
is he who is ‘reasonable,’ a being who is led to solve the problem in
front of him without questioning the terms of the problem itself.
He who rebels against this expectation emerges from his apedom
into human life.
In several places in The Mentality of Apes, Köhler recounts mo-
ments when the apes grow enraged. They kick at the boxes, snarl,
flagellate themselves. The descriptions are painful to read, because one
64 Benjamin H. Ogden

understands the torment and frustration that drives the chimpanzees

to wish that the world would stop demanding so much from them.
Bion, in the above passage gives us a kinder reading of these irate fits
of the apes: that Sultan and his fellow apes were exhibiting their own
kind of rebellion, one that expressed the wise thinking that inheres
in the ability to reject knowing and live less knowingly. They were
not being driven mad by a malevolent game, but erupting in brave
rebellion.
Chapter 4

Memoir of the Future and

memoir of the numinous
Mauro Manica

Is a mystery unveiling?
In one of my previous works (2013), I suggested an imaginary conjec-
ture,1 putting forth the hypothesis that a ‘mystery’ might have taken
place at the Tavistock. That is, when a pre-analytic Bion got in contact
with Jung’s theories – and there is evidence of such an occurrence –
this resulted in an imprinting that affected Bion’s thinking.
Similarly to what happens for the individual personality – where
the eruption of underground experiences confronts us with the emer-
gency of parts of the mind that have not fully come into being or have
been precociously miscarried, as they did not find any space within
the mind of the object (Manica, 2013) – there also seem to be models
and theories that did not find enough space in the Master’s (in our
case, Freud’s) mind or in the mind of the scientific community that he
created. Accordingly, they sank into the underground galleries and
dungeons of psychoanalytic conceptualisation.
Just like the scientific and biographic vicissitudes of Tausk, Ferenczi
and Jung that could be other emblematic evidence of these sympto-
matic segregations. As ostracised and underground theories since
the early developments of psychoanalysis, they were brought to light
through the volcanic eruptions and the earthquake shocks from the
impact with ever-new problems stemming from clinical practice.
We have been induced to think that their conceptual differences
caused the diaspora (in 1912–1913) between the Master and Jung2 –
i.e., their ideas about libido and the centrality of sexuality as well as
their different conceptions about the meaning of symbols. In fact,
Jung just seemed to bring to its extreme consequences a teleological
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conception of the unconscious that, implicit in Freud’s conception,

bestows to the symbolic function a main role in terms of the develop-
mental potential of the human mind.
In Jung’s perspective, the contexts that anticipated the most current
developments of post-Freudian psychoanalysis seemed to have been
split or dissociated and stored there – that is to say, he offered a fur-
ther perspective on the unconscious that was not only formed as a
depository of repressed childhood memories, but could also overlook
the infinite (Matte Blanco, 1975), as it is driven by the truth instinct
(Bion, 1977a), an impulse to representation (Bollas, 2009) and the
knowledge instinct (Ogden, 2011).
Then, could we think that there is an underground Jungian think-
ing that first sank and later re-emerged as a volcanic eruption in the
epistemological and theoretical evolution of psychoanalysis? And,
if we can hypothesise (mythologhéin) that the very diffraction of the
concept of the unconscious was the original cause of the diaspora
between Freud’s and Jung’s thinking, perhaps we could suggest (or
formulate an imaginative conjecture) that Bion, the new Master of
psychoanalysis, became the depository (the last link) of a heretic and
subversive legacy that was unconsciously passed on to him at the
Tavistock. Maybe we should say that he was the genius heir of an
underground not fully lodged, not yet fully thinkable that we suppose
ought to exist3 in Freud’s mind and psychoanalysis.
Then, it becomes intriguing to wonder if this unconscious and
implicit transmission of a further psychoanalytic vertex was in fact
the ‘mystery’ underlying the encounters between Bion and Jung at the
Tavistock in the fall of 1935.
Since his Tavistock Lectures (Bion, 2005), several evocative con-
sonances between these two minds, like underground streams, seem
to flow into an underground river that originated a common uncon-
scious and pre-scientific thinking. However, besides the conceptual
merging (archetype/pre-conceptions, psychoid/protomental, ampli-
fication/reverie, soul/α-function, alchemic recipiens/container (♀),
synchronicity/constant conjunction), we also find some consonant in-
tuitions about dreaming, the work of transformations and the primacy
of emotions over the drives, where the Jungian↔(Freudian)↔Bionian
underground stream has merged most significantly. Is it a stream that
the mind – even before coming into being – is already navigating to
 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous 67

look for worlds that have not yet been thought by any pre-existing
theory?
In a troubled and painful time of his life (‘a period of inner uncer-
tainty began for me. It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of
disorientation’; 1961, p. 170) – between 1912/1913 (after the rupture
with Freud) and 1916/1917 – Jung was absorbed in what he called a
work with and on his own unconscious. He therefore decided to re-
cord all of his thoughts, fantasies, dreams and visions of those years
in his Black Book at first (six small volumes of notes bound in black
leather) and then to copy them in a Gothic calligraphic script, like me-
dieval manuscripts, into a book bound in red leather: the Red Book.
Until 2009, except for a few excerpts and quotations by Jung himself
in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), the Red Book or Liber novus
was unpublished. Only recently, it became available to be studied as a
depository of the (unconscious) sources of Jung’s thinking.
However, it is an enigmatic and mysterious work that forces the
reader to leave the common paths, the common sense of the lógos,
and to venture in oneiric wanderings, full of characters that seem
to embody different parts of the author’s self. We meet the Biblical
Elias and Salomè, the black snake and Ka (the incarnated soul) and
Philemon – some kind of an avatar, guiding spirit or maybe Virgil
who accompanies us into the ‘underground’ of the unconscious. It
becomes difficult to resist the suggestion that the intuitions, still in
embryo, that have been actualised in the narratological turn (Ferro,
2010) of post-Freudian and post-Bionian psychoanalysis, were al-
ready peeping out in the Red Book.
The characters, Jung says (1961), are deep manifestations of the
unconscious, in other words, narrative derivatives of emotional con-
stellations that can start to introduce some traces of representability
in the analytic field. But then, as visionary as this might sound, why
not think about α-function and α-dream-work in sleeping and wak-
ing? Jung (1961, p. 177) observes: ‘To the extent that I managed to
translate the emotions into images – that is to say, to find the images
which were concealed in the emotions – I was inwardly calmed and
reassured’. This is undoubtedly the account of an analytic move, but
it could easily be also the report of a clinical vignette from a consulta-
tion room in which the dreaming ensemble (Grotstein, 2007) of patient
and analyst alphabetises an aphasic and intolerable emotion.
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In a wild synthesis, we could try to say that the Red Book is the pro-
posal of a method (methà-odòs): it points the way and outlines the di-
rection of a path of personal individuation. It is no accident that Jung
(2009) suggested that every patient or therapist (every human being)
could compose and illustrate his/her own ‘red book’ with pictures.
But then, is this how we could unveil the Tavistock ‘mystery’? Has
Bion unconsciously accepted this mandate? Could the excommuni-
cated ‘prince’, a scholar of the Eastern world, have as his ‘mystical’
probable successor the genius who emigrated from India to revolution-
ise Western psychoanalysis? And if this is the case, how? And when?
With a last imaginative effort, we can hypothesise (phantasieren)
that A Memoir of the Future was conceived and written as Wilfred
Ruprecht Bion’s Red Book. Jung (1961, pp. 318–319) says:

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question

to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed
to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise
I am dependent upon the world’s answer. That is a suprapersonal
life task, which I accomplish only by effort and with difficulty.
Perhaps it is a question which preoccupied my ancestors, and to
which they could not answer. Could that be why I am so impressed
by the fact that the conclusion of Faust contains no solution? …
I also think of the possibility that through the achievement of an
individual a question enters the world, to which he must provide
some kind of answer. For example, my way of posing the question
as well as my answer may be unsatisfactory. That being so, some-
one who has my karma–or I myself– would have to be reborn in
order to give a more complete answer.

In the epilogue of A Memoir of the Future, with similar karma, Bion

tells us about a change in his navigation:

All my life I have been imprisoned, frustrated, dogged by

common-­sense, reason, memories, desires and – greatest bug-
bear of all – understanding and being understood. This is an at-
tempt to express my rebellion, to say ‘Good-bye’ to all that. It
is my wish, now I realise doomed to failure, to write a book un-
spoiled by any tincture of common-sense, reason, etc. (see above).
So although I would write, ‘Abandon Hope all ye who expect to
 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous 69

find any facts – scientific, aesthetic or religious – in this book’, I

cannot claim to have succeeded. All these will, I fear, be seen to
have left their traces, vestiges, shots hidden within these words;
even sanity, like ‘cheerfulness’, will creep in.
(P. 578)

Unconscious biographies
In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live ‘in
modest harmony with nature’. Thoughts rise to the surface which
reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a re-
mote future. Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity
and play are close together.
(Jung, 1961, p. 226)

This is how Francesco Corrao starts his Preface to the Italian edition
of A Memoir of the Future:

Dedalus, the gifted maker, built the labyrinth – and his se-
cret (which only Ariadne knew), so as to conceal and, at the
same time, unveil the unspeakable and dangerous truth that
one attains only by going through an intricate and hindered …
Understood as a metaphor, the labyrinth represents the original
dialectic pattern, the archaic and violent connection between
lógos and the mortal páthos that imbues the conundrum …
Being a place of contradictions, in fact the symbol of all con-
tradiction, the maze mithologhem, beyond its literary drifts
and digressions and their interpretative nuances, let us glimpse
a consistent, metaphoric and mythic ‘grid’ of meaning that al-
lows us to experience a troubling Ergriffenheit. It is the enig-
matic, dark experience of ‘being grasped, dominated, drawn
and guided by a truth overcoming Intellect, Consciousness and
the scientific-­problematic research itself. This opens the way to
the dark territory of the Unknown and the Unconscious, to es-
tablish an asymptotic contact with a complex and chaotic sphere
full of both existence and reality that links the body and the
mind, the anthropic and the animal, the physical and the biolog-
ical dimensions, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’, individuality and
plurality, permanence and change.
(1993, pp. x–xi)
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It is quite surprising that this text could be easily adapted to Jung’s

Red Book with no changes in its meaning. The labyrinth is an enigma
going through two brilliant minds in which the dream, the difficul-
ties and the catastrophes of change, the problematic relationship be-
tween body and mind become Ariadne’s thread that can help explore
the Holzwege, going off the beaten track to tread the unconscious:
dreams that were not brought to completion or dreams that could
not exist, night pavor or nightmares, like non-existent knights of the
night4 (Ogden, 2005).
The ‘trilogy’ structure of A Memoir of the Future has often led us
to consider it as some kind of science-fiction story, modelling Dante
or Milton’s three canticas (Bléandonou, 1990), whilst its literary style,
according to Alberto Meotti (2000), could be inspired by Joyce or
Ezra Pound. Other scholars have claimed that Bion was inspired by
Samuel Barclay Beckett’s work – by his plays – particularly, Waiting
for Godot where, just like in A Memoir of the Future, apparently
nothing happens, and the facts are emotional events; yet the audi-
ence is somehow glued to the text – but especially by Beckett’s trilogy
(Molloy; Malone dies; The unnamable), where a progressive formal
dissolution of speech and language takes place.
Then, if it is true, as Bion Talamo (1997) says, that the book could
represent some kind of libretto that first and foremost imposes upon
the reader an emotional response: ‘First the emotion and then the
reason’, it is just as true that to read it requires an attention simi-
lar to the analyst’s experience as he listens to his patient. It requires
patience (PS). A patience that is induced, like for The Red Book, by
a fragmented, non-linear, non-narrative, maybe fractal text that is
too long to let a ‘selected fact’ or an ‘α-element’ merge and allow the
reader to feel on a safe island in time.
The analogies continue: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Lost Par-
adise, Samuel Beckett’s work, but also The Red Book, the Liber no-
vus, was structured as a ‘trilogy’: liber primus, liber secundus and liber
tertius or Scrutinies. Even some thematic passages are astonishingly
similar. For example, in Chapter 13 of the second book of the Red
Book, Jung describes one of his own dream-visions where a sacrifice
murder takes place. A girl (very likely a part of his infantile self) was
victimised and killed, and Jung’s Soul (a transformative function)
forces him to take up the responsibility of the murder and to perform
the cannibalistic ritual of eating her liver (live-r, the life carrier) so
 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous 71

as to become able to re-integrate her in an accomplished personality

organisation:

But this was the vision that I did not want to see, the horror that
I did not want to live … A marionette with a broken head lies
before me amidst the stones – a few steps further, a small apron –
and then behind the bush, the body of a small girl – covered with
terrible wounds – smeared with blood. One foot is clad with a
stocking and shoe, the other is naked and gorily crushed – the
head – where is the head? The head is a mash of blood with hair
and whitish pieces of bone, surrounded by stones smeared with
brain and blood. My gaze is captivated by this awful sight – a
shrouded figure, like that of a woman, is standing calmly next to
the child;5 her face is covered by an impenetrable veil. She asks me:

S: ‘What then do you say?’

I: ‘What should I say? This is beyond words.’
S: ‘Do you understand this?’
I: ‘I refuse to understand such things. I can’t speak about them
without becoming enraged.’
…
S: ‘Step nearer and you will see that the body of the child has been
cut open; take out the liver.’
I: ‘I will not touch this corpse. If someone witnessed this, they
would think that I’m the murderer.’
S: ‘You are cowardly; take out the liver.’
I: ‘Why should I do this? This is absurd.’
S: ‘I want you to remove the liver. You must do it.’
I: ‘Who are you to give me such an order?’
S: ‘I am the soul of this child. You must do it for my sake.’
I: ‘I don’t understand, but I’ll believe you and do this horrific and
absurd deed.’
I reach into the child’s visceral cavity – it is still warm – the liver
is still firmly attached – I take my knife and cut it free of the lig-
aments. Then I take it out and hold it with bloody hands toward
the figure.
S: ‘I thank you.’
I: ‘What should I do?’
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S: ‘You know what the liver means,6 and you ought to perform the
healing act with it.’
I: ‘What is to be done?’
S: ‘Take a piece of the liver, in place of the whole, and eat it.’
I: ‘What are you demanding? This is absolute madness. This is
desecration, necrophilia. You make me a guilty party to this
most hideous of all crimes.’
S: ‘You have devised the most horrible torment for the murderer,
which could atone for his act. There is only one atonement
abase yourself and eat.’
I: ‘I cannot – I refuse – I cannot participate in this horrible guilt.’
S: ‘You share in this guilt.’
I: ‘I? Share in this guilt?’
S: ‘You are a man, and a man has committed this deed.’
I: ‘Yeah, I am a man – I curse whoever did this for being a man,
and I curse myself for being a man.’
S: ‘So, take part in this act, abase yourself and eat. I need
atonement.’
I: ‘So shall it be for your sake, as you are the soul of this child.’

I kneel down on the stone, cut off a piece of the liver and put it in
my mouth … it is done. The horror has been accomplished.
S: ‘I thank you.’
She throws her veil back – a beautiful maiden with ginger hair.
S: ‘Do you recognize me?’
I: ‘How strangely familiar you are! Who are you?’
S: ‘I am your soul.’
(2009, pp. 320–322)

Bion, in the first volume of A Memoir of the Future, writes of a dia-

logue with Man:

BION: I see a man? A shade? A ghost?

MAN: Don’t talk; listen. Don’t watch; look. That’s better! More
like an encephaly, you will call it someday … That’s better –
you are coming over to me quite clearly now. This is 'infra-­
sensuous’. I shall know what your a-morphous ‘senses’ tell me.
BION: The man is filled with a kind of tenderness. Suddenly,
with the utmost violence he beats the woman’s skull and …
 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous 73

(pouring sweat and overwhelmed with fear), I won’t watch! I

shall not fight!
MAN: Get back, you damn fool … Poor stupid wretch … he has
had a sane episode … I was afraid he might not stand it. Get
on!
BION: He bashes in the skull. God! It’s like rock. He treats it like
eggshell. He’s sucking – this is cannibalism! He sucks out the
brain.
MAN: This is an anachronism. Luckily for you it isn’t a million
year later or they would be so barbarously civilized they
would murder you for murder. A million years later still they
would incarcerate you for insanity – an ‘insane’ monster.
BION: Are you trying to tell me that it is ‘I’ who am doing this
frightful thing, you damned blackguard?
MAN: ‘I’, ‘cannibal’, ‘blackguard’ – these are all anachronisms. I
didn’t exist for another couple of million years. Even now you
are measuring time in numbers of times the earth completes
its orbit around the sun … Thinking is bearable because of
its sensuous component. The experience which has not yet
reached a conclusion is whether the human animal will sur-
vive a mind grafted onto its existing equipment. Now, do you
think you could stand a little more?
BION: (surly and hostile) More of what?
MAN: Well … a little more of ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’.
Not quite how Blake meant it of course, but the idea may
emerge when the misleading quality imposed on formless
thought by articulation is dissolved away … The immortality
achieved through reproduction by cell division leads to the
mortality achieved by nuclear fission.
BION: What else?
MAN: I am not going to do your thinking for you. Sooner or later
you will have to pay the price of deciding to think +; whether,
in Freud’s formulation, to interpose ‘thinking’ between im-
pulse and action; or to interpose it between the two as a
substitute for action; or to interpose it between the two as a
prelude to action.
BION: Oh, all right – let’s get on with this enthralling and spectac-
ular spectacle.
(MF, pp. 159–161)
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Besides any other literary and psychoanalytic comparison and keep-

ing in mind that ‘another couple of million years’ could have passed,
is it so illicit to speculate – once again – that A Memoir of the Future
developed as Wilfred Bion’s Red Book? Or at least with the same bio-
graphic unconscious texture that characterised the Liber Novus?
If A Memoir of the Future – as López-Corvo (2002) suggests – could
be considered Bion’s biography of his unconscious life, The Red Book
was an overview of the unconscious biography of a troubled and
prolific time in Jung’s life. In this perspective, referring to ‘uncon-
scious biographies’ would mean that, in its dimensions that can be
historicised, the unconscious ‘does speak’, but not in Lacan’s sense of
ça parle (Lacan, 1966), i.e., not in the sense of an unconscious struc-
tured as a language. The unconscious speaks when it is enabled to
speak; when a mind meets another mind with which it is possible to
create and share the unconscious and when it is possible that the un-
conscious is intercepted by the oneiric, the dream – understood as a
translation/transduction of emotional (and sensory) events into visual
images that suddenly expand the field of mental experience into ±.

O and numinous
Once, how beautiful the dawn over the English
farm and field would have seemed.
What might it not have promised?
(MF, p. 21)

As Grotstein (2007) says, some time would still have to pass before
psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts can understand fully the deep
meaning of Bion’s change of paradigm.
A few traces have started to come to the surface as well as some
resistances to Bion’s ideas that have been considered the expression of
an exaggeratedly religious, spiritual or mystical tendency.
Grotstein writes:

Having read the mystical work of Meister Eckhart, he borrowed

Eckhart’s heretical distinction between the idea of an imma-
nent ‘god’ and a transcendent ‘godhead’ as the God of Essence
and paced the transcendent ‘godhead’ within man as immanent
and as a cognate of O. It is my belief that another reading of
 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous 75

the meaning of ‘godhead’ for Bion was the Gnostic one, where
­godhead is equated with pure thought – that is pure intelligence, in
the ­Neoplatonic sense of the Ideal Forms. This godhead is a pure
­essence and is not to be confused with God, the Creator … roughly
speaking, whenever a theologian speaks of ‘God’, a psychoanalyst
could substitute the unconscious or O. If Bion were ever to have
subscribed to religion at all, I should think it would have been
‘agnostic Gnosticism’.
(2007, p. 137)

Jung (1952), accused of spirituality and mysticism, seemed to dwell in

a similar ‘religious’ perspective when he said that, like every empirical
science, also his psychology needed auxiliary concepts, hypotheses
and models. Both the theologian and the philosopher would easily
make the mistake of seeing metaphysical axioms there. The atom the
physicist speaks about is not a metaphysical hypostasis but a model.
Similarly, Jung’s concept of archetype or psychic energy was just an
auxiliary idea that could always be replaced with a better formula.
He believed that his empirical concepts, philosophically understood,
were monstra of logic, and, as a philosopher, he said that he would
make a fool of himself. From a theological vantage point, he argued
that his concept of soul, for example, was sheer Gnosticism: that is
why he was often viewed as a gnostic.
In fact, both Jung and Bion seemed to think that O, the Absolute
Truth regarding an indifferent, impersonal – perhaps numinous and
unknowable – Ultimate Truth is to undergo a symbolic transforma-
tion so that, through the Soul or α-function, it can be transformed
into a personal and subjective truth concerning a reality that can be
experienced by human beings.
Jung (1952) added that the theologian could blame the empirical
scientist. The latter, although he possesses the means to solve the
problem of truth – that is the revealed truth – does not want to use
them. The empirical scientist would humbly ask which one of the
many ­revealed truths is to be taken into account and where the ev-
idence of the greater truth of one conception or the other is. It is in-
triguing to think that we would not be at all astonished if these words
had been said by Bion, although with some other terms and concepts.
Maybe this is the case: we can only access small truths that become
76 Mauro Manica

credible through acts of faith, that are necessary because we are dom-
inated by the godhead of O and the unconscious. In other words, the
unconscious with the contact-barrier (the ‘old’ para-excitation sys-
tem, the barrier against the stimuli that Freud imagined), can work as
an emotional boundary, as a shield or a filter of a psychic immunitary
system that tries to contain the impact with the numinous unknow-
ability of O, through its emotional registration and our attempts to
modulate its effect by dreaming, that is transforming it into narrative
and fiction (Ferro, 1999; Grotstein, 2007).
As we have learned, through Rudolf Otto’s lesson (1917), the
numinous7 is a quality of the ‘holy’ (das Heilege); in fact, it constitutes
its essential experience. If the sakrós ratifies its otherness, its being
‘other’ and ‘different’ from the ordinary, the common, the profane,
the experience of the holy is indissolubly linked to the human effort
to build a world with a meaning.
Mircea Eliade (1968) says that every ritual, every belief, every divine
figure mirrors the experience of the sacred and, accordingly, implies
the notions of being, meaning, truth. So, the sacred can be ­regarded
as an element of the mind’s structure and not as a stage in the history
of mind. In this sense, perhaps Jung uses the adjective ­‘sacred’ as a
synonym of the adjective ‘unconscious’ (Pieri, 1998): what is uncon-
scious is sacred and is experienced as numinous, that is with awe and
the uncanny character of otherness that lies at the basis of the poten-
tial experience of otherness itself.
From a Bionian vantage point, Grotstein (2007) affirms, by
emphasising the distinction between it and omnipotence, that the
numinous inspires awe, is mysterious, with the déjà-vu quality, the
preter-matured Uncanny. The numinous would then be placed be-
tween the troubling unknowability of O and the ‘memoirs of the
future’, the innate or acquired ‘pre-conceptions’: (Bion, 1962a) (ideal
forms, things-in-themselves, archetypes, noumena) that are engaged
as the ‘sensuous stimuli of emotional experience’ (external stimuli,
β-elements) call them from within the unrepressed unconscious. If
we follow Bion’s lead (Grotstein, 2007; Rather, 2005), O has a double
nature: the ‘sensuous stimuli of emotional experience’, that consti-
tute one of its arms, and the ‘pre-conceptions’, the memoirs of the
future, that constitute the other arm. With an astonishing anticipa-
tory analogy – a memoir of the future? – Jung (1952) writes that the
 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous 77

unknown is divided into two groups of objects, those that can be expe-
rienced through the senses, the external ones, and those that can be
experienced immediately, the internal facts. The former group is the
unknown of the external world, the latter that of the internal world.
This is the region that we call the unconscious.
If we qualified the last ‘region’, that Jung calls the ‘unconscious’,
as being ‘unrepressed’, we would have plausible reason to think that
Jung’s unknown has been absorbed, in Bion’s reflection, in the empty
concept of O and in its numinous definition: fascinating (as it refers to
fascinosum) and dreadful (as it concerns the tremendum).
In Bion’s version, the concept of O, the unknown, seems to have ex-
panded and allowed for an evolution of the model of the mind to which
we can refer. In extending and overcoming Freud’s and Jung’s concep-
tions, Bion seems to have succeeded in conceiving a mind that over-
looks the repressed and the numinous but is forced to be confronted,
since its origin, also with the nothingness of O, its lack of meaning.
Perhaps it is not accidental that Jung viewed psychosis – particularly
schizophrenia – as the product of the dream breaking into its wake,
whereas Bion came to postulate its essence in not being able to dream
or daydream. So, we could think that at the core of the psychotic
experience the mind is overwhelmed by the catastrophic experience
in dealing with non-memories or negative memories (−, minus,
memories) of nothingness, a nothing dimension existing since the ori-
gins. Only a good reverie of the mother (or of the maternal-paternal
environment) can make it bearable and transform it into no-thing that
originates thinking.
This too is Ariadne’s thread uniting Bion’s Red Book that might
have been inscribed in the trilogy A Memoir of the Future. Once again,
we need to recognise that the dream, the mother-and-infant dreaming
ensemble like the analyst-and-patient dreaming ensemble enables us to
overlook the unknown, the different versions of O, without getting lost
in nothing. It is always the dream that fosters an oneiric progression
that from nothingness leads us to tolerate the mysterium tremendum
that begins to take the shape of ‘memoirs of the numinous’ (MN), and
enables them to be transformed into ‘memoirs of the future’ (MF):
nothingness → MN ↔ MF.
The memoirs of the numinous, like the memoirs of the future and
nothingness, become crucial elements of the psychoanalytic process.
78 Mauro Manica

And the MN↔MF oscillation between an appealing and dreadful un-­

knowable – i.e., a nameless dread that starts to be named; at least in
its ‘dreadful’ quality – and a thinkability in embryo, becomes one of
the essential purposes of the unconscious psychological work that can
be carried out in the psychoanalytic field. Where the transformations-­
into-dream (Ferro, 2010), the transformations from O and the dream-
ing ensemble (Grotstein, 2007) of the patient and the analyst will be
committed in the transformation of the memoirs-non-memoirs of the
symptom into memoirs of the future.

Notes
1 I take this expression from Bion (1977b). Similarly, though from a differ-
ent perspective, Jung (1961, pp. 300–301) speaks of the art of storytelling
regarding one topic: mythologhéin. And, he writes, ‘To the intellect, all
my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a
healing and valid activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would
not like to do without’.
2 The one who, in Freud’s original intentions, was to be ‘his’ Crown Prince.
3 Bion (1992, p. 127) uses the formula ‘ought-to-exist-ness’ to refer to the
assumption of existence.
4 The reference is evidently to Italo Calvino’s ‘nonexistent knight’ di Italo
Calvino ([1959], The Nonexistent Knight, New York: Random House
1962).
5 Here and later Jung uses the word Kind.
6 See Jung (1961, p. 198): ‘The “liver”, according to an old view, is the seat
of life’.
7 Otto (1917) wrote that he formed the word numinous (if we can turn
omen into ominous, we can also turn numen into numinous) whenever he
wanted to speak of a special numinous category that interprets and val-
ues and of a numinous state of mind that arises every time that category
is applied, that is to say, when an object is thought of as numinous. Such
a category is absolutely sui generis and cannot be defined strictu senso,
but it is only apt to be hinted at, just like all fundamental and original
fact.
Chapter 5

A Memoir of the Future

and the defence against
knowledge
Antonino Ferro

It is well known that A Memoir of the Future is Bion’s way of giving

free expression to the theatre of the mind that is usually censored by
various spontaneously triggered diaphragms.
Somites, Devil, Immature, Term, Twenty Months, Six Years,
Heart, Thirty, Seventy-Five Years, and so on all take the floor with
equal rights in a real democracy of the proto-mental. This makes me
think of what a truly free mind would be capable of producing, where
the right to take the floor and to be heard is given to each sub-unit of
ourselves and to each planet of the galaxies of possibilities that com-
prise our minds.
No thought is so unseemly that it cannot be expressed. This means
that all thoughts are allowed to be guests in the agorà of the mind,
and it pre-supposes that sense impressions have been transformed
into images/thoughts. It reminds me of a typical renaissance banquet
in Mantua at the time of the Gonzagas. There are dozens of guests,
and then behind the scenes, unbeknownst to most of them, dozens,
even hundreds of cooks, servants, pages, butchers, greengrocers,
wine makers, and so on. It is like saying that behind each written
book stand the mental functions that enabled the book to be written.
Two clinical examples come to mind. Here they are:

1 Patient:Today I ate lamb and so did my daughter …

Possible responses:
a Longeque inferior stabat agnus! (The lamb was at a ­distance
below).
b As Montalbano might say, you were as hungry as a wolf.
80 Antonino Ferro

c Your daughter is preparing for a future as a little wolf,

too.
d I’ll never swallow that.
e You are telling me that you have managed to avoid inhib-
iting the most instinctual and voracious part of yourself.

Which models does the analyst have in mind? What is the implicit
interpretation in the examples, and why is it not spelt out?

2 Patient: This summer I’m going on a trip to China, and where I

really want to go is Shanghai. I’ll get there in small stages.
Possible responses:
a It sounds like an exploration of an unknown world, some-
thing to enjoy.
b Small movements so as not to stir up too many emotions.
c You are telling me that you are going to discover a part of
yourself you have never passed through.
d Perhaps you are afraid that the only alternative to the cau-
tion of Shanghai might be an earthquake.
e Could this be the way to make contact with ‘Chiang
Kai-shek’?

There was a time when I would have opted to give more decoding
types of interpretation out of a great concern for the linear develop-
ment of the patient’s ability to dream (alpha and container functions),
but now I prefer more open and daring interventions. They corre-
spond more to the possibility of tempting the patient and the field
to face emotional tsunami rather than engaging in ‘civil protection’
and organizing ‘defences’ and diaphragms. What is more, I appreci-
ate and embrace what Bion says in the last lines of A Memoir of the
Future, which in the light of après-coup seem to be the key to under-
standing the whole work.
Every analyst’s greatest anxiety and concern (and this applies first
and foremost to Bion himself) is learning how to speak in such a way
as to be understood (this has always been my own main concern both
on a technical level with patients and on a scientific level with col-
leagues). But what Bion says in the Epilogue seems to me connected
to the themes he talks about admirably (and with no possibility of
return) in his Tavistock Seminars and the Lyon Seminar: theories like
 A Memoir of the Future 81

wrecks to cling to for fear of sinking; the analyst who espouses the
idea of being an artist; being an artist, which means multiplying and
then offering points of view – which not everyone will accept, under-
stand or embrace; being curious about the experience you are going
through even at the point of death.
Likewise, being curious in each sub-unit of the session about the
worlds it will be possible to open by means of the ‘PIN’ that analyst
and patient create continuously.
The vertices are multiple. There may be one from the anus to the
mouth (Vol. I); the bottom may be made to speak (Vol. III); and oth-
ers are Mortimer, the Somites, Sherlock Holmes, etc.
It seems to me that Pirandello was someone who attempted to open
up the mind to extreme consequences in daring to challenge the po-
tential identities that inhabit us in continuous transformative move-
ments. Then perhaps also Beckett and, of course, Shakespeare, who
tried to compile an encyclopaedia of every possible expression of what
it means to be human. But Bion goes further. I see him more as the
printer who enables us to publish our own A Thousand and One Nights,
transforming it into A Million and One Nights or, better still, a Google/
Googol nights plus one. In other words, it is the expansion into what
we know to be an unattainable ‘O’, but which in its infinite disguises
continues to create the backstory to the various fables and plots.
A memoir of the future, but one that acts as a kind of diaphragm,
is to be found in the film Planet of the Apes and its sequels. The wise
apes know that humans have brought mankind to the point of nuclear
destruction and feel compelled to try to avoid a repetition of what
would happen in the future if the survivors of the past were to take
over the evolution of the species.
Here, I can see a link with another essential point Bion makes:
never take anything for granted. The gods laugh when they hear men
talk about their plans, so all optimism about our future is left in sus-
pension, destroyed by a nuclear war, swallowed up by a black hole
and supplanted by viruses that elude our domination.
But what does this mean?
I believe that we must live in a spirit of curiosity, without depending
on the book of life or the book of analysis that the many Bibles we
cling to promise to provide. According to the theory of fractals, this
curiosity and this risk should be extended to include the micro-level
of each sub-fraction of analysis or session of analysis.
82 Antonino Ferro

Defences against knowledge

In the Paris seminar, we find hardly any of the strange terms Bion
deployed to revamp the entire lexicon of psychoanalysis. Nor do we
sense the rarefied atmosphere of his most abstract writings, for exam-
ple, in Transformations. There is a wonderful moment when one of the
seminar participants tries to bring things back onto the known ter-
ritory of psychoanalytic theory. Bion has just finished talking about
the need to see what is not there, which is truer than what can be per-
ceived through the senses. He gives the example of the painting of a
tree and how the artist is also able to show the observer roots that are
invisible because they are underground. A colleague then asks if this
metaphor has anything to do with the unconscious. Bion just about
manages to remain desolately patient (or patiently desolate), point-
ing out that ‘unconscious’ is one of those words invented by Freud
to draw attention to something that really exists, but then, as usual,
discussion gets caught up in endless disputes between Kleinians and
Freudians and all sorts of theories, and eventually the simple fact that
what is at stake is a human being and a mind gets lost.
Often the limitations to the creativity of the analysis are a question
of how far down the analyst, and consequently the analytic couple, is
willing to go, bearing in mind that their relationship is in many ways
asymmetric, with responsibility for the depth of the immersion lying
with the analyst.
What means or defences can the analyst use to avoid diving into
waters that are too deep for him?
One much-used means is to fail to provide the humus suitable for
the development of the characters the patient has brought into play.
The easiest, most naïve and, at the same time, most subtle of these
means is to situate the ‘characters’ as people in history.
For example, if a patient talks about an uncle suspected of uxo-
ricide, this criminal aspect that he is trying to place in the field can
be bonsaized and crystallised inside the patient’s history rather than
providing him with all the seeds of growth and development that
would enable the criminal aspects of the patient (and perhaps of the
analyst, or both) to find a script and an appropriate setting.
Another ploy that likewise extinguishes stories that could other-
wise develop is to turn to the comfort of a supposed External Reality,
which can then be doubly chained when it becomes Historical Reality.
 A Memoir of the Future 83

A patient talks of a cousin of his grandfather who had been a mem-

ber of the Salvatore Mesina gang, a gang responsible for a number of
kidnappings, some of which had ended fatally for the victims. Log-
ically, this character, ‘the grandfather’s criminal cousin’, can be put
to sleep or lethargised, or it can become a ‘seed’ that will germinate
any number of possible stories if it finds suitable terrain and is given
adequate irrigation, making it part of the repertoire of split-off and
never-thought operations.
Essentially, each story is the possible progeny of sequences of
pictograms that may face a censor, like the priest in the Cinema
Paradiso who cut out all the kisses or the unforgettable Peppino De
Filippo in Fellini’s The Temptation of Dr. Antonio (AA. VV. Boccaccio
’70, 1962, Italy).
Essentially, each analyst at work often resorts to ‘blacklisting’ po-
tential characters to stop them from causing disturbance, disorder or
fear during the analytic work, but they will remain encysted in the
patient, like the dangerous war remnants that are sometimes defused
by bomb disposal experts but sometimes explode unexpectedly.
However, the responsibility for an analysis, whether it be at 45°,
90°, 180° or 360°, rests mainly on the shoulders of the analyst. Analy-
ses can be like a closed fan where the slats are still positioned on top
of each other, meaning that many stories will never see the light of
day, or they can be ‘fans with gradually opening slats’ that will tell
ever-growing numbers of possible stories. These fans can be opened
more and more, so there’s never an end.
It is often the case that theories, even those that have proved most
useful – like the Oedipus complex or the Unconscious – (and in say-
ing this we are simply paraphrasing what Bion says in his Tavistock
Seminars, 2007), insofar as they are already known, function as barri-
ers, as light pollution covering what we do not know. This is the only
really interesting work to be done in analysis: going in search of the
unknown and learning to tolerate knowing less and less but having
learnt the method for trying to learn more.
I am in no doubt that many analyses are in fact conducted by
analysts who behave like ostriches with their heads in the sand of
theory – so as not to risk seeing things that might frighten and hurt
them. My point is that the analyst often stands as the great anaesthe-
tist or narcotiser of ‘possible stories’, all of whose subversive power
84 Antonino Ferro

remains embryonic compared to often more normopathic, adequate

and orthodox aspects.
Perhaps the question of orthodoxy (and hence of adaptation to what
is known and shared) is also connected to this as a phobia of possible
subversion, and if psychoanalysis has historically had an incredible
subversive power, many now call upon it as a way of tranquillising
using maps of pseudo-normality.
Defending ourselves from the ‘present’ now often seems to be the
imperative. This is what happened in the case of posters, for an exhi-
bition by Maurizio Cattelan in Milan, that featured Hitler kneeling
in prayer. The posters were immediately banned on the grounds that
they offended the memory of the victims of Nazism. Whereas this
particular Hitler might not be the Hitler of the past, but a memento
of the Hitler who inhabits the human community, while other depor-
tations, both real and metaphorical, may still be continuing.
I still recall the scandal of puppets of children hanging in trees,
another work by Cattelan from some years ago, also stigmatised for
their supposed bad taste, although in fact they were perhaps mak-
ing a comment about truths of today, for example, lack of respect
for ‘children’ in all possible forms. Everything thought-provoking is
branded as bad taste and not seen as it should be, namely, a way of
awakening lethargic minds.
The treatment received by the various religions is very different.
Every religion represents a different attempt to curb all the emotions
that seethe inside us using orthodox rules. Even a different religion is
seen as a source of disturbance if it calls one’s own religion into ques-
tion. Just imagine the absence of religions. And to repeat the point,
the need for orthodoxy is no different in psychoanalysis.
Chapter 6

Bion’s razor
Reading A Memoir of the Future
Giovanni Foresti

Whoever reads even a few pages of the three books that constitute
A Memoir of the Future undergoes a continuous assault of heterogene-
ous stimuli and unexpected thoughts: a bombardment that prompts
a desperate struggle to accommodate the resulting commotion of
impressions, ideas and reflections within a single, relatively coherent
conceptual framework.
If one did have troubles understanding what the symbol ‘O’ means,
for instance (and honestly: who does really dare to assert a com-
plete comprehension of this theme?), here is something very helpful.
Throughout these books, inner life is described as a dialogue that
cannot be simplified or made much clearer than allowed by its fatally
complicated, phenomenological appearance. The psyche is repre-
sented as a continual, magmatic chaos whose changes are inevitably
catastrophic: a multi-layered system where even the smallest transfor-
mations are the elusive result of several processes that occur simulta-
neously at different levels.
To read those pages is therefore a vaccination against the illusion
of possessing easy certainties. ‘It is like being bombarded with chunks
of feeble puns, bits of Shakespeare, imitations of James Joyce, vulgar-
izations of Ezra Pound’, writes the author in Chapter 11 of the first
book: The Dream (MF, p. 51). Ironizing about the schizo-paranoid
nature of the reader’s experience (because bombs and grenades, here,
are only ‘phoney’), the word battery continues apace: ‘mathematics,
religion, mysticism, vision of boyhood, second childhood, and vision
of old age’ (ibid.). This is the inevitable complexity of psychic life,
as represented by A Memoir of the Future. One has to look below its
86 Giovanni Foresti

polymorphic surface for the transformations and factors that really

matter.
Fearing the outcome of ‘being “reasonable”’—as the great Ape always
pretends to be, the books end by wishing the readers ‘a Happy Lunacy
and a Relativistic Fission …’ Whatever but the pretense to KNOW:
because ‘“O”—Bion had written in Attention and Interpretation—does
not fall in the domain of knowledge or learning save incidentally; it
can “become” but it cannot be “known”’ (Bion, 1970, p. 26).

Hypotheses
My contribution to the close reading of A Memoir of the Future at-
tempts to order the far-from-soothing chaos raised by the text and
consists of three key interpretative couplets: (1) psychoanalytical wars
and non-psychoanalytical wars, (2) defining hypotheses and episte-
mological precautions, and (3) group dynamics and group thinking.

1 Together with Klein, Sullivan, Bowlby, Winnicott and others,

Wilfred Bion belongs to the pioneering group that enabled the
‘relational’ turn in psychoanalytical thinking (Aron, 1996; Civi-
tarese, 2011; Cooper, 2005). Bion’s contribution can be seen as an
attempt to rid psychoanalysis of the excessive internal conflicts
that marked the first decades of its existence. The ‘external’ wars
apart (i.e., the two World Wars that absorbed the first half of the
brief century: Hobsbawn, 1994), we should remember the impor-
tance of the great ‘internal’ war that took place in the analytical
movement: a conflict that lasted decades and seriously challenged
the political unity and conceptual coherence of psychoanalysis
(Ferro, 2010; Hinshelwood, 1997; King and Steiner, 1991). ­Bearing
this challenge in mind, I propose that the last words of Bion’s
book serve as a pacifist rebuke: ‘Wisdom or oblivion – take your
choice. From that warfare there is no release’ (MF, p. 576).
2 The most innovative theoretical and methodological solutions are
the products of a single author’s personal abilities, but these prod-
ucts also derive from the philosophical and scientific tradition to
which the author belongs. In Bion’s case, I assume that his ‘quest’
was strongly influenced by English empiricism, and particularly
by nominalism and associated developments (Noel-Smith, 2013).
 Bion’s razor 87

With these premises, I propose that Bion contributed to psycho-

analytical theory by alloying it with Ockham’s Razor and its
epistemological principles. Like the English Franciscan Friar
(upon whom Umberto Eco based the central character, William
of Baskerville, in The Name of the Rose), Bion sought to defend
the theoretical categories of psychoanalysis from vain, specula-
tive and contradictory proliferation. ‘Entia non sunt mulplicanda
praeter necessitatem’, the nominalists prescribed: the categories
of thought—in other words, the entia of theory—should not be
multiplied beyond need. To this end, detailed epistemological
inspection would periodically and usefully prune the categories
in question of conceptual excesses. If theory, like an untrimmed
beard, is granted unchecked expansion, the analyst may well lose
sight of the distinction between conceptions and experience, be-
tween defining hypotheses and clinical facts. As Bion states in the
Pro-Logue of A Memoir of the Future, the thus-blinded analyst
will ‘remain blind to the thing described’ (MF, p. 5). To Bion’s
numerous affirmations in this respect, we should add the contin-
uous expressions of doubt and the methodical quest for the most
obscure and elusive features of every issue: ‘Ultimately your un-
belief rescued you from that quagmire – sunk without a trace in
your own exudate of complacency’, Bion writes in the first part of
The Dawn of Oblivion (ibid., p. 451).
3 Finally, of all the compound activities that Bion undertook, his
work with groups constitutes the most original experience in his
curriculum and contributed most decisively to the development
of his thought. Bion’s research on group thinking dates back to
the first part of his professional life, when he worked in a non-­
orthodox psychoanalytical institution, the Tavistock Institute,
and served in the British military institutions (Bléandonou, 1990;
Foresti and Rossi Monti, 2010). Thanks to these experiences, Bion
began to elaborate a conception of psychic life that implicated
‘the idea of the individual being a “group”—like Hobbes’ idea
of the group being an individual’ (MF, p. 215). I believe that the
multi-subject and polyphonic voice with which A Memoir of the
Future originates derives from these early experiences, which re-
mained ever vivid in Bion’s mind. The ironically optimistic aspi-
ration that drove Bion to write A Memoir of the Future influenced
88 Giovanni Foresti

the choice of the symbolic container within which to elaborate

his thought, an aspiration that is clearly evident in passages such
as the following: ‘I think that it might some day be possible for
them all to be awake and carry on a fairly disciplined debate’
(ibid., p. 443).

The battle of Hastings and Norman

domination
The beginning of the first volume of A Memoir of the Future evokes
a catastrophic change of the sort found in Orwell’s descriptions of
nightmare revolutions. The initial protagonists of the story—Alice
and her husband Roland, the landowners; the maid Rosemary and
the laborer Tom, the servants—are buffeted by dramatic events that
change their lives forever. On the horizon of the small world they have
long inhabited, the perennial English nightmare unfurls: a lost war
and invaders who submit the country to capillary military occupa-
tion (we should recall that ‘occupation’ corresponds to the word Be-
setzung, which Freud chose to describe the work of the libido and
that was translated into Italian as investimento and into English as
cathexis).
In Bion’s story, as in First World War Russia, military defeat un-
leashes social conflict, triggers the overturning of the family structure
and brings about the hierarchical reorganization of the farm in which
the story takes place. Within this topsy-turvy setting, Rosemary re-
bels virulently against her female employer (‘All right, you bloody
bitch, I’ll make you pay for this. This is not capitalist England now,
you know!’ ibid., p. 15). For his part, Roland—who believes that he
understands everything, Bion notes with irony—furiously and use-
lessly inveighs against his consort and blames her for the class war in
which they find themselves: ‘You fool!’ he says to his wife. ‘God knows
what you have done with your tantrums!’ (ibid., p. 15).
This turbulent transformation results in a radical change in
perspective. Alice and Roland, who had always considered them-
selves to be part of the minor nobility who governed their locality
without hindrance, ‘stood naked, incongruous, alien, without a
point of reference that made sense’ (ibid., p. 27). The defeat suffered
by their world ‘was on a scale of defeat so disastrous that it would
 Bion’s razor 89

be necessary to suppose that something analogous to the Norman

Conquest had taken place’ (ibid.).
And here is the paradox whence the book’s pregnant incipit
originates—­a paradox that only the overturning of conceptual perspec-
tive and a binocular vision of history allow the viewer to perceive. The
defeat of the Saxon King Harold by the Norman Duke William, which
took place at Hastings in 1066, not only brought catastrophe to the
island’s nobility. Paradoxically, it also marked the birth of the United
Kingdom. Under the Norman rule, England would leave the sphere of
Scandinavian influence and enter the cultural area of European coun-
tries, particularly that of France. The unity and identity of the English
nation derives not from a victory, Bion notes, but from a defeat.
What of interest to psychoanalysis does this observation contain?
Let us think of the problem from the perspective that Bion attributes
to Hobbes: the group as an individual. Psychoanalysis is an investiga-
tion of the subject’s experiences and of the efforts to which the single
individual finds himself subjected. It is only by dealing with one’s own
defeats, and with the foreign domination that ensues that the subject/
object can hope to become the authentic subject of his/her own story
and a protagonist of his/her own life.
The opening of A Memoir of the Future focuses the reader’s atten-
tion on the history of an entire nation by chronicling a few prototyp-
ical individuals and by citing similarly few exemplifying narratives.
Buried by the tedium of an excessively quiet life, Alice and Roland are
described as lacking a real psychic life and as almost dead.1 Defeat
and foreign domination inform them of the hardships of history and
of the complexity of the world. The cards of the social game are re-
shuffled, and, surprisingly, Alice and Roland’s lives recommence.
The book that opens A Memoir of the Future presents itself as the
Bayeux Tapestry2 or as the Domesday Book demanded by the victor of
the Battle of Hastings. The first of these ‘texts’ (an embroidered cloth
that is 70 meters long and almost 2 meters wide) depicts the defeat
of Harold Godwinson: ‘hic Harold Rex interfectus est’. The ­second
is a catalogue of the property lost by the Anglo-Saxons, or rather an
inventory of the goods and the people acquired by the Normans as a
result of their victory.3
To elaborate a period of mourning, i.e., to initiate that strange
oblivion sui generis that heals psychic pain and enables the
90 Giovanni Foresti

recommencement of life, it is important to specify who and what has

been lost and to distinguish loss from what remains alive and capable
of forming a relationship.
Psychoanalytic wars are marked by the acquisition of metaphorical
territories and the more or less partial loss of imaginary sovereignty.
The disputed loot consists of the theoretical inheritance of tra-
ditions that oppose each other. Bion is attentive to the conceptual
consequences of the struggle between victors and vanquished, and
considers this dialectic to be a vital part of cultural comparison and
conceptual research. The textual tract that most clearly illustrates the
methodological consequences of the historical, theoretical and clini-
cal events of the analytical movement appears, in my opinion, in the
third paragraph of the 13th chapter of Learning from Experience—
one of the most explicitly nominalist extracts in Bion’s entire opus.

As a method of making something clear to himself the analyst

needs his own book of psycho-analytic theories that he personally
frequently uses together with page and paragraph numbers that
make their identification certain.
(Bion, 1962, p. 39)

In psychoanalytic theory, clinical dialogue and theoretical discussion

are the battle field in which the truly necessary conceptions survive
and emerge (‘pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’). The analyst
should not avail him/herself of theories by enthusiastically assisting
their spontaneous dissemination. Rather, (s)he should appraise them
as a legacy of as yet provisional hypotheses: incomplete and unstable
constructs to be treated with caution and to be kept in coherent order,
so as to permit constructive reassessment.

Uncertainty: the exercise of doubt

Let us invert the perspective and think of the individual as a group.
Psychoanalysis is an activity that allows the subject to understand
him/herself. However, even the knowledge of someone who studies
his/her psychic life intimately will be partial, provisional and not in-
frequently far from the mark. ‘I can say that I know who I was when
I was at school – we read at the end of the 28th chapter of the first
 Bion’s razor 91

volume – but that is very different from who I was; that I shall never
know’ (MF, p. 130). And, further on, the text returns to this theme
even more explicitly:

even when I am concerned with my own thoughts I am ignorant

though I am the person whom I have a chance of knowing better
than anyone … even if I know myself better than anyone I shall
ever meet, the sum of that knowledge amounts to little.
(Ibid., pp. 197–198)

Thus, even the single subject is a group that experiences considera-

ble difficulty in communicating with its own internal domain because
his internal heterogeneity is both synchronic (because numerous pro-
cesses occur simultaneously at numerous levels within the apparatus
that thinks thoughts) and diachronic (involution and, contrastingly,
psychic development, transform the structure of the mind by creating
relationships that are anything but obvious between past, present and
future).
The result of the continuous reshuffling of psychic life is that per-
sonal identity is only constructed at the cost of a certain closure to
experience and as a result of a fatal excess of theorization. ‘They don’t
really hate each other’, says the psychoanalyst of The Dawn of Obliv-
ion as he comments on the disagreement between the characters who
animate the second chapter of the third book of A Memoir of the Fu-
ture (ibid., p. 438), ‘“they” all hate learning – it makes them develop –
swell up’.
The consequence of addiction to previously established convictions
is that the analytic community continuously runs the risk of becoming
a ‘mutual admiration society’ (ibid., 195). Even if inevitable, recourse
to theory (‘Theorising is, I admit, a part of practising psychoanalysis’:
ibid., p. 201) is dangerous and can prove disconcerting. ‘The outcome
in pycho-analysts as I have observed them, is bigotry, dogmatism and
certitude’ (ibid., p. 198).
On this theme, the author of A Memoir of the Future sets out his po-
sition as early as the pages of the ‘PRO-LOGUE’. The original prob-
lem to which the author submits the entire question of the value of
psychoanalytic theory, and the latter’s effect on clinical research, con-
tinuously re-emerges as the book’s dominant theoretical Leitmotiv.
92 Giovanni Foresti

The defining hypotheses that are implicit in the theoretic models

should be taken very seriously ‘by those who wish to confront what they
believe to be the “ facts”, as near to noumena as the human animal is
likely to get’ (ibid., p. 4).
As postulated by Kant, this latter concept (the noumenon) is a Gren-
zbegriff: an extreme boundary category that indicates something that
is never directly cognizable and experience of which is only possible
through the effects produced by its asymptotic existence and by its
continuous transformations.
‘The psychoanalytic approach – says Roland’s friend, Robin (ibid.,
p. 71), though valuable in having extended the conscious by the un-
conscious, has been vitiated by the failure to understand the practical
application of doubt’. The sentence continues with an example of the
perspective within which Bion interprets the effects of theoretic abuse:
psychoanalysis is damaged, he writes, ‘by the failure to understand
the function of “breast”, “mouth”, “penis”, “vagina”, “container”,
“contained” as analogies’ (ibid.).
Only doubt preserves the possibility that the thing symbolized is
kept distant from the representation that is constructed on the basis
of experience. Without the necessary defeat of the signifier—always
and exclusively an indirect reflection of the referent (witness the per-
petual Hastings of the thinker/researcher)—it is difficult to avoid the
risk of becoming what in the second volume of A Memoir of the Fu-
ture Bion defines, effectively, as ‘His Satanic Jargonieur’ (ibid., p. 302).
The doubt that A Memoir of the Future eulogizes and actualizes is
solidly based on the group dimension of dialogue between people who
differ radically from each other, notwithstanding their co-­presence
within a single subject.

Aesthetic enquiry and thoughts

without thinkers
Bion’s keen interest in the symbiosis between clinical research and
literary practice dates back to the period that preceded the Second
World War (Anzieu, 1998; Torres and Hinshelwood, 2013). In the
1930s, Bion had treated an Irish young writer who was able, upon
completion of therapy and departure for France, to separate himself
from the objects that obstructed his thought (principally his mother, as
 Bion’s razor 93

the biographers argue: Bair, 1978) and to conclude the drafting of his
first novel.
The writer was Samuel Beckett, and the novel was Murphy (Beckett,
1938). In the first pages of Murphy, we find the description of a charac-
ter in whom we cannot but see some of the specific traits of the author
of A Memoir of the Future. Murphy describes the symptomatology
from which he suffers, and defines it by way of antithesis with his.4
His heart was

such an irrational heart – Beckett writes – that no physician could

get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, auscultated, percussed,
radiographed and cardiographed, it was all that an heart should
be. Buttoned up and left to perform, it was like Petrouchka in
his box.
(Ibid., p. 25)

Murphy’s teacher/therapist Neary, and more specifically the latter’s

interpretative technique, drew the patient’s undiluted causticism.
The language Neary used was obscure jargon. The therapist’s aim
was that ‘to invest his own with a little of what Neary, at that time a
Pytagorean, called the Apnomia’ (ibid.). Not satisfied with this lin-
guistic extravagance, Neary insists on using other useless obscurities.
‘When he got tired of calling it the Apnomia he called it Isonomy.
When he got sick of the sound of Isonomy he called it the Attune-
ment’ (ibid.).
It is no wonder that the therapy in question, built as it was on such
unstable bases, was not described as a success by the story’s author
(‘But he might call it what he liked, into Murphy’s heart it would not
enter. Neary could not blend the opposites in Murphy’s heart’; ibid.,
pp. 25–26). The conclusion of this extract—and even more its enig-
matic launch—is, however, paradoxical. True, the therapy is halted,
but some of its clinical effects are far from banal.

Their farewell was memorable. Neary came out of one of his dead
sleeps and said:
“Murphy, all life is figure and ground.”
“But a wandering to find home,” said Murphy.
(Ibid., p. 26)
94 Giovanni Foresti

Once the unease of separation has passed, Beckett is able to write the
brief and extremely pregnant sentence that follows:

And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleas-
ure was not the word.
(Ibid., p. 25)

And here, we are right in the middle of Bion’s thought! Beckett ap-
pears to have learned a lot about psychoanalysis as he worked with
this psychoanalyst who had not yet become a psychoanalyst.
But perhaps we should ask who learned from whom? Is it Beckett
who taught Bion to express himself clearly? Or, is it Bion who with
Beckett developed the central themes of his research, namely the in-
vestigation of the means by which we predispose, organize and exer-
cise thought?
Whatever the answer (Didier Anzieu investigated this issue at
length, and we know that his results were not unequivocal), it is a
fact that this was one of the principle motifs behind the writing of A
Memoir of the Future.

His Satanic Jargonieur took offence; on some pretence that

psycho-analysis jargon was being eroded by eruptions of clarity.
I was compelled to seek asylum in fiction. Disguised as fiction, the
truth occasionally slipped through.
(MF, p. 302)

This extract could be read as a response to the page on which Beckett

spoke of his therapist. Its self-descriptiveness is analogous to that of
the subjects who, in The Dawn of Oblivion, voice the complexity of the
subject by returning to eras that preceded his pre- and post-­natal lives.
The words that correlate most significantly with the Beckett-Bion
theme currently under discussion are central to the final pages of A
Memoir of the Future.

P.A. A danger lies in the belief that psycho-analysis is a novel ap-

proach to a newly discovered danger. If psycho-analysts had an
overall view of the history of the human history, they would appre-
ciate the length of that history of murder, failure, envy and deceit.
(Ibid., p. 571)
 Bion’s razor 95

To conceive the unconscious as a ‘newly discovered danger’ or to im-

agine psychoanalysis as a ‘novel approach’ is to mislead and to fuel
isolation, endogamic stagnation and unhealthy pride. The therapy
that Bion proposes for this discipline of ‘unpleasant warmth … and
arid abstractions’ (ibid., p. 470) is a very generous dose of doubt-
and-modesty combined with a mighty re-activation of surprise-and-­
inquiry abilities.
On the philosophical path that Bion suggests, though, the practice
of doubt does not become a comfortable skeptical attitude or an easy-
going variety of cynicism. The doubts function as factors that contrib-
ute to carving the thinking, assisting the psychoanalyst to face her/his
human and clinical responsibilities. If tolerated as the epistemologi-
cal frustrations necessary to develop new and fresh knowledge, the
doubts make it possible to devise hypotheses. And these latter—the
hypotheses—are the crucial tools that offer the opportunity to learn
from experience by virtue of their remaining open and uncertain.
To view human spirit in its entirety, it is necessary to avoid
parochial closure and to actively combat intellectual conceit. ‘If the
analyst observes functions’ (notice the mathematical term that Bion
uses as far back as 1962 to rethink the functioning of thought: the
psychoanalytical function of the mind) ‘and deduces the related
functions from them, the gap between theory and observation can
be bridged without the elaboration of new and possibly misguided
theories’ (Bion, 1962a, p. 2).
The idea is that psychoanalysis is merely a stripe on the tiger’s fur
and that the task of psychoanalysis is that of rethinking thoughts
that others had previously intuited and thought. This idea is at the
origin of the thesis—entirely counter-intuitive and yet extremely
convincing—whereby psychoanalytic thoughts were formulated be-
fore psychoanalysis existed, both in humanity as a whole and in the
single subject: proto-psychoanalytic thoughts in search of a thinker
who can think them over again.
As if to deny the idea of perennial and incomprehensible obscurity,
The Dream yields a dialogue that illustrates this point—that is, the
spontaneous emergence of psychoanalytic thought in the writings of
numerous literary and philosophical writers—with ironic clarity.

MAN:… Sometimes you have to my knowledge claimed that certain

well known figures of the past, not only of the recent past as
96 Giovanni Foresti

Sigmund Freud himself, were gifted with a profound capacity for

understanding their fellow men?
BION: Certainly. We can gauge their actions and behaviour from
what has been recorded of or by them, and allowing myself
anachronistic – like poetic – license. I would call them very con-
siderable psychoanalysts before anyone had heard of such a term.
MAN: Is this not an instance of claiming that there is such a ‘thing’ as
psychoanalysis, that there always has been such a thing as psy-
choanalysis, whether it could be verbalized or not?
BION: I would say that it is an example of a thought which, before
Freud existed to think it, was ‘without a thinker’.
MAN: I am not really clear why you postulate a thought without a
thinker. It seems an unnecessary complication.
BION: ‘Doubt’ is always regarded as an unnecessary complication.
That is clear whenever an individual asserts certainty.
MAN: You used the word ‘certainly’ just now.
BION: Touché. I agree.
MAN: But you reply in the language of a game of combat?
(MF, pp. 168–169)

Bion’s razor and the asymptotic O: a paradox

The community of Bion scholars and observers has generated numer-
ous questions that have greatly helped me to arrive at the reason-
ing that I here attempt to develop (Aguayo, 2013a). Given this essay’s
aims, I shall now reduce the issues I have raised to the following and
essential three themes. First, does the latest phase of Bion’s research
amount to a turn that unveils a completely new theoretical horizon,
or does it merely represent an extension of the previous phase? Does
the aesthetic turn whose most substantial product is A Memoir of the
Future (Ffytche, 2013) constitute a new cycle in Bion-oriented concep-
tualization, or is this a question of prosecuting what is known as the
‘epistemological’ phase of his thought (Bléandonou, 1990)? And, of
particular importance: what relationship is there between, on the one
hand, the proposal of condensing the connections between thinkers
and between subjects into three diverse typologies (L, H and K) and,
on the other hand, the hypothesis that psychic experience is the effect
of transformation into O?
 Bion’s razor 97

According to Hinshelwood, there is an evident rupture among the

three consonants of Learning from Experience (Bion, 1962a), symbols
for connections of hatred, love and awareness, and the vowel that,
from Attention and Interpretation (Bion, 1970) onwards, sends the
reader back to an ‘unarrivable’ thing-in-itself. In addition to the
group phase, the research on schizophrenic thought and the so-called
epistemological phase, Bion’s work demands recognition of a further
theoretical stage that begins with an essay written at the end of the
1960s (Bion, 1970) and proceeds to various additional publications in
the following years (Torres and Hinshelwood, 2013).
The key concept of this last cycle is ‘intuition’; assessment of said
concept’s quid should bear in mind the differentiation, established
by Bion’s research in the 1960s, between empirical sciences and
psychoanalysis.5 Even on this basis, it is difficult—‘it is a moot point’
Torres and Hinshelwood observe (ibid., p. 186)—to establish whether
the word intuition is truly the best suited to (i) defining the given
methodological model and (ii) evaluating the degree to which this no-
tion differentiates itself from, for example, Winnicott’s notion of inten-
tion as a recognizable element from the point of view of diverse subjects.
Within the context of the foregoing questions, I am convinced by
the thesis that Bion’s continuous research activities yield grand and
radical conceptual novelties, but I also believe that said novelties are
balanced by certain methodological constants that derive from Bion’s
cultural identity, from his theoretical domus and from his institutional
education.
The paradox that A Memoir of the Future obliges us to consider
is the result of a permanently unstable dialectic tension that in turn
creates a virtuous cycle between order and disorder, between com-
plexity and simplicity. The constant attempt to lighten theory—­Bion’s
epistemological objective in the 1960s (H, L, K)—is pursued in the
given texts by way of negation, i.e., by illustrating the labyrinthine
complexity of psychic life.
To distinguish truly necessary concepts from those that end up
as mere jargon,6 we have to compare our theorizing with the enig-
matic reality of experience. This latter is however obscured by the
habit, long since established in the history of our species, of recourse
to ‘sequential thinking’—a way of exercising reason that lays out
‘what it purports to describe’ (ibid., p. 85) in excessively linear series.
98 Giovanni Foresti

We have difficulty recognizing the invariants of psychic life not be-

cause our argumentation proceeds in clarity→confusion sequences,
as we tend ingenuously to suppose, but rather because the excess of
constructions based on confusion→clarity sequences prevents us
from seeing the reality of psychic life (ibid., p. 89). The strategy of A
Memoir of the Future is to overturn the flow, multiply the sources and
mix up the currents.
More than theorizing on the reality of O, Bion’s text constrains the
reader to experientially digest the continuous dialogic exchange that
in turn begets the thought of minds that are inclined to meet. The
internal world of subjects is organized by the eternal ‘laws of O—the
perfect blanc’, Bion observes with irony (ibid., p. 277).
The concept of ultimate reality is here expressed by two words, one
French and the other English: ‘blanc’ as in white, and ‘blank’ as in
empty. We thus have on the one hand the disquieting white of dizzying
movements of the colors of the mind. On the other hand, there is the
empty space—the blank between the lines of the text, for example—
that acts as an attractor, like an unconscious organizer of the group’s
thinking: the negative blanc/blank around which the swirling spiral
of thoughts gyrate.
In Bion’s view, the razor that resolves the essential from the
superfluous remains ever the distinction between K and −K, which
is explicitly described in the last page of Learning from Experience:
‘in K the group increases by the introduction of new idea or people;
contrastingly’, ‘in −K the new idea (or person) is stripped of its value,
and the group in turn feels devalued by the new idea’ (Bion, 1962a,
p. 99). And cautious of the epistemological specificity of ideas, Bion
writes:

The relationship of K to −K can be epitomized by saying that in K

particularization and concretization of the abstract and general is
possible, but in −K it is not because the abstract and the general,
in so far as they exist, are felt to become things-in-themselves.
(Ibid.)

Transformations into O are that towards which the subject’s interest

tends when he/she is able to experience thoughts as if they were analo-
gies and metaphors, and not thing-in-themselves. What distinguishes
thought from idle chat and from jargon is the conceptual vitality
 Bion’s razor 99

instanced by a container/content when it becomes a factor of the

thought of a group.

A provisional conclusion
Having reached the end of this task, and desirous of compressing
the characteristics of the Bionian razor into a sprinkling of sylla-
bles, I shall avail of a concise formulation devised by Umberto Eco
and quoted by the cultural page of a daily newspaper in the 1970s.
Without ever having read a single line of A Memoir of the Future (not
least because at the time the book had not been published), the Ital-
ian semiologist was able to express the principle upon which these
books are based: one has to learn to confound his ideas in order to
have clear ideas.
The curious coincidence—another instance of thoughts looking for
a thinker—probably depends on the fact that Eco, who was known to
have little time for psychoanalysis, had thoroughly read the work of
William of Ockham and was well versed in medieval philosophy and
English nominalism (Eco, 1970, 1987).
As I have done throughout the article, I shall conclude with a few
extracts from A Memoir of the Future that seem to me to be coherent
with what I have attempted to argue.
‘We follow the lead given to our shepherds’, Roland says, parodying
an attitude of supine devotion]. ‘You need not to be sheep’, replies
P.A. in all seriousness.

We do not aspire to be leaders or shepherds; we hope to intro-

duce the person to his real self. Although we do not claim to be
successful, the experience shows how powerful is the urge of the
individual to be led—to believe in some god or shepherd.
(MF, p. 266)

The reasoning (such reasoning that reasoning was not the word,
as Beckett put it) concludes as follows: ‘I should not like to replace
one dogma by another; the erection of any god should be studied’
(MF, p. 267).
Hence, the words chosen to conclude the three books: the wish that
the reader, at the end of her/his work, might become capable of enjoying
‘a Happy Lunacy and a Relativistic Fission’.
100 Giovanni Foresti

Notes
1 ‘Falstaff, a known artifact, is more “real” in Shakespeare’s verbal for-
mulation than the countless millions of people who are dim, invisible,
lifeless, unreal, whose births, deaths—alas even marriages—we are
called upon to believe in’ (ibid., p. 4).
2 Created by Queen Matilda of Flanders (William ‘the Conqueror’s’ wife)
upon commission by the victor’s half-brother, Bishop Odo, the tapestry
depicts the antecedents, the developments and the bloodiest phases of the
battle between the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons. The end of the pic-
torial story is marked by the Latin epigraph ‘ET FUGA VERTENTUR
ANGLI’: and the Anglo-Saxons were put to flight.
3 ‘Are you Mr and Mrs Trubshaw? Who’s this? You Miss Slocombe, the
maid? Have you seen …’, he consulted his paper … ‘Mr Jeremy? He’s
the man isn’t he? It’s nothing to do with us, but contact the liquidation
people; they may have made a mistake.’ ‘But do you mean’, said Alice
flushing angrily, ‘you take these things away?’ ‘That is all we have to do.’
‘Do you give us a receipt?’ The man seemed almost shocked. ‘Whatever
for?’ As soon as it’s all been checked and found correct they will give us
a receipt’ (ibid., p. 17).
4 We read on the second page of the story (Beckett, 1938, p. 25):
Murphy had lately studied under a man in Cork called Neary. This
man, at that time, could stop his heart more or less whenever he liked
and keep it stopped, within reasonable limits, for as long as he liked.
This rare faculty, acquired after years of application somewhere
north of the Nerbudda, he exercised frugally, reserving it for situa-
tions irksome beyond any endurance, as when he wanted a drink and
could not get one, or fell among Gaels and could not escape, or felt the
pangs of hopeless sexual inclination.
5 The former—empirical sciences—base their experience on sensorial
data, while experience in the latter discipline—psychoanalysis—­
originates from the encounter between minds (O) and accordingly
cannot be seized by the senses, but merely intuited by means of thought/
thinking.
6 ‘Jargon passes for psycho-analysis, as sound is substituted for music,
verbal facility for literature and poetry, trompe d’oeil representation
for painting’ (MF, p. 307). To go beyond jargon and escape from that
which has substituted for experience of the internal world, it is necessary
to rediscover the complexity of psychic life and to attempt to improve
and deepen the perception of what is one’s own continuous and elusive
psychic material.
Chapter 7

Memories of the future,

realisations in the present.
The oneiric destiny of pre-
conceptions that turn up in
the minds of dreamers
Violet Pietrantonio

The introduction
Dear Wilfred,
There were many who trembled in horror, yawned in irritated incom-
prehension or grimaced in sickened repulsion on first reading your final
trilogy. The striking absence of the customary analytic psycho-logos so
upset them that they protested at the scandal and cried out in terror of the
psychotic wolf, seeking refuge and lost certainties (Turillazzi M ­ anfredi
1994) in the diagnostic dictionary of their beloved psychoanalese. What
had happened to you? Psychosis in California? Had you allowed yourself,
without honour or shame, to record in print the incontinent ramblings of
your senile dementia (O’Shaughnessy 2005).
But there were those who, perhaps without realising it or perhaps
through passionate magnetic perception, found their minds impregnated
by the pollen grains of pre-conceptions (♂♂♂) which you had sown
among the visionary threads of your tale. Diviners who detected the
whispers of extraordinary intuitions under the apparent logical decay
of the discourse, the traces of new routes to explore, the first sketches
of a new atlas of psychoanalysis and of our mental functioning … Who
would recognise in the shattering of the logical-deductive system the ex-
ample of a new, revolutionary de-scaling treatment necessary for the
maintenance and reinvigoration of the psychoanalytic probe.
Three decades passed, and the first realisations of those recalcitrant
pre-conceptions which you had disseminated in your final pages started
to bloom …
102 Violet Pietrantonio

I will try to venture onto the mysterious paths of that transmission of

ideas (Bion 1979) which you had included among the roads to be scoured
in your manual of Psychoanalysis for the Future, using only the lantern
of the first effects of germination observable today, to your memories
first, distant tomorrow.

... Just fancy if there was something about ideas which would
make them ‘generative’! The transmission of ideas may not follow
the biological laws of sex or the Mendelian laws of inheritance …
(The Dawn of Oblivion, 1979)

Perhaps a bit like a grand-daughter who fishes out of the family attic
the diary left by a grandfather and leafs through it enraptured, I have
been rereading A Memoir of the Future over the past few months and
finding myself once again filled with surprise as I note the vision-
ary quality and fecund power of this phantasmagorical text, which
seemed to me an extraordinary and potent Guernica (Picasso, 1937),
a formal mess and a disturbing origin of contemporary psychoanal-
ysis. A Guernica born under the bombs, crying for help and finding
no peace or container for a horror and terror that rack and shred
the mind, which calls art to new tasks and incarnates new languages
capable of giving voice and image to the violence of the nameless
O-bscure that can roar, groan and stun, beyond what is sayable by the
logic and language of what has already been domesticated, portrayed
and assimilated by common sense. A Guernica that is ever more nu-
minous as time goes by (Grotstein, 2007; Manica, 2014), an avant-
garde manifesto possessed by intuitions, pre-sentiments (Bion, 1965),
predictions about the travelling circus of evolution, a jigsaw puzzle of
epistemic embryos essential to future development. A futuristic work
in which the brutal subversion of the order of the established λογος,
striking and drenching structure, weave and contents to the full 360°,
seems to become a vehicle, a tool, the extreme movement necessary
for the emergence of the pre-conception (♂) of an essential cata-
strophic change (Bion, 1974) in desperate search of an oneiric host. A
catastrophic change essential for the breathing of new psychoanalytic
thoughts in search of thinkers, for the hosting and rearing of a psy-
choanalysis available for the encounter with a migrant O (Bion, 1970)
of the still unknown, which blows and presses at the K-onfines of
every mental and analytic experience, just as it does at the frontiers of
 Memories of the future 103

theory and of already metapsychologised technique. A catastrophic

change that analysts, analysis and psychoanalysts cannot escape.
The revolutionary dismantling of the professional grammar code
provoked apoplectic dismay and crazed surges of violent indignation
and outright rejection. To most people, psychoanalysis stripped of
its usual garb no longer seemed to be psychoanalysis. As some ana-
lysts from our own time tell us (Ciocca, 2014), the trilogy had a very
bumpy ride through the process of publication: numerous rejections
by editors, intractable difficulties with translation, low sales and,
above all, many strongly disparaging initial reactions. A few (Gaburri
and Ferro, 1988) were able to detect (Manica, 2014) the presence and
transformative power of the new dreams that vibrated among the un-
precedented semiotic chords of this wild and visionary composition,
in which a new mythopoeic psychoanalysis makes its first appear-
ance, recognising in the nakedness of the nun without her habit or of
the empress with no crown, sceptre or ceremonial robes the revelation
of an often hidden analytic nature secreted behind the institutional
adornments that cover the body of psychoanalysis. Perhaps the recent
flourishing of writings (Ciocca, 2014; Harris Williams, 1983; Manica,
2014; Pistiner de Cortinas, 2009; Waddel, 2011) dedicated to this fi-
nal Bionian offering also testifies to the length of time needed for
the psychoanalytic community to metabolise the impact of contact
with an object bearing aesthetic qualities and crammed with contents
never before encountered in the landscape of psychoanalytic litera-
ture; of decades required for the removal of blunders and obfuscation
through a slow bringing into focus of the familiar and personal in the
apparently alien and bizarre.
Mute and silent has perhaps also been the time needed for the gestation
of the pre-conceptions … (♂) scattered in the narrative flow of this fable
so that, nested in the uterus of the mind (♀) of some sensitive readers,
they could be realised (Bion 1962a) in new inspirations and hypotheses
about life and the meaning and practice of psychoanalysis as a method,
technique, treatment. In the après-coup observatory of the present, per-
haps only today, as posterity, can we take note of how many messages,
inscribed as ideograms on the totemic soma of this work, seem to be
revealing themselves as a fertilising semen of many elements that con-
stitute the various contemporary theories of dreaming analysis (Civita-
rese, 2013a, 2015a; Ferro, 2009, 2015; Grotstein, 2007, 2009; Ogden, 2005,
2015; Pistiner de Cortinas, 2011); theories that, in the theoretical-clinical
104 Violet Pietrantonio

development of the discovery of the mind’s dream function as a vital

nucleus and active principle of psychoanalytic therapy, are setting off
radical transformations in the vision of how our human mind functions
and in the conception of psychoanalysis as treatment.
An evidence-kangaroo that carries in its pouch a possible, singular
story of the generative, trans-generational transmission of ideas …

A Warburg hypothesis: A Memoir of the Future

an extraordinary Mnemosyne of psychoanalysis?
Mnemosyne (Warburg 1928–1929) is a figurative atlas composed of a
series of plates, consisting of photographic montages, assemblages of
reproductions of various works: pieces of evidence from the Renais-
sance (artworks, manuscript pages, playing cards, etc.), archaeological
finds from oriental, Greek and Roman antiquity, items from twentieth-­
century culture (newspaper cuttings, publicity labels, stamps). Images
are privileged objects of study in that they are an immediate way of ‘say-
ing the world’. The image is the place in which the impression and mem-
ory of events precipitates and condenses. In the Atlas the juxtaposition
of images, laid out in such a way as to weave together many thematic

Figure 7.1 T he primitive oneiric power of the image

 Memories of the future 105

threads around the nuclei and details of the boldest relief, provokes
the viewer into an open interpretative process: ‘to the image the word’
(zum Bild das Wort). The objective of the Atlas is to illustrate the mech-
anisms for translating themes and figures from antiquity to the present
day, with particular regard to the recovery of motions, gestures and
postures that express the entire range of emotional excitation (aggres-
sion, defence, sacrifice, mourning, melancholy, ecstasy, triumph, etc.).
These are Pathosformeln, expressive formulae for emotion …

A fairy tale creature, which would appear to be the most typical

product of a playful imagination, is really, in statu nascendi, the
hard-won outcome of the struggle to grasp an abstract idea. It is
an attempt to define the extension of phenomena which, in their
fleeting elusiveness, cannot be grasped in any other way.
(A. Warburg, sketches for the conference on The
Serpent Ritual, in Gombrich, E.H. Aby Warburg:
an Intellectual Biography, p. 218, n. 2)

Aby Warburg composed Mnemosyne during the last years of his life,
after re-emerging from the darkness of a mental suffering that had
confined him for years in the Swiss clinic directed by Binswanger, and
after coming across the powerful oneiric drug of the image. Warburg
indeed tells how fateful it was for him, in enabling him to re-emerge
from the darkness, to encounter the image of primitive man with his
success in evoking that experience of early existence and to feel oneself
trembling, bewildered, terrified in a world populated by as yet name-
less perceptions, the same as the nightmare in which Warburg had
been trapped. A film-still capable of telling him and the world about
the terrifying experiences of that speechless newborn (Gombrich,
1970) who continues to live in all of us and who, if too deprived of
experiences of reverie, can sometimes resort to frantic yelling, feeling
its dreams throttled by clutching cramps of pavor. An experience of
oneiric psychopharmacology upstream and perhaps a source for this
Mnemosyne made only of images that burst like Prometheus into the
world of the academy, irradiating the fire of sensory and emotional ex-
perience as the matrix of the meaning and functions of artistic produc-
tion. A work that had to wait for years to be published and decades to
be accepted and recognised in its full valency and epistemic potency.
Snapping the threads of chronology, philology and deductive order,
106 Violet Pietrantonio

Warburg perhaps came brutally close to the burning O (Bion, 1970) of

Art, to its being above all a protension to satisfy a primordial mental
need: finding in the film-still a first articulation of the kaleidoscope of
proto-sensations and proto-­emotions by which we can feel ourselves
inhabited, using the image as a spasmodic bestowal of form, figure,
communicability and dreamability on our human emotional experi-
ence. Mnemosyne also seems like the attempt to convey the meaning,
myth and passion (Bion, 1963) of a new intuition, lifted blazing from
the long darkness of a night in the murkiest and most hellish regions
of an evil and an anxiety without name (O→K). The potency of a new
idea that, processed by the enzymes of time, radically changed the
method for investigating and comprehending works of art and dis-
mantling nets of entrenched tòpoi in the foundations of the History of
Criticism and Art History.
I do not know if Bion was familiar with Mnemosyne, but didn’t
he operate in a similar way in A Memoir of the Future? Breaking
the schemes of discourse and habit of logical-deductive reasoning,
didn’t he catapult at supersonic speed into the world of O? The O of
psychoanalysis? Didn’t he, and doesn’t he, lead the reader with him
on a disturbing tour through the grotesque, the absurd, the horror,
the chaos of s-O-mething that lies, still waiting, unnamed and mean-
ingless under the Kovers of the already uttered, signified, thought? In
the subsoil probed by the still mysterious roots of our mind’s func-
tioning and that of psychoanalysis as treatment? Among the shad-
ows and phantoms of a past that are perhaps nightmares and terrors
that have not yet found oneiric medicine and the trails of a noumen
in which perhaps so many pre-conceptions dwell as they wait for a
future dream?
Is A Memoir of the Future a sort of Mnemosyne of psychoanalysis,
which some analysts were able to acknowledge in its incredible im-
portance as the first work of psych-O-analysis? A tribe of Gombrich-­
Analysts who found themselves living right in that earthly triangle
where they came close not only to the later Bion’s Psyche, but also
to his Soma: indeed, for many analysts California, Brazil and Italy
were places where it was possible to meet W. Bion personally during
the last years of his life, and these are the very lands where, from
the beginning of the century, the ferment of youthful thoughts had
started to pulse, dancing energetically, agitatedly, boldly around and
in the midst of the O of dream. Dream as miraculous medication,
 Memories of the future 107

unique and inspired creation (Rulli, 2015) of the αdream-function of

which our mind is a naive bearer and of which Psych-O-analysis must
become robust incubator (♀) and passionate midwife (♀♂). Scientists,
who try courageously to make their way onto the untrodden paths of
oneiric stem-cell cure, which, at the Azimuth of this trilogy, W. Bion
adumbrated to the shocked eyes of the psychoanalytic community in
perceptive vestiges of a science yet to come.
Observing this singular geographical correlation, an impudent
question comes to mind: could the possibility of a psycho-somatic en-
counter play a fundamental role in the trans-generational transmission
of ideas? What primary, essential function could intercorporeality
perform (Gallese and Ammaniti, 2014) in the encounter between two
minds, for the purposes of creative learning? Does in vivo psycho-­
sensory experience of the other generate a ♀♂ relationship different
from that created in vitro by literature? Could the quality of the ambi-
ent emotional experience of the ♀♂ encounter be the crucial synaptic
mediator in the psycho-transmission of ideas between generations?

Report from the present: flash of intuitions

and evidences that are revealed as the dawn
of discovery of new science

1 Narrative and narrating function: α-lipoic acid

and stem cells for the genesis and development
of the mind’s oneiric functions
… if there were such a thing as a mental digestive system, I could
say that
the mental diet of entertaining fictitious characters has con-
tributed greatly to my mental health (MF, p. 129) … That fellow,
Shakespeare, puts words to the emotional problem that is still not
solved (ibid., p. 395) … Some people can talk with such precision
that the right audience could not fail to understand the communica-
tion. An obscure poet may, nevertheless, be expressing something in
the shortest and most direct language known (ibid., p. 192) … The
‘fictitious character’, the ‘fiction’, is the ‘reversed perspective’ of the
‘abstract’. Is there an ultra logic or infra logic which does not fall
within the spectrum of human logic, the logical spectrum analogous
to the visual portion of the spectrum of electro-­magnetic waves?
(Ibid., p. 395)
108 Violet Pietrantonio

… I suggest a possibility of stimulating in the listener who lis-

tens as he listens, mental activities that intervene between him and
thoughts, the obscuring capacity of which is specific, not general.
(Ibid., p. 192, italics added)

In this mini Warburg-puzzle from A Memoir of the Future, there

is just a small sample of the numerous potent flashes about the
narrative function that Bion dots here and there among his pages,
evoking its intuited properties as a morula for psycho-stem-cell
production to support the genesis, growth and regeneration of
functions necessary for mental life and its O-neiric oxygenation.
Like an encoded preview of the forthcoming psychoanalytic phar-
macology for those who, using the lens of the future, may witness
in the work of A. Ferro, T. Ogden and J. Grotstein at the unfold-
ing of the evolutionary destiny of this first chrysalis of Bionian
intuitions about the essentiality of narrative as a function and
necessary instrument for the survival both of the human and psy-
choanalytic species. For whoever can zoom in on the metamor-
phic process of a pre-conception silkworm (♂), which has been
realised in a brilliant and colourful conception in the mulberry
tree of post-Bionian studies (♀,♀♂); a conception pregnant with
new ideas about the functioning of our mind and psychoanalytic
treatment.
A pioneer of research and experimentation and enunciator of the
virtues of narrative as a principal instrument of the psychoanalytic
method, A. Ferro has from his earliest publications (Ferro, 1992b,
1996) drawn attention to the narrative factor in psychoanalysis, high-
lighting its invaluable polyvalence as a tool-product of extraordinary
efficacy, as much for an ultrasound diagnosis of the hic et nunc of
the psychoanalytic process as for the non-intrusive administration
of ­analytic medications. Perhaps curious at the flickering of scientific
mystery, over the years Ferro seems to have moved ever deeper into the
artesian wells of narrative, revealing its depths and its oneiric geneal-
ogy. At bottom, all A. Ferro’s work could even be read as an in-depth
treatise on narrative, which he has found to be the mother tongue of
dream. For him, all the elements and psychodynamic functions of
narrative can be studied and plumbed with scientific expertise (Ferro,
2002, 2006), thereby becoming object and instrument of choice in a
psychoanalytic treatment that sets itself the goal of germinating and/
 Memories of the future 109

or developing the ability to dream personal emotional experience (Civ-

itarese, 2014; Ogden, 2005; Grotstein, 2007, 2009). A work in progress,
a working-through of narrative, which step by step shows itself to be
a molecular and synaptic treasure trove of receptors and transmitters
of oneiric peptides necessary for the αlphaβetisation of emotional life
and for analytic α-generation. In his current resting place of field the-
ory (Ferro, 2009; Ferro and Basile, 2007; Ferro and Civitarese, 2015),
Ferro shows us how narrative and its handmaid, the narrative func-
tion, can be considered the language and technical device most appro-
priate to a dreaming cure, which, in the stem-cell effect of dream-work
and within the container of Bionian metapsychology, has found new
principles, functions and foundations for the transformative growth
of our human mind and for treatment in psychoanalysis. In his texts,
narrative, the story narrated in the session, shows itself to be the
seat and pre-selected medium chosen by the proto-mental for blurt-
ing out the presence and residence of βfoci in urgent need of αinter-
vention, but also shows itself to be the preferred analytic idiom for
achieving transformations in dream, thanks to its unrivalled oneiro-
congruence and oneiro-compatibility. If the characters who shyly
peep or violently burst out in the session can be accepted and listened
to as the most trustworthy envoys of O, bearers of proto-dreams in
search of a dreamer, how will it be possible to loosen and transform
into a dream-film the magma or rock of proto-­emotions encrypted in
their soma if not by using that same native, narrative vocabulary in
which they are timidly attempting to communicate? This cluster of
oneirogenic and oneiromodulatory properties, also revealed by the
Californian colleagues T. Ogden and J. Grotstein (Ogden, 2001, 2005,
2009; Grotstein, 2007), seems to make the narrative function grad-
ually acquire the epistemological and metapsychological status of a
function of the mind and of psychoanalytic work. Flushed out of hid-
ing, observed, investigated and illustrated in its dual specialisation as
βreceptor and αtransmitter, narrative stands out in the panorama of
twenty-first-century psychoanalysis as the unchallenged semiologist,
re-animator and fecundiser of the human mind’s dream activity, un-
rivalled nightmare-catcher, peerless bard of rêveries and dreams that
reawaken our innate capacity for dreaming or train it in oneiric play
(Grotstein, 2007) … In the meantime, the recognition of the narra-
tive αmine’s nobility as a source of the nourishment and vitality of
the human mind, is confirmed by a large multidisciplinary chorus of
110 Violet Pietrantonio

studies and reports of experiments ranging from the human sciences

to the neurosciences (Damasio, 1999; Gallese, Migone, and Eagle,
2006; Gallese and Ammaniti, 2014; Gottschall, 2012, etc.): listening
to and telling stories encourages the birth and development of neu-
ronal chains (mirror neurons) and has been an activity indispensable
to our survival thus far as a human species, as much as, if not more
than, the development of mere technology. Like the first notes of a
unanimous Eureka that announce the rediscovery of a new factor that
transfigures the well-known psychogenetic profile of Homo sapiens
into Dreaming Man, bearer of primary needs often misunderstood
and treated as secondary accessories …
And so, dear Wilfred, after 50 years, we can conclude that characters,
stories, poets sing of a mind still unknown to science, speak a word capa-
ble of verbalising and reverberating the Atlantis of that oneiric βιος, which
is the lymph that makes it possible for us to feel we exist. Today, what is
starting to warble and babble in the sensus communis of psychoanalysis
is the idea of an analyst as myth-maker (Levine, 2015a), rather than that
of a Pythoness dispensing shrewd K-interpretations … Perhaps the trans-
mission of ideas can be truly generative if it is an honest and courageous
communication of personal intuitions … and if we keep in mind the long
timescales of the psycho-embryology of dreams and thoughts …

2 Senses, Soma and Smell: among the first rustlings

of a debutant somato- psychoanalysis?

BODY: It is the meaning of pain that I am sending to you; the words

get through–which I have not sent–but the meaning is lost.
(MF, p. 434)

SOMA: If you had any respect for my ‘feelings’ and did what I feel,
you wouldn’t be in this mess.
(Ibid., p. 434)

PA: … if we could receive the facts which we are capable of ‘sense-

ing’ we might be able to read the facts available to us, and
‘think the thought through’, to what lies behind the facts (ibid.,
pp. 263–264) … the psycho-analyst needs to ‘smell’ the danger, as
well as know as much as his training and psychiatric textbooks
 Memories of the future 111

can tell him (ibid., p. 529) … the training we all undergo in the
process of becoming civilised does destroy, or dangerously cover
up, our animal inheri-tance (ibid., p. 250) … I have in mind the
need to distinguish between experience of knowledge imparted
by others and knowledge derived from the analyst’s ability to
turn what his senses tell him into nourishment.
(Ibid., p. 458)

Use the Warburg Method as a compass for the Memoir reading-­

comprehension, and what scratches its way out is a collage of hints, ad-
monishments, aphorisms, witticisms and intimate cogitations (Bion,
1992) about the fundamental importance of lending the analytic ear to
the neglected somatic mantra: a thorny flora of somato-­psychoanalytic
semiotics that pops up like Edelweiss in the first two volumes, before
imposing itself in the third one as a soma-­sauro-chakra of senses and
unknown sense, which impels and urges psychoanalysis to undertake
non-deferrable but hitherto unattempted tasks of auditing and aus-
cultation in humble, attentive at-one-ment (Bion, 1970) and strenuous,
distilled, untrammelled negative capability (ibid.).
A Jurassic soma, an enclave of inaccessible mental states (Bion, 1976;
De Mattos and Braga, 2013) that can only be smelled, sniffed out and intu-
ited (Bion supervision A34, in Levine and Civitarese 2015) by a sense-able
analyst (Civitarese, 2015b). A hypothalamic area (Bion, ibid.; De Mattos
and Braga, 2013), a precarious encampment of the wild proto-mental,
hungry for dream, which overbearingly shows itself in Bion’s late sem-
inars and writings as a learned ‘must’ of clinical ontology and deontol-
ogy: the violent somato-psychic tyrannosaurus that plunges heavily and
terrifyingly into the consulting room will not long tolerate being put to
flight with denials or sedated with K-­injections of interpretative antibiot-
ics; we shall have to learn to accept it, listen to it and recognised it as the
most personal prim-O-rdial sauvage in search of oneiric subjectivation,
the Arf-Arfer (Bion, 1982) of that devouring, nameless terror waiting for
sens-orization α. A proto-­sensory animalness that presupposes animal
capacities for being approached, sniffed, understood and channelled
into the circuitry of oneiric transformation, present-ifying to psycho-
analytic practice a petition for skills hitherto unthought-of and not yet
absorbed into metapsychology and institutional training. Over and over
again, Captain Bion urges a reconnection to our animal inheritance, so
that we can recapture, sharpen and refine our faculty for sense-ing all
112 Violet Pietrantonio

those mute proto-­emotions that circulate in the analytic situation, and

so that an analytic experience can truly be an opportunity for psychic
epiphany, rather than a rerun of painful, autistic scotomisation of O, held
hostage by timorous and presumptuous K-intellectualisations. In mor-
dant Morse code, the last Bionian telegram seems tirelessly committed
to transmitting dots and dashes that look like the first sketch of a debu-
tant somato-­psychoanalysis, entailing a training in the availability and
use of the senses, soma and a somato-psychotic vertex, so as to achieve
an adequate and useful practice of the psychoanalytic profession.
But how is this wasps’ nest of stinging, harassing pre-conceptions
about relevance and potential not yet absolved and put into prac-
tice in the exercise of our profession, to be realised in the form of
theoretical concepts and analytic finesse? How are we to metapsy-
chologise the gloss of the soma in our treatises on psychoanalysis?
How to contact, comprehend and engage in dialogue with the somites
(MF) that crowd silent or βurβling in our analytic encounters? In
the Mare Magnum of recent publications, a small community of
studies stands out (Civitarese, 2014; Collovà, 2015; De Mattos and
Braga, 2013; Manica, 2016) as seeming to make a start at sounding
the barely opened universe of the somato-psychic in psychoanaly-
sis; descriptions of adventures in the depths of analytic mutism that
have revealed themselves to be sands of hibernation dense with bur-
ied larvae of sleeping dreams; O-rphanages unearthed among mists
of the unsaid and forests of reasoning, putting Faith (Bion, 1970) in
the signals coming from the receptors of the personally sensible by
an analytic mind that eavesdrops, breaths, absorbs the impressions
(Ogden, 2015) of proto-­sensory waves and vibrations propagating in
the analytic field; colleagues who show us how gestures, looks, shiv-
ers, enactments or material objects may be able to unlock an unex-
pected access to the spectrum of the oneiric (Civitarese, 2014), if they
are recorded and smelled out as the death rattle of paralysed night-
mares in search of oneiric physiotherapy. Analyst scuba divers who,
descending into the abysses of the proto-oneiric, provide us with a
state of the art theoretical-technical vademecum for the clinical prac-
tice of this debutant somato-psychoanalysis, which seems to com-
pel Metapsychology to broaden out; we will need to go beyond the
Kleinian Pillars of Ps, immersing ourselves in at-one-ment in that
autistic-contiguous position (AC) outlined by T. Odgen as the oldest
 Memories of the future 113

experiential platform for the relationship between human beings, to

bear with trust and negative capability that darkness that has no pic-
togram, and where the flows and pressures of the still unsayable sens-
ible surge; to roam around in it so that we can draw on the truest and
most personal plankton of our still undreamt dreams. We are present
at the rise and codification of AC as an analytic position, at its po-
sitioning in AC-PS-D (Manica, 2016) as a third pole of oscillation
necessary for an analytic work capable of also αlphabetising the vo-
cabulary of that somatic that enters the consulting room speaking of
an ‘us’ as yet unKnown to us; an AC that, for now perhaps, becomes
the first and fullest metapsychological realisation of that cryptic and
vigorous pre-conception of an analytic setting without memory and
desire that flashes like lightning in Bion’s final discourse.
So Wilfred, if tadpoles (♂♂♂) of meliorism happily wriggling in
the narratological cipher given blood, skeleton, muscle and an anima
fabulans of ‘selected fact’ (Bion, 1963) by you in A Memoir of the
Future, seem to have found in the theoretical-clinical model of Bion Field
Theory (Stern, 2013) a habitat (♀,♀♂) for benign (Bion, 1963) evolu-
tion and transformation into new carrier conceptions-elements for the
analytic apparatus, then hour by hour they are starting to feature αnews
about analytic body to body involving that Kunta Kinte of a Soma, which
has finally been taken as a legitimate passenger and protagonist on board
the αmistad of analytic work … And there are rumours of ever-­more so-
phisticated headphones and decoders for filming the oneiric pictography
of anagrams mumbled, grunted, sputtered or inarticulately mimicked in
that psychosomatic common t-O-ngue, now identified as the idiographic
indigenous dialect of dreams and nightmares originating in the thalamus.
And the Soma, aroused in bestial pre-­conception in The Dawn of Obliv-
ion, stands up imposing and ferocious like the most handsome precursor
of progress, the selected analytic object in tomorrow’s psychoanalysis.

3 If it had not been for Memoir of the Future,

would I have tried to listen to Robbie?
Psychosis: baleful marker of dementia and cancer of mind and thought,
or Avatar1mindfulness2 of primordial oneiromancy?
Memoir of the Future reversed and mythopoeic perspective in the
psychotic discourse.
114 Violet Pietrantonio

… ‘Straitjacket’, ‘crazy, ‘psychotic’— are all associated with confin-

ing the Disturbing Mind so that it does not disturb the peace of our
Sleeping Beauties (MF, p. 271, Italics added).
… there can be a delusion, or an hallucination, or some other flaw
in which an idea might lodge and flourish before it can be stamped
out and ‘cured’ (p. 268) …
I am the horrendous dream that turned Science Fiction to Science
Fact …
I am thought searching for a thinker to give birth to me. I shall
destroy the thinker when I find him …
The Mind that is too heavy a load for the sensuous beast to carry
(p. 38) …!

Portrayed, embodied and personified by the theatrical and theatr-­

ising structure of the work, the mind’s fantastic, phantasmagorical
functioning dances and yells in shameless nakedness between the
lines of A Memoir of the Future, with no veil or K-filters. Overturn-
ing expectations and Kredence, it presents itself to its legentes as a
pop-up circus that tears up the films of what has been and can be told
and directs a live, intersubjective film of the noisy, bustling agora that
quivers in that bizarre and complicated organon that is the human
mind. In the brood of newness that swarms wildly in between the
lines and chapters, this choice of object and narrative style stands out
as titanic in its subversive, innovative charge, its ability to commu-
nicate and make us experience with immediacy a radical destitution
of K and selection of O as the vertex for observation-immersion-­
comprehension of our being-feeling-thinking-dreaming. Grasped
and intuited ab initio by those who first esteemed it (e.g. Corrao,
1993; Gaburri and Ferro, 1988, etc.) as an extraordinary and violent
mise-en-scène of the mind’s rackety and multitudinous constitution,
in the theoretical-­technical apparatus of the analytic field (Civitarese;
Collovà; Ferro; Levine; Mazzacane) the mind-rave of A Memoir of
the Future seems almost to be set up and used as an example of that
dream-scene that becomes the fulcrum of all analytic work, centred
on monitoring, nourishing and fertilising the dream-work animated
and managed in the session. Meanwhile, in the field model the char-
acters, disembarking for the first time on planet psychoanalysis from
the little boat of A Memoir of the Future, seem to evolve into the
 Memories of the future 115

most sensitive instruments of analytic work, true dream-detectors that

can be used for a wide range of functions, from an oneiric check-up
of the field to the activation and stimulation of the dream-work in the
field itself. In the light of the subsequent theory of the analytic field,
the newborn genre of Bionian psycho-literature seems to reveal itself
as the premiere of future landings in the method O→K, Copernicus of
revolutionary, epoch-making changes in the geography of knowledge
of the mind and of treatment. The method O→K cannot be taught in
manuals or by K-explanations, so can it only be learned by vivid, brutal,
personal experiences of immersion and subjective impressions (Ogden,
2015)? Hence the sommelier’s remarkable proposal of a reading-­test,
or rather perhaps a test in reading, made by A Memoir of the Future?
Method O→K, which, in my analytic experience, has unveiled itself as
an irreplaceable way of tuning in to the Narnia3 of the oneiric, which
is still able to hum with activity, to breathe and take risks, where emo-
tional turbulences with a powerful narcotic and explosive charge can
ossify and iatrogenically sicken any possible movement K→O, from
the protension directed towards comprehension and signification, to
the impatient interpretation made defensively out of terror. I am think-
ing of child analyses, but also of all those analytic situations in which
only an oneiric eye on characters, on faded pictograms glimpsed in the
shadow of dense mists, on βα splinters that may emerge in the desert
or the storm can make sense of the heartbeat of a dream-life where the
first sight of and contact with a total unravelling of the K-ego functions
could create the fear of a presence of an irreversible psychic coma.

Robbie
From the story behind his referral I was expecting a little guy, one a bit
bewildered and intimidated by the world … A first rêverie narrating in
avant-coup (Bonaminio, 2010) dreams of a self never born? At the door
I found a giant, with a weird stance and way of walking, as hyperac-
tive as if he were on coke, pouring out a jumbled torrent of words.
Working with him, I discovered a master, a Tolkien, adept in the most
unthinkable, transformative adventures in the world of O. During our
first meetings, he was unable to stay in the room with me for more
than 15 minutes, but, half way through the second conversation, a
little before going out, he made one of his half-asleep hints about
116 Violet Pietrantonio

painters and singers and I, in total K-­desperation, possessed by diag-

nostic spectres of psychotic disintegration, found myself moved and
enlightened by an unexpected rêverie: the image of a frightened little
boy who, shyly, almost hiding, was making me ‘eye up’ his favourite
games … games that alluded to dreams … dreams that were speaking
about the plasma of a dream-life that was still alive …
I found myself making an abrupt about-turn from the prudent
temptation to abstain from the analytic undertaking to the no less
terrified but fully determined decision to embark on this analytic
voyage in which I scented the αurora βorealis of dream.
Like Hansel and Gretel, I decided to follow the trail of pebbles of
proto-dreams that Robbie had shown me: the sensation that not only
had he shown me the facts to select (Bion, 1963) but also the most
opportune and fruitful way of working …
In all these first years never a transference interpretation, feared as
still too potentially violent and traumatogenic for a still foetal ♀ …
but also trying to feel/hear, be curious about, expand in unison the
forerunners of possible stories that were being flung here and there
around the analytic film-set on the high seas of his logorrhoea …
Trying to weave together narratives that imagined images of possi-
ble states of mind and experiences of characters who seemed to en-
capsulate violent emotions, perhaps still with no name … trαining,
empowerment and regeneration of a dreaming ensemble (Grotstein
2007, 2009) atrophied by β-earthquakes and chronic deprivation of
rêverie, through possible experiences of α, ♀, ♀♂, rêverie.
But without A Memoir of the Future and that Odyssey-in-preview
of the fractal Ur of our foetal mind, would it be possible today to
try and find how much frozen oneiric legacy might be concealed in a
psycho-Sumerian lyric misunderstood and misrepresented for a long
time as word-reference of damned and intractable madness?

A session with Robbie

Pokémon singing about evolutions in O?

P: Robbie rings the bell 5 minutes early, probably keeping his finger
on the button for the whole time he is waiting: an unbroken squeal
sounds loudly in the consulting room.
 Memories of the future 117

P: “I was afraid you’d forgotten about me … There are things I’ve

got to tell you …” He gives me an envelope with payment for the
sessions from the previous month, with a request written by one
of his parents for a possible change of time for the next session.
“Because he’s going fishing and I’m going with him …”
A: [A moment of panic. I feel put on the spot with no time to think …
Beyond all the theories about the setting and its violations (K),
I have the sense-ation (O) of catching the sound of a first at-
tempt at expressing a personal request … a child daring for the
first time to ask for what he wants, with the help of a parent …
wouldn’t a reply the patient’s own code be the only possible
way, for now, to seize the opportunity of a possible realisation
in the field of a pre-­conception never perhaps realised before?
Were I to offer a symbolic elaboration of an interpretative kind,
wouldn’t it sound recherché and incomprehensible, like explain-
ing a treatise by Aristotle to a three year old?] “Would the 16th
be possible?”
P: “Not the 17th? Because I might still be down there on the 16th …”
A: “I understand … Let’s see … I could do the 17th at 5 o’clock or the
19th at 1.00 …”
P: “The 19th at 1.00!”
A: (anxiety about the proximity of the changed session to a session
with a delicate patient …)
P: “There was a party yesterday in Via Benozzi …”
A: “Ah, an all-day street party …”
P: “Yes, but it was only for part of the street, there were ambulances.
You had to go all the way round if you wanted to go out …”
A: (weighed down by emotions about the party/postponed session?)
“A party that was a bit of a bother, a bit annoying …”
P: “Yes, I prefer Cortella me too, the one they have on Via Cortella …
Yesterday there was a big do where you gave what you wanted to
buy something and I got masses of Pokémon I didn't have …” He
smiles with satisfaction.
A: “Ah, so you were able to get something for yourself at this party …”
(as I begin to inhale an unusually cheerful emotional life … and
I do not feel oppressed and wiped out by the usual insidious nar-
colepsy which regularly fogs me with lethargy from the twentieth
minute of the session to the end.)
118 Violet Pietrantonio

P: “Yes, there are new evolved Pokémon. Because Pokémon evolve.

There’s Giratina, who is the Pokémon of the Distortion World,
who has to keep defending himself because they want to catch
him …”
A: “Giratina lives in a Distortion World? But what’s this Distortion
World like?”
P: “Like that ladder that you’d bring down from the loft …”
A: “And instead of the earth you’d have to walk in the sky?”
P: “Yes, but not only sky … there are pieces of earth too …”
A: “I wonder how Giratina feels living in this world where everything
seems the wrong way round …”
P: “He’s fine, it’s just that everyone always wants to catch him. Then
there’s Mew Two, who is the evolution of Mew. He was generated
by men. To start with he had organised an army to fight the men
because he thought they wanted to use him for their own reasons,
but then he realised that Pokémon and men can co-exist, and love
each other. And when he came to know how he had been gener-
ated he got a shock!”
A: (evolution in O? But also original O more approachable?) “There’s
been an evolution, a movement from mistrust and perhaps also
from the fear that we feel when we’re afraid of being considered
objects to be used for personal ends, of not being loved, to feelings
of affection and trust …”
P: “Exactly! From being angry with men to loving them … There’s a
saying in Sicily: if the Opuntia grows big, the prickly pear is good,
if it doesn’t the prickly pear isn’t good …”
A: (O-puntia? If a ♀ is able to impregnate itself with O, will ♂♂
mature, juicy with new emotions and thoughts? … even if they are
thorny, not easy to gather and dream?)
P: Draws a prickly pear with fruit and thorns: “to get close to a
prickly pear you’ve got to have big work gloves, with no holes in,
a sack for the fruit, and never stand close to a prickly pear if it’s
windy because you’ll get thorns in you … The time for good figs is
between September and November …”
A: “More or less this period …”
It’s time to say goodbye.
 Memories of the future 119

Dear Wilfred,
How old is Robbie? Is it his calendar age that matters or the one we
sense in the field? Robbie is nearly thirty … perhaps thirty years in which
pre-conceptions (♂) of play (♂♀) have stayed in hibernation waiting for
a ♀ in which they can be realised … I have hesitated, doubted and even
trembled … at the crossroads between K norms of the usual analytic
work with adults and strong O sensations in need of the structure, style
and modus operandi of child analysis … Around the 40th birthday of
A Memoir of the Future, I felt I couldn’t in the end not entrust myself
to the very strong flow of meanings and reveries in the field that were
speaking to me about a little kid … who was seeking contacts, responses,
and a playroom as a child … The first time I couldn’t help following my
nose, which was bringing me the scent of baby dreams was when, seeing
his beautiful drawings building up on the desk, I felt that only by putting
a little folder on the desk would I be able to try and communicate my
feeling of contact with ♂♂ veined with oneiric exuberance and looking
for a ♀; ♂♂♂ that had perhaps found, and could at last finally have,
a ♀ … A drawing (♂) perhaps seeks a folder (♀) in order to realise
the pre-conception ♀♂ of which it is the animated cartoon … what use
would there have been in more abstract symbolisations of it? …
In the transmission of ideas, which are perhaps also pre-­conceptions
in search of containers, and decisive for the outcome, could they be the
conditions for harmony and attunement between ♂♀ on the wavelength
of the different levels of the oneiric? Maybe A Memoir of the Future,
on its first appearance as O-contained (♂) was a pre-conception of
intercourses ♀♂ in O→K, difficult to accommodate for containers (♀)
accustomed to K contained (♂♂) alluding to ♀♂ in K→O ?

Notes
1 Avatar (2010), a film directed by J. Cameron.
2 Mindfulness is the translation of sati in Pali, the language used by the
Buddha for his teachings. Mindfulness is a mode of paying attention,
moment by moment, in the hic et nunc, in an intentional non-judgemental
way, to sensations, perceptions, impulses, emotions, thoughts, words,
actions and relationships (from Wikipedia).
3 The Chronicles of Narnia (2005), a film directed by A. Adamson.
Chapter 8

The ineffable
Avner Bergstein

The silent, elusive movement of the emotional experience becomes a

word when it crosses an invisible border, beyond which lie thoughts
and speech. However, this transition from experience to speech en-
tails an essential loss. Experience is simplified and objectified, and
the individual is drawn farther away from the emotional truth of his
being. Thought, right after providing a name, is fascinated by its own
power and consequently forgets the reality represented by that name.
This is the essential argument that Buber tries to articulate: objectifi-
cation has replaced the encounter, and today one encounters thoughts
and words, not the reality that preceded them. Buber’s analysis seems
to be an attack on the tendency of the mind to objectify and then
relate to the abstract thought as if it were a real entity (Avnon, 1998).
The psychoanalyst, too, might become enthralled with the words and
forget the inconceivable, elusive reality that preceded them.
P.A. protests against the easy and careless use of words and says to
ROBIN: “Either you have little respect for what you say, or you say
words for which you have no respect …” (MF, p. 227). Further on,
P.A. goes on to say:

… All of us are intolerant of the unknown and strive instantane-

ously to feel it is explicable, familiar … The event itself is suspect
because it is explicable in terms of physics, chemistry, psycho-­
analysis, and other pre-conceived experience. The ‘conception’ is
an event which has become ‘conceivable’, the ‘conceivable’ it has
become is no longer the genetic experience.
(Ibid., p. 382)
 The ineffable 121

How, then, can we maintain the essential perpetual movement

between the pre-linguistic relation to being and the verbal modes of
communication; between the ineffable experience unmediated by
thought and the possibility of communicating it to another, without
objectifying it and denuding it of its essence? ‘It is clear’ Bion writes,

that in psychoanalysis talking can be a method of communication

of genuine thoughts. Unfortunately words can be used in such a
way that they are a ‘cosmetic’ representation of thinking instead
of being the outcome of the labour involved in thought.
(Ibid., p. 666)

Bion often addresses this paradoxical nature of the relationship

between language and truth whereby linguistic expression is the path
by which truth can be glimpsed at, while at the same time it hides and
distorts it.
Healthy mental growth seems to depend on this truth as the living
organism depends on food (Bion, 1965). This is the notion at the foun-
dation of Bion’s psychoanalytic thinking. Yet this ‘truth’ is not The
Truth, but rather ‘truth in transit’, suggesting that truth becomes a
dynamic feeling related to what is taking place at a certain point in the
transference, depending more on intuition than on any by-­products of
sensory perception (Horovitz, 2007). This is not necessarily an empir-
ical truth but rather a sense of truth at a certain moment.
Psychoanalysis strives toward this truth. This is its essence. However,
this truth cannot be known and is often not amenable to verbal com-
munication. This is the paradox that creates the tension generating
the infinite psychic movement. This is the paradoxical movement of
language as veiling and unveiling. It is neither one nor the other but
rather a constant movement between the two modes. The mere use
of words is often insufficient in the attempt to understand the live,
ever-changing, ever-moving individual. Without this movement, we
collapse to stagnation, to an inanimate, static portrayal that cannot
capture the psyche’s aliveness.
Bion (1970) maintains that any truth that can be thought is no
longer truth but its evolution1 into material reality, that which can be
known through the familiar senses. Thus, any truth that penetrates
into the realm of verbal language is a falsity.2
122 Avner Bergstein

This thinking is essentially similar to that of philosophers like

Plato, Hume, Kant, and Berkeley who postulated a gap between the
phenomenon as it is realized in the world and the thing-in-itself, i.e.,
between the sensuous manifestation and the pure form that is beyond
sensuous perception. David Hume (1748) put it deftly when he wrote
that the most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest experience.
The limited human nature, which does not permit knowing an-
ything beyond the phenomena amenable to sensuous perception,
cannot bridge this gap. All we can do is deduce that which exists
beyond our sensuous perception. Every form of expression, be it
verbal communication, painting, music, etc. is only a transforma-
tion of the thing-in-itself, and it is only its transformation that can
be known.
The invariant psychic reality of the session, O, can be described as
a space with an infinite number of dimensions (Neuman, 2010) and
thus cannot be grasped in its totality, due to the fact that the human
mind is limited to three dimensions. However, ‘ultimate reality must
be a whole even if the human animal cannot grasp it’ (MF, p. 229).
Thinking about absolute truth is utilized as proof by contradic-
tion of that which is beyond us and that Man’s restrictedness is
defined in opposition to it. Our perceptual capacity, as Kant might
say, is discursive and not intuitive. We learn circuitously, one thing
from another, through deductions, judgments and general concepts
and do not perceive directly, or all at once, the object’s entirety
(Yovel, 2013).

The pain in the absence of words

The urge to communicate, alongside the difficulty to communicate,
seems to be Ariadne’s thread running throughout Bion’s work from
his War Memoirs to his very last seminars and the Memoir, and to my
mind is a very powerful driving force in Bion’s need to write (Berg-
stein, 2015). In The Dawn of Oblivion he writes:

The nearest that a psychoanalytic couple comes to a ‘fact’ is when

one or the other has a feeling. Communicating that fact to some
other person is a task which has baffled scientists, saints, poets
and philosophers as long as the race has existed. (MF, p. 536)
 The ineffable 123

Bion (1970) cites Isaac Luria, the 16th-century Jewish mystic who left
no writings and when asked by a disciple about his reasons for not
setting out his teaching in book form replied:

It is impossible because all things are interrelated. I can hardly

open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst
its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul
has received, and how can I put it down in a book?

As noted by Francesca Bion (1997), Bion’s Diary, written to his par-

ents at the end of World War I, was offered as a compensation for his
having found it impossible to write letters to them during the war,
out of a compelling need to express his very recent painful experi-
ences. She recalls that during the first occasion they dined together,
Bion spoke movingly of his experiences as if compelled to communi-
cate haunting memories. Already at the very beginning of Diary, Bion
laments his inability ‘to be accurate in some things’ (Bion 1977, p. 5)
and writes that he can only describe his impressions of various actions
and try to portray his feelings at that time. Further on, he writes:

I am at a loss now to tell you of our life. Such worlds separate

the ordinary human’s point of view from mine at that time, that
anything I can write will either be incomprehensible or will give a
quite wrong impression.
(Ibid., p. 94)

The opening chapters of The Past Presented demonstrate the inade-

quacy of language and the pain inherent in not being able to describe
one’s state of mind. Bion tries to capture the multidimensional, elusive
truth through the multitude of characters, who ultimately each resorts
to his own language and a plethoric use of quotations and action.
It seems Bion often goes out of his way to describe the frustration
and suffering he feels in the face of the inability to represent and com-
municate the emotional experience. He writes:

The experience of the patient’s communication and psycho-­

analyst’s interpretation is ineffable and essential … What has to be
communicated is real enough; yet every psycho-analyst knows the
124 Avner Bergstein

frustration of trying to make clear, even to another psycho-­analyst,

an experience which sounds unconvincing as soon as it is formu-
lated. We may have to reconcile ourselves to the idea that such com-
munication is impossible at the present stage of psycho-­analysis.
(Bion, 1967a, p. 122)

Every testimony, as reliable as it may be, is in effect only an interpre-

tation, dressed in familiar categories and symbols.
Bion (1967b) makes use of the spectrum of the electromagnetic
waves as an analogy for emphasizing the limits of our verbal capacity.
The wavelengths visible to us fall in a narrow strip of visual percep-
tion between the infrared on the one end and the ultraviolet on the
other. We cannot see the ones that fall off these ends, but they are nev-
ertheless there. Using that as an analogy, Bion suggests that, thanks
to verbal capacity, there is a certain realm of mental life we can speak
of in terms like personality, mind and so forth. This is the small part
of the spectrum, in which one could talk about it as being verbally
communicable. However, the psychoanalytic encounter compels us to
observe and meet those areas of the mind that lie beyond that narrow
sphere, encapsulated in the unrepressed unconscious or the psychotic
part of the personality (Bergstein, 2014). This is neither pre-verbal nor
an active, neurotic avoidance of communication, but rather, the un-
verbalizable, mute part of the self. And yet, ‘Can we make some cor-
responding extension of our … mental capacity, to take in a little bit
more of … the invisible aspects of the spectrum?’ (Bion, 1967b, p. 60).
An attitude of ‘thus far and no further’ (MF, p. 244) is therefore
insufficient.

… If the ‘universe of discourse’ does not facilitate the solution of

3 minus 5, then real numbers are no good, but must be enlarged
by ‘negative numbers’. If the mathematical ‘field of play’ is not
suitable for the manipulation of ‘negative numbers’, it has to be
extended …
(Ibid., pp. 175–176)

Paul (after Milton in Paradise Lost) yearned: ‘that I may see and tell
of things invisible to mortal sight’ (ibid., p. 225).
The analyst must thus be able to intuit a psychic reality that has
no ‘senseable’ foundation. He must ‘blind himself’ to the evidence of
 The ineffable 125

engaging in a conversation seemingly between two adults and loosen

the grip on familiar anchors of mature thought, so as to get in touch
with ‘the unobserved, incomprehensible, inaudible, ineffable … from
which will come the future interpretation’ (Bion, 1974, p. 127).
We are thus in the realm of the negative, ‘what is not’, a core notion
in both psychoanalytic thinking and the mystical traditions.

The negative in psychoanalytic thinking

In describing the notion of the negative in psychoanalytic thinking, I
would like to begin with an illustration from a Hasidic3 tale depicted
by Buber4. A great Hasidic leader said that,

… the Torah (The Jewish Law or Bible) received by Moses on

Mount Sinai … cannot be changed and we are forbidden to touch
its letters. But, in fact, not only the black letters but also the white
gaps between them are letters of the Torah. However, we cannot
read the white gaps. In the future, God will reveal the white hid-
denness of the Torah.
(translated in Avnon, 1998, p. 122)

We read in this tale an allusion to a hidden reality indicated by white

gaps between the black letters. Its absence is only apparent, an effect
of the reader’s focus on the foreground of the text at the expense of
noting its interwoven background. We can see and read the black let-
ters and usually do not pay attention to the gaps between them. To
render the white gaps relevant to our understanding, we first have to
see them as signs necessitating a release of the attention that is ordi-
narily focused on the black, dominant script. Perceiving the black
letters differently, in a manner that would bring the white gaps to the
fore as ‘letters’, implies experiencing the text in a new, revitalized,
mystical way (Avnon, 1998).
In a similar vein, Bion stresses that psychoanalytic listening in-
cludes the silences, or rests as the musicians might say. The totality
of the musical composition includes these silences, which play a very
big part in the composition. No doubt, they cannot be neglected. Bion
adds that every now and then you get some sort of curious event, like
a person who for some obscure reason, doesn’t, or won’t, listen to the
music, but listens to something else. Freud, who Bion sees as a mystic,
126 Avner Bergstein

did not listen to the words uttered but to something else, and ‘the
next thing you know, you have this vast realm of psychoanalysis’ (in
Aguayo, 2013b, p. 64).
Mystical thinking maintains that truth is hidden from the senses,
from language and from thought. It is concerned with the unknown,
concealed, and zero-ness; in effect—with the negative. But P.A. asks:
‘… how does one discover a negative?’ (ibid, p. 79). The intuition of the
negative appears throughout Freud’s writings beginning with the very
fact that the free associations are connected to each other with appar-
ently invisible, unconscious threads that are sensually non-existent.
It is realized pre-eminently in the creation of an analytic setting neg-
ativizing perception as an indispensable means of approaching the
psyche (Botella and Botella, 2005). And, what appears in the space
that is generated is not that which was repressed or the return of
something that was once represented in the mind, but rather an en-
counter with the irrepresentable.
Freud described two forms of the same existence of reality—psychic
reality and material reality. Bion elaborated the notion of these two
aspects of reality and wrote of ‘reality sensuous and psychic’. Whereas
sensuous reality is perceived through the five basic senses, psychic re-
ality is intuited. Intuition is an unmediated knowledge or understand-
ing of truth, not supported by any information derived from a familiar
sensual source. Since it cannot be communicated to another and can-
not be corroborated by a rational method of scientific knowledge, it is
often seen as close to mystical revelation (de Bianchedi, 1991). Hence,
the analyst ‘sees’ an internal world and has no doubt of its existence,
even though he has no sensuous evidence for it.
Winnicott (1969) writes of the ‘non-event’. He ‘hears’ the scream
the patient is always not experiencing. The great non-event of the ses-
sion is the screaming that the patient does not scream. This seems
to be an illustration of Winnicott’s intuition of the negative as de-
scribed by Green (1997), who himself wrote widely of the negative,
emphasizing that he does not use the word absence, because in the
word absence there is the hope of a return of the presence. It is also not
a loss because this would mean that the loss could be mourned. The
reference to the negative is to the non-existence, the void. Winnicott’s
contribution, according to Green, is to show how this negative, the
non-existence, will become at some point the only thing that is real.
 The ineffable 127

Bion (1974) illustrates this further by describing the observation of

a game of tennis, looking at it with increasing darkness, while dim-
ming the intellectual illumination and light. 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 that are collected
together in a net.
Botella and Botella (2005) speak of the negative of the trauma that
has its origin not in a quantifiable positive, but in the absence of what,
for the child’s ego, should have occurred as a matter of course. Some-
thing fundamentally evident for the subject that should have hap-
pened did not happen, even though he is not aware of it, let alone form
an idea of what this negative is. These authors, too, argue that the
negative of the infantile trauma is not a product of the abolition of a
representation, but the consequence of a lack at the outset, a missing
inscription, at any rate in the form of a representation.
All these lead up to Sandler’s (2011) conceptualization of the realm
of Minus, ‘a non-concrete, immaterial realm that complements the
positive “senseable” realm of the material reality’ (p. 13). Again, ‘the
realm of Minus cannot be equated to denial; It contemplates the pos-
sibilities of impossibility, and its propositional content cannot be seen
on the same level … as the “Plus realm”, what is affirmative; in other
words, what occupies a position in space-time. Therefore, since it in-
dicates “what is not” … it cannot have the properties assigned to what
would be the opposite of “what is”. It is ineffable’ (p. 14).
The clinical implication of this is that we are required to listen not
only to the words, or to their semantic meaning, but rather to their ef-
fect on us, to the emotional experience generated by them. The very fact
that the patient lies on the couch liberates the analyst to be immersed
in a trance-like state so as to promote the encounter with irrepresent-
able areas of the patient’s internal world. ‘Phantasies sometimes burst
through into articulate words when the individual is “off his guard”’
(MF, p. 485). Accordingly, Bion advocates the analyst’s negative capa-
bility, i.e., being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irri-
table reaching after fact and reason, thus capacitating the analyst’s
formal regression of thought, a quasi-hallucinatory mode of being as
described by the Botellas or in Civitarese’s (2015a) elaboration of Bion’s
transformations in hallucinosis as a feature of the analyst’s receptivity.
128 Avner Bergstein

In fact, Bion (1967a) says that ‘The proper state for intuiting psycho-­
analytical realizations … can be compared with the states supposed
to provide conditions for hallucinations. The hallucinated individual
is apparently having sensuous experiences without any background
of sensuous reality.’ So, the analyst too must be able to identify some-
thing that can be perceived not by any of the familiar senses, but
rather through primordial, mystical intuition. Nevertheless, admit-
ting the caesura (i.e., a break and continuity) between the psychotic
and the non-psychotic parts of the personality, entailing some overlap
between them, the intuitive, mystical state of mind differs fundamen-
tally from the psychotic one. The incapacity to tolerate the negative,
the no-breast, is a fundamental characteristic of the psychotic per-
sonality, whereas toleration of the negative and the frustration this
entails is a defining characteristic of a psychoanalytically trained in-
tuitive or mystical state of mind. In his mystical diary, Rabbi Isaac of
Acre, the 13th-century Spanish Kabbalist, warns the mystic against
quenching his soul’s thirst lest he be utterly consumed by fire [or might
I add, insanity?]. He draws on Moses as an example of a person who
controlled himself and did not stare into the burning bush or satisfy
his soul’s hunger and thirst.
The psychoanalytic attitude, much like the mystical one, is a delib-
erate, conscious act of discipline that depends on an active suspension
of memory and desire. Bion (1970) proposes a discipline for the analyst
that increases his ability to exercise ‘acts of faith’; however, he stressed
that this must be distinguished from the religious meaning with which
it is invested in conversational usage. This is faith that truth exists and
is calculated to meet that irrepresentable part of the personality and
an ineffable emotional truth while retaining an attitude as an observer
by virtue of training, experience and personal analysis.5
No doubt suspension of memory, desire, understanding and all that
binds us to external reality brings the analyst, as well as the mys-
tic, closer to an animistic world; however, the collapse to animistic
thinking, characteristic of the primitive religious world or psychotic-­
hallucinatory states, is precisely the result of an individual’s inability
to maintain a psychoanalytic, or mystical, state of mind. Bion (1970)
comments that it may well be that analysts who attempt this approach
will find that the test of sensuous deprivation involved in eschewing
memory and desire will cause them to feel the need for further anal-
ysis that would not have occurred had the analyst remained content
 The ineffable 129

with the atmosphere of deprivation as it has been understood in clas-

sical psychoanalytic thinking.
Bion adds that the purpose of the analyst’s partial severance with
external reality differs from the purpose of the psychotic manoeuver.
The psychotic wishes to destroy contact with psychic reality whereas
the analyst wishes to establish it. This psychic reality is ineffable,
not because it is experienced beyond or outside reality, but precisely
because this is what real experience feels like when infinite dimen-
sions are perceived simultaneously, paradoxically, with no bounda-
ries of time and space; this is why linear, narrative language cannot
grasp it.
And so, we are again in the realm of what is sensuously invisible but
intuitively visible, the juxtaposition between psychoanalytic thinking
and mysticism.

Emotional truth and ultimate reality:

Bion and Jewish mysticism
The fact that different disciplines, at different times and from dif-
ferent vertices, describe the same experience gives this experience
greater validity and enables a ‘multi-ocular’ view of truth. And, this
encounter between the different disciplines is an emotional experi-
ence in itself, an emotional experience of discovering coherence. It is
a mode of being in which different facets of the emotional experience
can be ‘observed’ from different vertices, integrated in a way that feels
truthful, affording a sense of truth.6
Bion drew a parallel between psychoanalytical and mystical states
of mind. Since Bion’s reference and affinity to Christian mystics have
been widely explored (e.g., Reiner, 2012), I will focus predominantly
on Jewish mysticism. Bion mentions only a few of the Jewish mys-
tics and Jewish philosophers, namely, Isaac Luria, Martin Buber, and
Gershom Scholem, a scholar of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism who
seems to have made a big impression on Bion’s thinking.7 Indeed,
both Jewish philosophy and Jewish mysticism try to address the prob-
lem of ineffability through the issue of God. Inasmuch as one cannot
describe in words the ultimate reality of the emotional experience,
any attempt to describe God undermines its very essence.
In contrast to Jewish philosophers, Jewish mystics cannot say
enough about God and describe him inexhaustibly. Yet, the name of
130 Avner Bergstein

God is merely a symbolic representation of an ultimate reality which is

forever unformed and amorphous (Scholem, 1960). There is no word
that can encompass the entire meaning of God; hence, a superfluous-
ness of words is needed.
It seems to me that these are two complementary modes of deal-
ing with the ineffability of the deity in its entirety: the former assert-
ing the absence of words in relation to God thus espousing silence,
whereas the latter advocates contriving genres of discourse about the
Naught, transforming it into the Infinite.
Similarly, Bion (1965) designates the sign ‘O’ to denote unknowable
ultimate reality, the Godhead8 the infinite. In a striking parallel, he
specifies its definitory qualities listing the following negatives: ‘It is
not good or evil; it cannot be known, loved or hated … The most, and
the least that the individual person can do is to be it’ (pp. 139–140).
Bion, like the mystics, writes of the countless and yet insufficient
number of words required to describe the emotional experience. He
writes:

I do not feel able to communicate to the reader an account that

would be likely to satisfy me as correct. I am more confident that
I could make the reader understand what I had to put up with
if I could extract from him a promise that he would faithfully
read every word I wrote; I would then set about writing several
hundred thousand words … In short, I cannot have as much con-
fidence in my ability to tell the reader what happened as I have in
my ability to do something to the reader that I have had done to me.
I have had an emotional experience; I feel confident in my ability
to recreate that emotional experience, but not to represent it.
(Bion, 1992, p. 219, italics added)

In an attempt to describe the ultimate reality symbolized by O, Bion

writes:

It is perhaps too mathematical to call it infinity, too mystical to

call it the infinite, too religious to call it the Godhead … Verbal
expressions intended to represent the ultimate object often appear
to be contradictory within themselves, but there is a surprising
degree of agreement, despite differences of background, time and
 The ineffable 131

space, in the descriptions offered by mystics who feel they have

experienced the ultimate reality.
(1965, pp. 150–151)

Mysticism
Science and mysticism are seemingly opposites. Science deals with
knowledge, with what is revealed, with ‘what is’. Mysticism deals
with the unknown, the hidden, the Naught. However, over the years
this dichotomy has lost its meaning. Truth, as noted by Civitarese
(2013b), is neither scientific/philosophical nor mystical/aesthetic.
The former is lacking in emotions/feelings, the latter in concepts.
One has only to think of the immaterial nature of the negative or the
imaginary numbers in mathematics in order to illustrate the overlap
and dialectic interplay between science and the mystical tradition.
In Bion’s later writings the scientific vertex is put into constant con-
junction with at least two other vertices, the mystical and the ar-
tistic traditions. Nevertheless, the word mysticism is saturated with
connotations, often in the service of religious, esoteric or new-age
dogmas, that its depth is lost and often denigrated in psychoanalytic
thinking. One must, therefore, go back to its original definition to
allow the affinity between the two disciplines to become apparent,
as well as to capacitate the mutual inspiration inherent within such
an affinity.
The word ‘mysticism’, derived from the Greek μυω, and meaning
‘to conceal,’ was defined by Celsus, a 2nd-century Greek philosopher
and opponent of Early Christianity. It was defined as the closing of
the senses to all worldly matters, sensations, passions and desires, so
as to enable the soul to be open to the spiritual matters of the sublime.
It is from this definition that the two characteristics of most mystical
traditions derive: first, most mystical methods require detachment
from mundane desires as a pre-condition for spiritual wholeness and
view asceticism as a way to achieve this goal. Second, the mystical
way leads to an experience in the realms of an ineffable reality. It is
caught in the dire straits of the intense desire for expression on the
one hand, and the inability to express itself on the other. Many mysti-
cal traditions refer to nothingness, or Naught, so as to emphasize the
fundamental qualitative difference of the realm of mysticism from all
132 Avner Bergstein

that is called ‘reality’ or ‘existence’ in the ordinary world of experi-

ence. The mystical literature stresses that any talk or speech is only
an allegory. Mystical literature is therefore inclined to puns and par-
adoxical expressions. Interestingly, referring to the Memoir, Meltzer
and Harris Williams (1985) remark that the way of playing fast and
loose with language, with wit, obscenity, endless punning, splitting,
and recombining words, is part of the method that the characters use
to try to ‘get through’ to one another.
Another trait of the mystical experience is its unitive nature. The
mystic feels that he ‘unites’ with a sublime, divine or cosmic reality.
However, most Jewish mystics have referred to ‘adherence’ or ‘close-
ness’ to God (Devekut), and avoided talking about a complete, actual
and substantial union. In fact, as Scholem (1971) argues, the avoid-
ance of a complete union with God (unio-mystica) differentiates Jew-
ish mysticism from all other mystical traditions. It is in the nature of
Jewish mysticism that one should at most aspire to communion with
God, but never to union. Whereas in Catholic mysticism, ‘commun-
ion’ was not the last step on the mystical way, in Kabbalism it is the
last grade of ascent to God. It is not union, because union with God is
denied to man, according to Kabbalistic theology, even in that mysti-
cal upsurge of the soul. I suspect this reverberated with Bion’s notion
of the endless striving for unreachable, unknowable truth.
These mystical notions are incredibly similar to Bion’s notion of es-
chewing memory, desire and understanding and closing the familiar
senses so as to facilitate an intuitive state of mind, hence becoming
at-one with the emotional truth of the moment. Mysticism is thus a
way of delving into one’s inner world, shutting one’s eyes to sensuous
reality enabling the individual to see with one’s ‘inner eye’ (II, p. 225),
much as dreams are created.

Mysticism, not religious dogma

It appears to me that unquestioning belief in God is demanded
P. A:
by the Church or its representatives. Perhaps I am misled by the
Institutions of Religion which have obscured for me the chance of
going beyond the institutions’ dogmata to a reality beyond.
PAUL: There are certainly plenty of religious teachers who have de-
veloped that and warned against it. St. John of the Cross even
 The ineffable 133

said that reading his own works would be a stumbling block if

they were revered to the detriment of direct experience. Teach-
ings, dogma, hymns, congregational worship, are supposed to be
preludes to religion proper – not final ends in themselves.
P. A: This sounds not unlike a difficulty which we experience when
psycho-analytic jargon … [is] substituted for looking into the
patient’s mind itself to intuit that to which the psycho-analyst
is striving to point; like a dog that looks at its master’s pointing
hand rather than at the object the hand is trying to point out.
(MF, p. 267)

It is true that established religion and mystical traditions share the

same scriptures, yet they differ from each other in the most drastic
manner. A religious person believes in the word of God incorporated
in scriptures and is certain that he understands it, or at least that its
core, its most important meaning, has been absorbed by him. His
‘truth’ is therefore often static and finite and so does not pertain to
psychoanalytic truth. God then becomes an idol as clearly argued by
ROLAND when he says: ‘… the Israelitish God was a recognizable,
tribal deity showing marked human characteristics, such as jealousy
and envy, not markedly different from the inhabitants of the Homeric
Pantheon located on Olympus …’ (ibid., p. 80). The mystic, on the
other hand, knows that various levels of communicative interpreta-
tion, including allegory, analogy and the like, cannot reveal the hidden
divine truth, which can be approached in non-linguistic ways alone.
His truth is therefore dynamic, transient and infinite. The mystical
meaning and message of the scriptures is beyond communication.
It is hidden within the text, but the mystic, by his meta-­sensual and
meta-­intellectual perceptions or experiences, can achieve a glimpse of
the hidden truth. A sensuous-intellectual approach to the text of the
scriptures is either meaningless or false (Dan, 2002).
The rejection of any dogmatic authority is echoed by BION who
says: ‘… We do not know the cost in suffering associated with the
belief in a Christian God, or the God of Abraham’s Ur, or Hitler’s
Germany, or peyotism – or God of any kind’ (I, p. 172). And ­further
on, in another debate, ROLAND remarks that ‘Religion has been
aptly described as a drug,’ to which PAUL replies: ‘Because it is used
for that purpose by some people I do not see why religion should
134 Avner Bergstein

be held responsible, any more than why wine should be blamed for
alcoholism …’ (MF, pp. 271–272). Elsewhere Bion (1977a) writes:
‘Religious dogmata are … vulgarizations of that which the religious
mystic can achieve directly’ (p. 32). Chapter 5 of The Past Presented
highlights the discussion in which religious feelings or a ‘religious im-
pulse’ is distinguished from religious institutions. Perhaps the most
defining differentiation is voiced by P.A. as to whether it ‘is capable of
development rather than decay’ (MF, p. 287).
To my mind, Bion’s psychoanalytic writings testify to the fact that
there is no necessary connection between a deep devotion to a certain
religion and the specific characteristics of a mystical view. As a matter
of fact, Bion seems to present us with non-religious mysticism.
Throughout the Memoir, there is much affinity between P.A. and
PAUL/PRIEST (representing both religion and the mystical tradition),
which they come to realize as their encounter evolves, for example:

P. A: … I have found that if I say what I mean it is not English; if I write

English it does not say what I mean.
PAUL: Theologians are blamed for being incapable of being religious –
you are as bad as we are!
P. A: Probably for the same reason. Ultimate Truth is ineffable.
(Ibid., p. 229)

Bion began to be interested in mystics in 1965 when he realized that

many of them had found it very difficult to put their revelatory ex-
periences into words and manage to communicate them to others
who had not had this unique experience themselves (de Bianchedi,
2005). This is similar to the difficulty Bion experienced when trying to
communicate the intuitively perceived psychoanalytic experience to a
person who had not been in the room and who had not had the same
experience. Moreover, Bion (1967a) wanted to bring the notion of the
mystic, which he regarded as interchangeable with the word ‘scien-
tist’ or ‘artist’, into the psychoanalytic discourse. He was aware that
‘mystic’ has a much more religious connotation, and he had indeed
referred in his late writings to religious and theological terms such as
‘Godhead’, ‘faith’, ‘atonement’,9 etc. However, these terms were used
in an attempt to borrow concepts from different disciplines in order to
avoid the collapse to psychoanalytic terms that have become jargon.
 The ineffable 135

Bion did not try to describe the psychoanalytic experience as re-

ligious, but he did see the advantages of religious metaphors and
thought that at times these are superior to psychoanalytic models
in addressing that quintessential mystery known as man (Grotstein,
2007). Bion (1970) writes: ‘Poetic and religious expressions have made
possible a degree of “public-ation” in that formulations exist which
have achieved durability and extensibility’ (p. 1). Furthermore, words
such as God and Godhead were borrowed to try and depict an emo-
tional truth, or ultimate reality, which like God, is transcendental,
existing beyond the possibility of human knowledge and conscious-
ness. As he stated,

I use these formulations to express, in exaggerated form, the pain

which is involved in achieving the state of naivety … The rele-
vance of this to psychological phenomena springs from the fact
that they are not amenable to apprehension by the senses.
(Bion, 1965, p. 159)

Bion makes use of mystical writings to interpret psychoanalytic prob-

lems, as he does with other cultural myths that have a universal or a
large social value (cf. Bion, 1992). He suggests that the scientist must
know enough mathematics to have an idea when he is confronting a
problem to which a particular mathematical procedure would apply.
The psychoanalyst likewise might use myths or mystical writings as a
tool comparable to that of the mathematical formula for investigating
emotional problems. Associating on a chosen myth, and selection of
the myths on which to associate, plays an important part in the pro-
motion of psychoanalytic intuition and, more precisely, in the reinvig-
oration of the analyst’s α-function (Bion, 1992). Hence, Bion’s attitude
to myths is similar to the use Buber makes of Hasidic legends and
Biblical tales as conveying philosophical insight. Buber’s hope was
that these would help readers gain access to the truth conveyed by
such myths, which would otherwise require complicated philosoph-
ical reasoning. Bion’s turn to mystical exegeses, too, is derived from
his belief that these could facilitate the communication of emotional
truth that is beyond verbal communication. P.A. remarks: ‘… I was
compelled to seek asylum in fiction. Disguised as fiction, the truth
occasionally slipped through’ (MF, p. 302).
136 Avner Bergstein

The Memoir and the Zohar

The Zohar, as maintained by Scholem (1961), has stood out for cen-
turies as the expression of all that was profoundest and most deeply
hidden in the innermost recesses of the Jewish soul. I do not know
whether Bion had ever read the 2,400 densely written pages of the
Zohar, although I assume he did not. However, there is no doubt that
he was acquainted with parts of it through the writings of Gershom
Scholem, which he cites on several occasions. Be that as it may, the
similarity between the Zohar and the Memoir is striking, and it seems
to me that the Memoir, albeit not being a mystical text, can be read as
one might read the Zohar.
In its manifest appearance, the Zohar is a scriptural exegesis, i.e.,
a mystical interpretation of the Torah. But the Zohar, much like the
Memoir, is also an epic fiction. It is written in pseudoepigraphic form,
almost in the form of a mystical novel. It portrays the epic story of
Rabbi Shimon and his companions, who are the fictitious or legend-
ary embellishment of real historical persons. Its dramatis personae
include other wondrous characters such as an old man, young child,
donkey driver, etc., who reveal ancient secrets to the companions
or describe the primordial world before emanation. Much like the
Memoir, the author tries to capture the multidimensional transient
truth through the multitude of characters. Hellner-Eshed (2009) com-
pares the Zohar narrative to a jazz jam session, where a common
melodic theme performed by the ensemble branches into solo improv-
isations that build to greater surprise, complexity and crescendo—the
more virtuosity, the more wonderful and surprising the innovations.
One could perhaps say the same of the Memoir.
I dare to think that the Memoir, like the Zohar, was written in a
dream-like, at times quasi-hallucinatory state, with Bion delving into
his inner world, awakening primordial sights and visions. It is an
attempt to be in the dream rather than talk about it. Both texts are
thus often obscure and perplexing, inclined to puns and paradoxi-
cal expressions, and should be read together in a circle of colleagues.
Reading both is an emotional experience of capturing glimpses of
an ineffable, hidden reality, arousing an emotional turbulence, at
times bordering on ecstasy, in response to its aesthetic capacity of
awakening the realm of noumena. Moreover, they both seem to be
 The ineffable 137

an attempt at bearing the pain inherent in the ineffability of the emo-

tional experience.
The mystics related to the Scriptures that populated their liter-
ary world as reference points to their revelatory experiences. Simi-
larly, by abundantly quoting classical poets such as Virgil, Milton,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, it seems that
Bion is making a similar reference in the Memoir to the literary and
cultural climate of his world, as a way of conveying his ineffable emo-
tional experience.
The unknown author(s) of the Zohar make(s) use of numerous liter-
ary sources from classical Jewish writings. These sources are usually
not mentioned. Instead, the author(s) content themselves, and discon-
tent the reader, with vague references to ancient writings or mystical
tracts dealing with the same topics. Thus, the discovery of the real
sources, which are so carefully obscured, is one of the main prerequi-
sites for an appreciation of the historical and doctrinal significance of
the Zohar (Scholem, 1961).
The author of the Zohar, as Scholem tells us, employs the pointed
language of the ancient sages although usually less successfully in
terms of being understood. Not worried by chronology, the author
lets imagination roam freely among the different generations. The text
frequently loses itself in mystical allegorization and not infrequently
becomes abstruse, but again and again a hidden and sometimes awe-
ful depth opens before our eyes, and we find ourselves confronted
with real and profound insight.

The mystic and the psychoanalyst

I would like to address the mystical state of mind of analyst and
patient, whose mutual work of analysis facilitates the development of
their intuitive capacity. Thus, I suggest that mystical qualities are not
reserved for a privileged, ‘illuminated’ few, but are part of what psycho-
analysis strives to attain and develop.
Mystics are men who by their own inner experience and specula-
tion concerning this experience discover new layers of meaning in
their tradition. A mystic is a man who has been favored with an imme-
diate, and to him real, experience of the divine, of ultimate reality, or
who at least strives to attain such an experience. His experience may
138 Avner Bergstein

come to him through sudden illumination, or it may be the result of

long and often elaborate preparations (Scholem, 1960).
The moment a mystic tries to clarify his experience by reflection,
to formulate it, and especially when he attempts to communicate it
to others, he cannot help imposing a framework of conventional sym-
bols and ideas upon it. Yet, there is always some part of it that he
cannot adequately and fully express. But if he does try to communi-
cate his experience—and it is only by doing so that he makes himself
known to us—he is bound to interpret his experience in language,
images and concepts that were created before him.
The mystic’s attitude to religion is one of deep doubt that verbal
communication can reveal divine truth. The mystic is someone who
knows that real truth, meaningful truth, can never be expressed in
words. And, it is not only language that the mystic distrusts. The
whole range of means by which people acquire knowledge, especially
the senses, logic and thought, are suspected as a cause for error and
meaninglessness (Dan, 2002).
The mystic discovers a new dimension, a new depth in his own
tradition. In employing symbols to describe his own experience and
to formulate his interpretations of it, he transforms and reinterprets
established religion, and his symbolism is the instrument of this trans-
formation. He uses old symbols and lends them new meaning; he may
even use new symbols and give them an old meaning. In either case,
we find a dialectical interrelationship between the conservative as-
pects and the novel, productive aspects of mysticism (Scholem, 1960).
The mystic, Bion (1970) writes, is both creative and destructive. These
two extremes coexist in the same person.
The analyst’s state of mind of no memory, no desire and no un-
derstanding, strives, like that of the mystic, to blur the familiar and
conventional interpretations, so as to allow openness to a new impres-
sion, a fresh interpretation. Mental growth, analytic transformation
and the encounter with emotional truth are made possible through a
‘breakup’ of the familiar meaning and a ‘breakthrough’ of the new
discovery. The fear of catastrophic change often emerges at the point
where new caesuras are created, at the place where a new incision,
which is not the obvious one, is forged. The discovery of new caesu-
ras entails de-construction, or destruction, of the familiar thought or
idea and necessitates mourning the loss of the old perception. This is
 The ineffable 139

the potential for growth and discovery. However, this often entails a
threat of catastrophic ‘breakdown’.
A good illustration is Bion’s (1970) well-known vignette when he
suddenly hears ice/cream as I/scream. After some years when the
words ‘ice cream’ appeared sporadically, Bion suddenly heard these
words as ‘I scream’, cutting the syllables differently, thus discovering
and forging a new meaning.
We find another illustration in Bion’s paper Evidence (1976). The
patient associated: ‘I remember my parents being at the top of a
Y-shaped stair and I was at the bottom and …’ That was all. There
were no further associations. Bion was struck by the statement being
so brief, stopping short at that point, and he thought it must have a lot
of meaning that was not visible to him. It then occurred to him that
the statement would be more comprehensible if it was spelled ‘why-
shaped stare’. However, Bion could not see how he could say this to
the patient in a way that would have any meaning, nor could he pro-
duce any evidence for it. Bion said nothing, fearing it was just a pun,
a fanciful free association of his or an interpretation that would be in-
comprehensible to the patient. The analyst had plenty of associations
and possible interpretations while playing with this image. However,
it was only in the next session, after ‘killing time’ with conventionally
acceptable interpretations, that he dared to say to the patient: ‘I sug-
gest that in addition to the ordinary meaning of what you have told
me – and I am perfectly sure that what you said means exactly what
you meant – it is also a kind of visual pun.’ And then, he gave him the
interpretation. The patient replied: ‘Yes, that’s right. But you’ve been
a very long time about it …’
The de-construction of the familiar meaning, and awarding a new
meaning, grants the text a mystical tenor. In this sense, a mystical
interpretation is akin to an intuitive interpretation, which is often un-
canny and even terrifying.
Scholem (1960) writes:

The genius of mystical exegeses resides in the uncanny precision

with which they derive their transformation of Scripture into a
corpus symbolicum from the exact words of the text. The literal
meaning is preserved but merely as the gate through which the
mystic passes, a gate, however, which he opens up to himself over
140 Avner Bergstein

and over again. The Zohar expresses this attitude of the mystic
very succinctly in a memorable exegesis of Genesis 12:1. God’s
words to Abram, ‘Lekh lekha’ [Go thee out of thy country, and
from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house], are taken not only
in their literal meaning, ‘Go thee out’. That is, they are not inter-
preted as referring only to God’s command to Abram to go out
into the world, but are also read with mystical literalness as ‘Go
to thee’, that is, to thine own self, away from the habits to which
you are accustomed.
(p. 15)

In fact, the Zohar interprets every place Abram travelled to, as a psy-
chic state of mind, and his journeys throughout the land as the inner
journey of the psyche. The divine world, which was concealed from
Abram, opens up before him. The verse ‘And Abram journeyed, going
on still toward the south’ (Genesis 12:9) describes Abram ascending
further and further toward encountering his own truth (Hellner-­
Eshed, 2009). Mystical interpretations are thus often pre-disposed
toward the inner world.

London and Edinburgh

An intuitive and, to my mind, essentially mystical interpretation,
re-interpreting the patient’s text and directing the meaning further
inwards, into the internal world, can be found in another of Bion’s
(1967a) seminars. The patient was apparently talking quite obviously
about a particular group known to him, in external terms. As the ses-
sion evolved, the analyst began to feel that he wasn’t simply talking
about an external group, even though it was also that. The patient had
been talking about people, about London and Edinburgh, and Bion
drew his attention to the fact that these were not simply London and
Edinburgh. They were names of places where it was once a mother and
a father. It was simply a way of describing not the father and mother,
but the place where the father and mother were until something or
other happened to them, which had turned them simply into a place.
And then, that these other objects which he’d been mentioning were
really felt to be the children of this pair (these two objects that had
now turned into places). From that, Bion gave the interpretation that
 The ineffable 141

it was in fact the patient himself, only he himself was now split up.
The parents had been attacked so that they were only places where
parents used to be, and he himself had been destroyed in the pro-
cess, split up into a whole lot of particles, which could be described in
terms of these people, with names, and so forth.
Following this interpretation, the patient started on a series of hy-
pochondriac complaints. This may obviously be a controversial inter-
pretation, but Bion contends a process by which the external objects
had been gathered inwards and transformed into internal objects like
his spleen, his hernia and so on. (These words are mentioned as bod-
ily objects whereas they also have a psychic meaning, spleen meaning
hate, anger, depression, and hernia meaning a fracture or a rupture.)
Bergson asserts that the intellect has a tendency that impels us to
think on all occasions of things rather than movements. Bion’s inter-
pretation of London and Edinburgh transforms the places, the things,
back into movement, the inanimate back to the animate. This may
seem very similar to our ordinary work of deciphering the symbolic
meaning of the patient’s repressed or displaced material. However,
we may have here, as suggested by Meltzer (2000), a distinction be-
tween allegory and symbol. Allegory is taken by Meltzer to consist
of the rather ingenious substitution of known elements for what is
mysterious and unknown; it is a kind of cheat because it pretends to
bring the unknown within the sphere of the already-known. Symbol,
on the other hand, is full of mystery, and inexhaustible however much
one digs into it. Its many levels are not just an ingenious emblem. A
symbol carries with it the gift of humility; you know perfectly well you
will never understand it completely.
In a lucid passage that I can imagine might have inspired Bion,
Scholem (1961) writes:

Allegory consists of an infinite network of meanings and cor-

relations in which everything can become a representation of
everything else, but all within the limits of language and expression …
That which is expressed by and in the allegorical sign is in the first
instance something which has its own meaningful context, but by
becoming allegorical this something loses its own meaning and
becomes the vehicle of something else … [However] the symbol
[is] a form of expression which radically transcends the sphere of
142 Avner Bergstein

allegory. In the mystical symbol, a reality which in itself has, for

us, no form or shape becomes transparent and, as it were, visible,
through the medium of another reality which clothes its content
with visible and expressible meaning … The thing which becomes
a symbol retains its original form and its original content. It does
not become, so to speak, an empty shell into which another con-
tent is poured; in itself, through its own existence, it makes an-
other reality transparent which cannot appear in any other form.
If allegory can be defined as the representation of an expressible
something by another expressible something, the mystical symbol
is an expressible representation of something which lies beyond the
sphere of expression and communication, something which comes
from a sphere whose face is, as it were, turned inward and away
from us. A hidden and inexpressible reality finds its expression
in the symbol … Where deeper insight into the structure of the
allegory uncovers fresh layers of meaning, the symbol is intuitively
understood all at once - or not at all.
(pp. 26–27, italics added)

London and Edinburgh, the symbol in the above description, much

like the symbol in Jewish mysticism, is paradoxically utilized since
no words can encompass the infinite meanings of the ineffable, emo-
tional experience or the ultimate reality concealed in the patient’s
‘dream’. There is no realization that approximates the verbal descrip-
tion of the emotional experience concealed in the words ‘London and
Edinburgh’. These words do not symbolize the persons of the paren-
tal couple per se, but much like the characters of the Memoir, they
evoke a caesural experience, a complex link that is ineffable due to its
infinite dimensions. It is a constant conjunction encompassing a myr-
iad of elements comprising the experience of the emotional link. And
as Bion stressed from early on, he employs the term ‘link’ because he
wishes to describe a patient’s relationship with a function rather than
with the object that subserves the function (Bion, 1959), thus render-
ing it unsaturated and open to infinite elaboration.
The patient’s experience has never been mentalized and therefore
has never been repressed. The patient could never have uttered his
experience because it was never mentally registered. Nevertheless, it
is burnt and encapsulated in the unrepressed unconscious, awaiting
 The ineffable 143

an intuitive, mystical moment when it can emerge as a symbol. The

Kabbalistic symbol paradoxically expresses in language what the
mouth cannot utter and the ear cannot hear (Scholem, 1975), thus
steering us toward the unknowable navel of the dream, the noumena
beyond the phenomena. This, to my mind, may be a major contribution
of Jewish mysticism to psychoanalysis. It illuminates the reality of a
hidden life, which can only be achieved through symbols. It sharpens
our listening to the unrepressed unconscious and enhances our capac-
ity to attend to the words uttered in a fresh, intuitive and mystical way.
The value of intuitive interpretations like these is therefore not in
uncovering historical truth or repressed unconscious material. Nor
are they evaluated for the ‘correctness' of their content. Rather, their
merit lies in their capacity for generating psychic movement, trans-
forming psychic barriers into caesuras, affording a multi-­dimensional
view, and enabling the patient to move from a preoccupation with
external reality to an observation of his or her internal reality. The
patient may thus get in touch with remote, encapsulated parts of the
psyche (Bergstein, 2013). Preoccupation with external reality is finite
whereas internal reality and the unconscious are infinite. Any interpre-
tation is only a partial representation, retaining an irrepresentable
navel that will forever remain unknown, hence evoking a feeling of
mystery and unknowability.
This lengthy discussion, in the attempt to give meaning to the above
vignette, is brought about in retrospect, after several readings of
Bion’s seminar. However, my first impression of reading it was of be-
ing immensely moved, without being able to comprehend or describe
in words why it was so moving. I am inclined to think that this is due
to the awe generated when, paraphrasing P.A., ‘one meaning turned
out to have, like a many faceted diamond, a fresh, fiery brilliance of
truth the [patient] did not know because it hadn’t happened – when
[he said] it’ (MF, p. 234). Furthermore, it seems that by evoking an
experience analogous to a mystical union, these interpretations revive
our intrinsic tendency to experience the numinous. In these rare and
privileged moments, the intuition is united with a conception, akin
to a mystical union. Since such interpretations evoke an experience
rather than being subject to discursive understanding, it is often dif-
ficult for anyone, other than the patient him- or herself, to sense or to
comprehend the experience inherent in the interpretation.
144 Avner Bergstein

Bion (1962a) writes: ‘We have thus approached a mental life un-
mapped by the theories elaborated for the understanding of neurosis’
(p. 37), and this mental life, I suggest, is the realm of the ineffable.

Concluding remarks
Bion (1970) reminds us that it is often forgotten that the gift of speech,
so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much for the purpose
of concealing thought as for the purpose of elucidating or communi-
cating thought. DU, representing a germ of an idea striving to escape
from the confines of Roland’s mind and create meaning, cries out:
‘Words; words; words have no right to be definitory caskets prevent-
ing my birth’ (MF, p. 276).
However, I would not like to collapse to the point of abolishing the
power of language. As Bion (1967a) says, ‘If the psycho-analytical sit-
uation is accurately intuited … the psycho-analyst finds that ordinary
conversational English is surprisingly adequate for the formulation
of his interpretation’ (p. 134). The analyst may interpret that part of
experience at has penetrated the sensuous world and language. Any
new formulation, from an additional vertex, allows us to expand our
psychic world ad infinitum. And yet, any utterance is just a reminder,
a pale shadow of the thing-in-itself.
The analyst should thus hover in the dialectic interplay, in the cae-
sura, between intuition and conception. Intuition is essential due
to the immaterial nature of psychoanalysis, and yet it must not be
dissociated from a scientific outlook lest it leads to careless, wild
interpretations.
Bion says:

… infants … know all about what it feels like, but they have no
concepts, they cannot write any of these great books – their con-
cepts are blind. Later on they have forgotten what it is like to feel
terrified; they pick up these words but the words are empty – ‘I’m
terrified’ … it is an empty phrase, it is a concept; it is only verbal;
the intuition is missing.
(1980, p. 40)

We are thus faced with the problem of marrying the concept of terror
with the corresponding feeling.
 The ineffable 145

So again, one must ask how can we move in the caesura between
the infinite unknowable and the finite sensuous, verbalisable experi-
ence that is derived from it?
In an imaginary dialogue between Bion and myself, Bion writes:

BION: … You must often have heard, as I have, people say they don’t
know what you are talking about and that you are being deliber-
ately obscure.
MYSELF: They are flattering me. I am suggesting an aim, an ambi-
tion, which, if I could achieve, would enable me to be deliberately
and precisely obscure; in which I could use certain words which
would activate precisely and instantaneously, in the mind of the
listener, a thought or train of thought that came between him and
the thoughts and ideas already accessible and available to him.
(MF, p. 191)

In a similar vein, it is said that when God was revealed on Mount

Sinai when the Torah was handed down to the people of Israel, all
illnesses and handicaps were cured. Moses, who had been stam-
mering since he was an infant, refused to be cured. When asked
why, he replied that his stammer is the way he communicates with
God …

Notes
1 The concept of evolution, or hishtalshelut, as used in Jewish mysticism,
refers to the metaphysical process, the chain of events, whereby the
complex and finite reality of the universe unfolds out of God’s abso-
lute oneness. This evolution proceeds by ten degrees, the attributes
through which God reveals Himself, called the ten Sefirot. Yet, the
Sefirot themselves are only varying degrees of expression of the un-
changing, all-­encompassing ‘Eyn-Sof’ (infinite). It seems this might
have reverberated for Bion the notion of transformation in O, and it
is perhaps from here that he drew the concept of evolution. For Bion,
ultimate reality is unknowable. The analyst must wait for the reality
of the session to evolve, and he is able to know only the events that are
evolutions of O.
2 Bion uses the word falsity to denote the transformation of the emotional
experience into a word. A word is thus always false compared to the
original emotional experience. However, falsities are distinguished from
lies, which are conscious attacks on truth.
146 Avner Bergstein

3 Ḥasidism is a Jewish spiritual movement founded in the Ukraine in the

18th century. It is characterized by mysticism and opposition to secular
studies and Jewish rationalism. One of its aims was to popularize Jewish
mysticism and to allow ordinary people access to the Kabbalah. It was
opposed by the orthodox rabbinical establishment.
4 Buber’s book Light of the Hidden (1976) is a collection of Hasidic tales
in which he uses biblical interpretations, inserted into Hasidic legends.
Buber stripped the legends of their magical and ecstatic elements, at the
same time emphasizing a new way of seeing and experiencing reality.
5 In a striking resemblance to the role of the training and supervising
analyst, Scholem (1960) stresses that
the widespread belief that a mystic requires a spiritual guide … He
prevents the student who sets out to explore the world of mysticism
from straying off into dangerous situations. For confusion or even
madness lurk in wait; the path of the mystic is beset by perils. It bor-
ders on abysses of consciousness and demands a sure and measured
step … The guide should be capable of preserving the proper balance
in the mystic's mind. He is familiar with the practical applications
of the various doctrines, which cannot be learned from books. And
he has an additional function … he represents traditional religious
authority. He provides at the outset the traditional coloration which
the mystical experience, however amorphous, will assume in the con-
sciousness of the novice … to be safeguarded against uncontrollable
emotional excesses.
(pp. 18–19)
6 A ‘sense of truth,’ Bion (1962a) suggests, is paradigmatically ‘experi-
enced if the view of an object which is hated can be conjoined to a view
of the same object when it is loved and the conjunction confirms that the
object experienced by different emotions is the same object’ (p. 119).
7 Bion cites only seven authors apart from himself, in his book Attention
and Interpretation, Scholem being one of them.
8 The Godhead is a concept borrowed from the German theologian,
mystic and philosopher Meister Eckhart (1260–1328). Godhead, which
is infinite, is often contrasted with God, which is finite (see MF, p. 180).
9 Bion hyphenated the word atonement, making it into at-one-ment, which
may, in the spirit of the Jewish mystical tradition, denote that there is
never a complete union in this experience of being at one with ultimate
reality.
Chapter 9

Psychoanalysis ‘at the

mind’s limits’
Trauma, history and paronomasia
as ‘a flower of speech’ in
A Memoir of the Future
Clara Mucci

At the mind’s limits: the position of

the subject, traumatic truth and the
encounter with O
In A Memoir of the Future, Bion provocatively acts out what happens
‘at the mind’s limits’ (to echo Jean Amery’s account of his survival
after the trauma of Auschwitz; Amery, 1966), when ‘wakeful dream
thinking’ and the language of disguise, typical of poetry and liter-
ature (‘paronomasia’, ‘a flower of speech’; MF, p. 239), take hold of
reality and attempt to finally express what is, by definition, ineffable
and unrepresentable. The trauma of reality, after the experience of
the War and towards the end of Bion’s life, is investigated—enacted
and worked through—intentionally by way of a kind of language
and a post-modern narrational mode that explodes the limits of
representation, mostly time and space, and uses a paradoxical mise-
en-scène where the faults of reason or what Western thought consid-
ers as reasoning and truth are exposed in their limitations.
It appears that the ineffable, unspeakable, unsymbolised reality in
so far as it is traumatic, has deconstructed the centre of vision and
the supposed unity on which the rational mind rests, and as a con-
sequence it has unleashed the opposite side of that rational vision,
namely, the corporeal body, the un-reason, and the inversion of power
categories together with the radical openness of a signification that is
not univocal but polysemic and overdetermined. The moment of re-
integration, or at-one-ment (at one with oneself but also in connection
with a wider order, beyond the Self, in connection with O, which in
148 Clara Mucci

English has also the sense of a reconciliation), is the final destination

of this movement beyond the drive in Bion’s perspective. It is a trip
from learning through the experience of the body (a radically painful
journey through emotions, until the place of a loss is reached; see
Klein, 2011; Correale, 2015) through the dream-thought of metaphor-
ical language to its termination and possible revelations.
As Giuseppe Civitarese explains, from a deconstructive perspec-
tive in line with this new, post-modern view of psychoanalysis, the
deconstruction of the binary system of signification is made real
through ‘the systematic use of a non-pathological, i.e., non static
but dynamic, inversion of perspective’ (2013, p. 2), and this inversion
provokes a creative tension capable of generating thoughts and crea-
tive developments.
On the enigmatic quality of ‘truth’, Bion writes in The Past
Presented, the second book of A Memoir:

P. A: It has often been said, and I should be claiming to be less than

human if I said there was no truth in the accusation. But you will
miss something if you feel that the ulterior motive is the only one;
just as I think it fallacious to assume that scientific truth, or ra-
tional truth, or aesthetic truth, or musical truth, or rational truth
is the only truth. Even what psychoanalysts call rationalizations
have to be rational. Because I think we should be aware of the
ultra- or infra-sensuous, or the super-ego or id, I do not think that
one should deny the rest.
ROL AND: But, good heavens, what would happen to us if I couldn’t
blind myself to sidereal space or space time when I want to tell
my time by my watch?
P. A: If we are to translate our thoughts and feelings into physical or
corporeal fact, there has to be a certain focusing of our mental
apparatus as a prelude to action. That very act seems to me–­
putting my thoughts into verbo-visual terms–to involve putting
other elements out of focus. It is difficult in practice to de-focus–­
peripheralize–the irrelevant without falling in to the opposite
error of permanent insensibility; blindness, deafness, repression.
That is why I talk of the ‘opacity’ of memory, desire, understanding.
EDMUND: The centre of our galaxy is hidden from us, and though we
suspect that it lies near Sagittarius we cannot see, as we can when
we examine M31, the bright centre. (MF, p. 232, emphasis mine)
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 149

Truth cannot be seen per se, since the center of vision, the ‘bright
center’, is precluded to us; therefore, a detour needs to be taken to
pierce though it, to gaze at it without being hurt or in order to achieve
a feeling or a bodily, unconscious/preverbal understanding of the
experience.
I agree with Civitarese when he says that:

‘O’, similar to the sunlight, cannot be looked at without filters.

A rhetoric of blindness and vision, therefore, is what forms the
weave of Bion’s thought, and this perhaps explains Bion’s fasci-
nation with the mystical author (and poet) St. John of the Cross.
(2011, p. 3)

I wonder if it is even possible to associate Lacan’s object a to Bion’s

O. As for the Lacanian object a, and as happens for the Divine for
mystics, the encounter of O for Bion cannot be experienced through
the rational mind and through normal language (‘the English’ in the
excerpt above) but might be encountered through a special disguise
of language where the aesthetics and the bodily sensorial aspects of
the mind are particularly awake; ‘The painful, conscious learning by
heart is passed on to domains which are not conscious–like muscles
or nerve systems which are sub-thalamic’ (MF, p. 239).
This kind of truth, awry and displaced, away from the comforts of
a (misleading) central vision, is more appropriately traced through a
sort of anamorphic vision, the decentered perspective that, through
a hole on the side of the painting or even through the frame itself, a
marginal site par excellence, achieves some kind of revelation of what
the whole (the entire representation) is all about, as in the famous
example of Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, analyzed by Lacan in The
Four Fundamental Concepts (Baltrušaitis, 1977; Hamish, 1997; Broad-
foot, 2002, Lacan, 1978).
As Broadfoot argues,

In anamorphosis, what is in front of the picture plane does not

locate itself in an external reality but in the real. This is what
makes the image that forms itself there a presentation rather
than a representation. The strangeness of this situation, however,
should be acknowledged, for the real is not a reality that precedes
or comes after perspective, a reality that would be outside the
150 Clara Mucci

symbolic order; the real is a lack that arises from within the sym-
bolic order itself.
(2002, p. 88, emphasis mine)

Identifying the Real in Lacanian terms as the traumatic kernel of

modern societies (major historical examples of which can be found
in the extermination camps as well as in the Gulag and all the other
twentieth-century genocides), we could say that trauma is the unsym-
bolized and unmetabolized core structure of the entire order (Lacan,
1966; Kirshner, 1994) and of what defines the uncertainties of the
post-modern identity for the subject.
The centrality of perspective is illusory. It would seem that at the
unattainable centre of vision lies (or silently speaks) a void, a blank
space (Mucci, 1992), a sort of structuring absence, in the wake of
Lacan’s object a. The entire symbolic order, which comes to be re-
vealed at once as an artificial construction, in a synchronic rather
than diachronic understanding, through a moment of revelation, is
structured on this absence, according to Lacan. And I wish to pro-
pose that it is precisely this structuring absent cause revealing the
traumatic hole, the void, the blank or the black hole defining trauma
that has eroded representation and rational awareness, after History
encountered the devastation and the annihilation of Trauma, in the
wake of the two Wars and after the Shoah and the other extermi-
nations that took place in the twentieth century, what trauma theo-
rist and clinician Dori Laub calls the ‘empty circle’ (1998). Traumatic
awareness is an oxymoronic concept. Where trauma is, there is no
subjectivity to record or name it: ‘In this form of traumatic memory,
the center of experience is no longer in the experiencing “I”. Events
happen somewhere, but are no longer connected with the conscious
subject’ (Laub and Auerhahn, 1993, p. 291). Trauma displaces the sub-
ject and his/her awareness to an extreme, to a vanishing point.
Although trauma needs to be reconstructed carefully in its histor-
ical detail for some kind of healing and recovery to come forth, for
both the individual and the collectivity (for this view, see Mucci, 2013),
History, has become ‘an event without a witness’ (Felman and Laub,
1992). We are left with pieces of corporeal understanding, ‘islands’ of
dissociated truths (Cimino and Correale, 2005) and at the same time
mental erasures of the events, dissociated fragments that we can shore
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 151

up against the ruins of what used to be called civilization. It is life at

the mind’s limits.
This state is not too far from psychotic decompensation:

Since structure is built up by libidinal investments and identifi-

cations, we see that at its worst, trauma involves the annihila-
tion, by aggression, of psychic structure and the total desolation
that is tantamount to what we would experience in psychotic
decompensation.
(Auerhahn and Laub, 1984, p. 336)

For Bion, the reversal of perspective (RP) is therefore what can protect
the subject from the unbearable pain of the traumatic experience. A
Memoir of the Future tries to rekindle in the reader precisely the expe-
rience of this ‘estrangement’, (and I play here on the very meaning of
the concept of estrangement as ‘ostranenie’ from Russian formalism,
a sort of defamiliarization of the familiar to introduce Freud’s con-
cept of the Uncanny, Freud 1919), of this alienation that can become
the only productive gift of the extreme experience.
Bion in his writings predicates a reversal of perspectives, a practice
similar to the continuous transformative and imaginative performativity
of dreams, a concept similar to what anthropologists would call ‘limi-
nality’. This is a particularly creative and even revolutionary mid-phase
studied in the rituals of transformation and coming of age in so-called
primitive cultures, the first phase being separation and the last incorpo-
ration, and involves a paradoxical notion of truth, unattainable through
univocal linguistic acts. Liminality is a moment of apparent disruption of
the present order and world structure, where rules and daily conventions
are suspended and things seem upside down, in a realm of obscurity and
unreason, followed by a moment of revelation (just as in a dream).
In liminality, anthropologist Victor Turner explains:

profane social relations may be discontinued, former rights and

obligations are suspended, the social order may seem to have
been turned upside down … Liminality may involve a complex
sequence of episodes in sacred space-time, and may also include
subversive and ludic (or playful) events … Then the factors or ele-
ments of culture may be recombined in numerous, often grotesque
152 Clara Mucci

ways, grotesque because they are arrayed in terms of possible or

fantasized rather than experienced combinations–thus a monster
disguise may combine human, animal, and vegetable features in
an ‘unnatural’ way, while the same features may be differently,
but equally ‘unnaturally’ combined in a painting or described in
a tale. In other words, in liminality people play with the elements of
the familiar and defamiliarize them.
(2001, p. 26 emphasis mine)

Like the dismantling of repression in Freud’s accounts of das Un-

heimliche, liminality momentarily liberates the subject from civiliza-
tion’s constraints, allowing him or her to peer through the fictions
of society and the constraints of rationality and political order (for
this connection, which is not in Turner, see Mucci, 1995). Liminality
allows one also to see through the empty structure of conventions
that regulate the symbolic order, revealing the artificial core around
truth. As Lacan says, ‘every truth has the structure of fiction’ (The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 12; for a discussion of this point, see also
Kirshner, 1994).
Here is how Bion presents his project and the tension he identifies in
his Memoir/psychoanalytic treatise between what he means by ‘real’
(ultimately a traumatic ineffable core, unspeakable, unrepresentable
if not through distortions and play) and what reality is, an inevitably
distorted representation of truth:

The whole of this book so far printed can be regarded as an arti-

ficial and elaborate construct. I myself, here introduced into the
narrative, can be regarded as a construct, artificially composed
with the aid of such artistic and scientific material as I can com-
mand and manipulated to form a representation of an author
whose name appears on the book and now, for the second time, as
a character in a work of fiction. Is it a convincing portrait? Does
it appear to ‘resemble’ reality?
(MF, p. 86)

The relief from the constraints of reason that he aimed to achieve is

explicit. The three books represent among other things the story of
characters (to start with, Alice, Paul, Robin, Rosemary, Tom) whose
power position in the social structure is reversed; moments of sheer
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 153

horror follow, with murder, rape, unexpected and incomprehensible

violence and abrupt sexual acts, intermingled with theoretical and
intellectual discussions, where Bion himself takes the parts of sev-
eral personalities: Bion, myself, P.A., Captain Bion, man. They seem
rather the impersonations of human features and qualities that pro-
vide a mere excuse for the description of a ‘stream’ of events and feel-
ings and situations that are more important than individual qualities,
similar to what modern and postmodern authors, from Woolf (es-
pecially the Woolf of The Waves or Between the Acts) to Beckett, to
Joyce, have accustomed us to.
It is only through disruption of that logical order, through the ap-
parent folly of vision, or an anamorphic intentional distortion, the re-
linquishing of the quest for logic, and through a language that defies
univocal meaning that we can hope to arrive at a bodily experience
of O, through the soma-psychotic portion of the personality, through
prenatal awareness and the insights (or the hallucination, hallucinosis
and delusions) of the proto-mental apparatus. As Meltzer reminds us,

In these three methods [hallucination, hallucinosis and delusion

formation] for evacuation of beta-elements, the sense data of
the emotional experiences are dealt with as if the meaning and
significance were already inherent in the data and need not be
created by the laborious, conflictual and anxiety-laden processes
of thought (alpha-function) …
One implication is quite clear, that we cannot perform this func-
tion intellectually; it requires an unusual degree of identification
with the patient, an unusual depth of reverie in the session, and an
unusual degree of tolerance of feeling mad oneself.
(1986, pp. 35, 37)

I find here an interesting correlation with what Allan Schore in his The
Science of the Art of Psychoanalysis (2012) recommends as the peculiarly
reconstructive intersubjective practice of the psychoanalytic experi-
ence, to let oneself be disregulated by the patient, working at the disreg-
ulatory boundaries (of self and other). In a word, at the mind’s limits.
The practice of ‘wakeful dream thinking’ (what makes psychoa-
nalysis a practice at the mind’s limits) pierces through the veil of a
reality that, rather than revealing truth, eludes it and postpones the
(terrifying) encounter with what is at its core, what Bion has termed
154 Clara Mucci

O. More than ‘understood’ (which is impossible, as impossible as a

description or a rendering of it in normal rational language) O might
only be, under certain conditions, encountered and experienced.
From this encounter and transformation might result the state of
‘becoming’, made possible only by the transformative state of reverie
(again, wakeful sleep). The subject does not apprehend truth in the
same way as he/she does not apprehend O, but O might be traversed
or pierced through by what Grotstein echoing Bion has called ‘a beam
of intense darkness’ (2007).
O conceptualizes and subsumes for Bion this passing through or
piercing Truth by means of the instruments of the abandonment of
memory and desire, leaving aside or overcoming the coordinates
of time frame and time structure (subverted in the very title of his
work, since a ‘memoir’ is about the past of the subject, while here it
hints at the future, at the process of subjectivity itself through the
relationship of the subject with his/her own Truth) as well as those
of ‘desire’. Consequently, what leads the subject to his/her own path
of repetition, i.e., desire stands at the opposite of freedom and trans-
formation or the status of ‘becoming’. The tragedy of the subject
lies in this being prisoner precisely of memory and desire. As Grot-
stein writes: ‘We are born as fateful prisoners to the quality of the
­maternal – and paternal – container that (who) initially contains our
raw dread of “O”’ (2007, p. 44).
This is similar to Lacan’s concept of the Real, which is not ‘reality’
but precisely what resists reality and interpretation (Kirshner, 1994),
therefore has a traumatic, irrepresentable and horrific core, is inef-
fable and unpierceable, and a thick veil (rationality, thought without
reverie, thoughts without body and bodily sensations, therefore de-
prived of alpha elements) prevents us from being in touch with—or
becoming one—with Truth, prevents at-one-ment, moments of reve-
lations or, to use a term from modern literature, ‘epiphany’. What the
traumatic core of reality explodes is precisely the illusion that the sub-
ject can understand and describe and peer through the Real if he/she
does not put on the garments of un-reason, of aesthetics (as Civitarese
has highlighted in recent years, following Bion) in the sense of being
in touch with the body and the senses, or elaborating the beta ele-
ments, transformed into alpha elements. If, with Freud, we could say
that dreams are the road to the unconscious, with Bion we can say
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 155

that it is a road of uncertainty and revelations, abiding at the margins

of the rational mind.
As Grotstein writes,

Bion pulled the positive psychoanalysis of Freud and Klein with

the new, uncharted realms of uncertainty: from the strictures and
prison of verbal language to a realm beyond and before language.
Here one experiences the dread of O, the Absolute Truth about
our Ultimate, infinite, ineffable, always evolving, uncertain,
and impersonal Reality that supplants the putative dread of the
positivistic drives.
(2007, p. 44)

Only a non-linear thought processing similar to the oneiric one can

account for the unbridgeable paradoxes of what existence has be-
come after Trauma invaded the scene of History. The unconscious
processes can attain truth in a way inaccessible to conscious second-
ary processes. Only the dreamlike disguise of truth can be peered
through and hinted at without horror. Because the other side of this
disguise would be, I suppose, abjection, in Kristeva’s terms (1982), i.e.,
the other side of the Sacred (which is also part of life and the Real).
The disguise (of truth) rendered by poetic language can account for
Truth and leaves the Subject unhurt but transformed.
As we read in A Memoir,

The dreamless sleep ended. The day was as empty of events–facts

proper to daytime–as the night had been empty of dreams. Meals
were served to both girls. It occurred to them that they had no
memory of the food; the ‘facts’ of daytime and night were defective,
mutilated. They were having dreams–mutilated dreams– lacking
a dimension like a solid body that casts no shadow in light. The
world of reality, facts, was no longer distinguishable from dreams,
unconsciousness, night. Thoughts with and thoughts without a
thinker replaced a universe where discrimination ruled. Dreams
had none of the distinguishing characteristics of mind, feel-
ings, mental representations, formulations. The thinker had no
thoughts, the thoughts were without thinkers. Freudian dreams
had no Freudian free associations; Freudian free associations had
156 Clara Mucci

no dreams. Without intuition they were empty; without concept

they were blind.
(MF, p. 33)

This is in Chapter 8, page 33 of A Memoir, therefore at the very beginning

of a long journey. The trip into the non-linear, multidimensional world
of psychoanalysis (and traumatic Truth or the Real after trauma) after
the linear work of Freud, a new world inhabited by obscurities, bizarre
thoughts and paradoxical truths has just started: at the mind’s limits.

Bion’s ‘Praise of Folly’ and the breach to

Postmodern Truth through punning: ‘through
the cages of my psychoanalytic zoo’
P. A: Allow me to conduct you round the cages of my psychoana-
lytic zoo. Of course the names are somewhat forbidding, but the
creatures themselves are beautiful and ugly. Ah! Here is Abso-
lute Truth–a most ferocious animal which has killed more inno-
cent white lies and black wholes than you would think possible.
ROL AND: You muddle it with your puns.
ROBIN: Call it paronomasia–more scientific.
ALICE: It sounds like a very attractive flower.
P. A: Only a flower of speech. Throw here all your quaint enam-
elled lies that on the green turf suck the honied showers.
(Ibid., p. 239, emphasis mine)

Paronomasia, states structural linguist Roman Jakobson, ‘reigns over

poetic art’ (1960); the dictionary equates paronomasia to punning, to
a play on words. As Freud has maintained in his Jokes and their Re-
lationship with the Unconscious (1905), punning or playing with lan-
guage allows a return of the repressed that the rational, adult mind
rejects, imprisoning the subject in the spires of reason. Here is Freud:

The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary

possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repu-
diated by censorship in us, are lost to us. But to the human psyche
all renunciations are exceedingly difficult, and so we find that ten-
dentious joke [i.e., ‘aggressive’ jokes, jokes against authority, and
‘sexual’ jokes] content provides a means of undoing the renuncia-
tion and retrieving what was lost.
(Jokes, 1905, p. 101)
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 157

Freud attributes to what he calls the ‘rediscovery of something fa-

miliar’ the final reason for the pleasure we take from form, the aes-
thetic pleasure, but he also hints at the real reason for this pleasure
we take in form: this kind of aesthetic, formal, metaphorical and
disguised version of truth suggests a return to a modality of mental
play that is repressed by rationality, therefore allowing the subject to
express what normally is repressed, censured. It is in a word a breach
to truth, a kind of truth that is collective, allowing the return of what
has been repressed by the pressure of authority and the pressure
of sexual containment (at least according to the Freud of the first
topic, since Jokes was written in 1905, when the two major contend-
ing principles were reality and pleasure). He also links this pleasure
in paronomasia and punning to the pleasure in nonsense, which is
‘concealed in serious life’ (p. 124).
The realm of literature, from narrative and novel writing to ­poetic
language, may be viewed in this context as ‘the return of the re-
pressed made acceptable and enjoyable through its form’ (Orlando,
1973, p. 25).
The pleasure jokes and literature as formal, metaphorical and
metonymic disguise give the reader is due, according to Freud, to
the retrieval of a modality of expression forbidden to adult ration-
ality and that only children or poets are allowed to enjoy and use.
Freud’s definition of the pleasure children experience in word-play
and sound-play and rhyming is strikingly close to Roman Jakobson’s
definition of the poetic function of language (see also Mucci, 2004, for
this interpretation) based on the similarity between sound and mean-
ing; according to Jakobson, the poetic function projects the principle
of equivalence from the axis of selection [syntagmatic] to the axis of
combination [paradigmatic] (Jakobson in Sebeok, 1960, p. 358).
Freud remarks: ‘We notice, too, that children, who, as we know,
are in the habit of still treating words as things, tend to expect words,
that are the same or similar, to have the same meaning behind them’
(1905, p. 120).
He goes on:

During the period in which a child is learning how to handle the

vocabulary of his mother tongue, it gives him obvious pleasure
‘to experiment with it in play’, … And he puts words together
without regard to the condition that they should make sense, in
order to obtain from them the pleasurable effect of rhythm or
158 Clara Mucci

rhyme. Little by little he is forbidden this enjoyment, till all that

remains permitted to him are significant combination of words
… These attempts are found again among certain categories of
mental patients. Whatever the motive may have been which led
the child to begin these games, I believe that in his later develop-
ment he gives himself up to them with the consciousness that they
are nonsensical, and that he finds enjoyment in the attraction of
what is forbidden by reason. He now uses games in order to with-
draw from the pressure of critical reason … the rebellion against
the compulsion to logic and reality is deep-going and long-lasting.
Even the phenomena of imaginative activity must be included in
this (rebellious activity).
(Ibid., pp. 125–126)

Extending Freud’s consideration of ‘imaginative activity’ and the rebel-

lious activity of ‘treating words like things’ as a rebellion against rea-
son and the constraints of civilization for adults, I would say with Bion
that the unconscious playful mechanism of punning ‘treats words’ not
only like ‘things’, (as Freud underlined) but assimilates polysemic lan-
guage and imaginative, aesthetic, creative activity to the protomental
and the emotional unsymbolized content stemming from experience
(Bion, 1962a), or in other words, ‘treating words like body’. Through
the creative aspect of the interventions/presence of the therapist in the
field, through his/her wakeful dream thinking, the emotional experi-
ence of the patient may be transformed and find meaning.
This has several implications for a restructuring of psychoanalytic
theory and Freudian metapsychology, first of all for the partial rele-
vance of merely intellectual interpretation, if it is not sustained by a
continual emotional discovery and participation in the experience of
the patients and his/her somatic-linguistic experience and expression
of experience (through language, dreaming, and in cases of psychotic
patients, even hallucinations, hallucinosis and delirious thoughts).
Language (playful, punning and creative-metaphorical language to-
gether with non-verbal communication) becomes a tool in the render-
ing and the understanding of the special container-contained process
going on between patient and therapist. To repeat Meltzer here, this
also involves an ‘unusual degree of identification with the patient, an
unusual degree of reverie, and an unusual degree of tolerance of feeling
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 159

mad oneself …’ (1986, p. 37). And, I agree with him that in the thera-
peutic interchange: ‘We must set ourselves an entirely different task,
namely that of discovering the emotional experience which the patient
is unable to dream about and to do his dreaming for him’ (ibid., p. 37).
What happens, then, in this continual ‘praise of folly’ and play on
language in which the three books consist, is the exploration of a nar-
rative detour and the creation of a paradoxical landscape where the
inverted world of liminality (where rules are subverted and typical
expectations disattended) and the language of paronomasia takes
over through a sort of transformational state of reverie and transi-
tion, where the reader is an active participant in the continual process
of discovery and revelation. It is a way of illustrating the practice of
psychoanalysis and its revelations.
Characters in search of an author, like thoughts without thinkers,
move along through a wasteland where threatening power reversals
have taken place and atrocities have been enacted. In this trip, the
reader is not spared murder, rape, cannibalism and all kinds of allu-
sions to war atrocities, in the awareness that truth cannot and should
not be avoided, especially emotional truth, which is what the uncon-
scious is all about. The ‘ineffable subject of the unconscious’, the
‘dreamer who dreams the dream’ and the ‘dreamer who understands
the dream’ (all definitions taken from Grotstein, 2007) are one and
the same when the ‘veil of representation’ (to quote Erasmus’ Praise
of Folly, 1511) has been lifted and the underlying truth of deceit and
misplacement has been revealed. The subject encounters his/her own
truth only on the path of the irruption of unconscious truth, which
speaks through the disguise of a metaphorical language similar to
that of dreams and poetry, not on the route of libido and conflict.
This is the difference Bion made with his contribution to metapsy-
chology and the reason for the strain he felt within the more tradi-
tional psychoanalytic circle surrounding him in Britain. Submerged
in psychoanalytic jargon, truth in psychoanalysis might survive only
if disguised in fiction:

P. A: I am no poet, but I succumbed to the temptation to compose

a ­patriotic anthem, almost a New World symphony, using the
theme – ‘borrowed’ of course without acknowledgement – ‘My
Mind to Me a Kingdom is.’
160 Clara Mucci

ROL AND: How very apposite. Just right for a psycho-analyst!

P. A: Alas, no.
ROLAND & ROBIN: Really? How was that?
P. A: His Satanic Jargonieur took offence; on some pretence that
psycho-­analytic jargon was being eroded by eruptions of clarity.
I was compelled to seek asylum in fiction. Disguised as fiction, the
truth occasionally slipped through. (MF, p. 302, emphasis mine)

‘A nameless dread’: the reality of war,

the facts of trauma and ‘psychoanalysis
afterwards’
Dismantling the time and space frame, and condemning the subject to
an ever-present repetition (what Lacan calls ‘the return of the real’, as
the ‘ever-absent cause’ (1966)), the traumatic core has the (atrocious)
capacity to put the subject in contact with his/her own truth (what
by definition cannot be achieved), and this encounter is effected and
played out through the limits of a logical representation and the tri-
umph of the irrational logic of the primary process similar to dream-
work, in Freud’s language, or wakeful dream thinking, in Bion’s
words. It is an encounter with pre-verbal and pre-­linguistic implicit
memories, stratified in bodily sensations, which for Bion recount
‘facts’ and build up the path towards transformation. In the Italian
Seminars (Bion, 2005), Bion quotes the Freud of 1926 convinced that
‘there is much more continuity between intrauterine life and earliest
infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth allows us to
believe’ (SE 20, p. 138). The importance of experience through senses,
which he calls ‘facts’ is here underlined:

My training in the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis, my ex-

periences with John Rickman, with Melanie Klein– all of it was
verbal. Are we supposed to be blind and deaf to everything except
what comes in through the ears? When a patient comes to see me,
there is, in fact, a body which I can see for myself, and to that
extent I can fall back on the evidence of my senses and on the
information which my senses bring me. I don’t think that we can
afford to ignore what our senses tell us, because the facts are very
few anyway.
(Bion, 2005, pp. 1–2)
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 161

Only the patient knows what it feels like to be him or her:

The patient is also the only person who knows what it feels like to
have ideas such as that particular man or woman has. That is why
it is so important that we should be able to hear, see, smell, even
feel what information the patient is trying to convey. He is the
only one who knows the facts, therefore those facts are going to
be the main source of any interpretation, any observation which
we are likely to be able to make.
(Ibid., pp. 4–5)

And he goes on equating what ‘the patient feels’ to ‘the nearest thing to a
fact’ (ibid., p. 7). And especially very sick patients are the closest to a kind
of truth we have learned to detach from: ‘With regard to patients who
are described as being “psychotic” or “borderline psychotics”, I think
they are extremely aware of things which most of us have learnt not to be
aware of’ (ibid., 2005, p. 7). Bion carries to further consequences Freud’s
assumption that between health and folly there is only a matter of de-
gree, not of content, and that the body is the first carrier of the emotional
experience connecting him/her with the outside world and is particularly
in tune with pain and the ‘brutality of reality’ (Preta, ‘Prefazione’, in
Rugi, 2015), therefore, I would say, at the core of the Real. Without this
experience, the mind cannot work through the raw material of reality
and apprehend it (Correale, 2015; Rugi, 2015; Lombardi, 2016).
The theorization of the experience of the body, or mere flesh, as the
only (unspeakable) truth can be found in Shoah survivors and writers.
This is what Jean Améry writes describing his experience of torture:

The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say.
Qualities of feelings are as incomparable as they are indescriba-
ble. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to commu-
nicate …
Whoever is overcome by pain through torture experiences his
body as never before. In self-negation, his flesh becomes a total
reality.
(Améry, 1986, p. 33, emphasis mine)

Flesh becomes the subject, a speechless subject. If, as Correale writes,

‘the thing-in-itself is the object before it becomes represented in a
162 Clara Mucci

collective linguistic network’ (2015, p. 29), here trauma has exploded

any possible relationship with ‘the thing-in-itself’, needless to say any
communication between subject and external world.
According to his second wife Francesca and to his daughter
Parthenope, Bion was rather obsessed with his experience in the War
as a tank officer and would buy books on the topic on every possible
occasion. He also recounted his war experience, as is well known, in
several writings, The Long Weekend (1982), All My Sins Remembered
(1985) and War Memories (1997). Parthenope argues that in A Memoir
of the Future (1991), Bion used some episodes ‘carried over almost un-
chewed and apparently undigested … as though no further working-­
through were possible’ (Bion, 1997, p. 310).
In A Memoir, the voice of memory of the War is evoked mostly
through the stratagem of the character Captain Bion. The tone is that
of an abrupt Real intruding and disrupting the futility of all the other
concerns of the mind; pain strikes at truth directly; bodily sensations
and concrete sensorial aspects are fundamental:

CAPTAIN BION: I stared at the speck of mud trembling on the straw. I

stared through the front flap at the clods of earth spouting up all
round us. I stared at the dirty, strained face of my driver Allen–
my strained face as I sat by me; at the boomerang that Allen sent
me from Australia. I got out and hovered about six feet above us.
How they walked–walk! walk! They went like arfs arfing. Arf arf
together, arfing’s the stuff for me, if it is not a Rolls Royce, which
I’d pick out for choice. (MF, p. 53)

This strange passage in A Memoir can be understood only if we jux­

tapose his last Memoir (defined by Francesca Bion as his ‘psycho-
analytically oriented autobiographical fantasy’) with what he had
written right at the beginning of his first book of memories, called
The Long Week-End 1897–1919 Part of a Life, in which the reference
to Arf Arf (which in A Key to the Memoir written by Bion and his wife
is defined simply as ‘childhood version of ‘Our Father’’) is described
as a first idea and understanding of the Divine for the child Bion in
India; it conveys therefore in very oblique ways the threat to life that
fighting in the War constituted for him. This brief excerpt also con-
veys the sense of one of the typical nightmares of the experience of the
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 163

War, when he was dreaming of dying in the Steenbeck River flood,

and his feet and his hands were sinking into the mud.
The experience of ‘having been in fighting’ is commented on openly
not by the character CAPTAIN BION himself but also by another
character, ROBIN:

No woman, even one as sensitive as Alice, will understand that life

cannot be the same for a man who has been in fighting. I remember
the night when the enemy front was red with fire. I couldn’t believe it
was the enemy destroying their ammunition. Retreat and disaster I
was familiar with; victory not – and it came too late. I had changed.
(MF, p. 262)

It is also significant that Bion could go back to the memories of war

only after he gained the security and the peace of mind of his second
marriage, several years later, in the 1950s. Trauma cannot be worked
through according to an agenda, but the elaboration might start when
parts of the mind are strong and emotionally sound enough to start
the work; it is, as I showed in Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma
(Mucci, 2013), a process that goes on in a spiral, some movements
onward followed by regressive moments going eventually further or
beyond. It is in fact interesting that Bion’s writing about his War ex-
perience in ‘Amiens’ describe events that took place in 1958, when
he was writing his papers on psychosis in the 1950s and right before
his major theoretical publications of the 1960s (Learning from Experi-
ence, 1962a; Elements of Psychoanalysis, 1963; Transformations, 1965).
It is also of interest to note that years later, in 1972, after reading
what he had written in his ‘Diary’ as early as 1919, Bion wrote the
‘Commentary’ in the form of a dialogue between a character called
MYSELF (i.e., Bion at the time of the Commentary) and BION (Bion
at the time of the Diary). There, BION says that, during the Oxford
Years, he could not work or enjoy games (1997, War Memoirs, p. 209),
and MYSELF states that he ‘did not stand up to the rigours of war
very well’. And finally we have the dialogue:

BION: Of course we did not know that, though I was always afraid I
would not. I think even the diary shows that as it goes on, though
at Oxford I was still too ashamed to admit it, and very glad of
164 Clara Mucci

the opportunity that Oxford gave me to be seduced into a more

self-satisfied state of mind. But I never quite got rid of the sense
that all was not well.
MYSELF: That ultimately drove me to psychoanalysis.
(Bion, 1997, p. 201)

In the Diary, most of the times he uses the plural form ‘we’ to refer to
the most emotional events, and it seems that the psychic terror is de-
scribed more in collective terms, or on the basis of group experiences,
than in individual and personal terms. The basic incapacity to think
when the mind is overwhelmed by terror is the major assumption we
can make from a reading of the Diary, a fundamental step towards his
metapsychology and his later theoretical thinking.
The connection we can make between his state of mind in war over-
whelmed with terror and what he wrote in 1962 as a major contribu-
tion to psychoanalytic thinking, namely his ‘containment theory’ and
the ‘nameless terror’ the mind faces when there is this lack of contain-
ment, is indeed striking:

Normal development follows if the relationship between infant

and breast permits the infant to project a feeling, say, that it is
dying into the mother and to reintroject it after its sojourn in the
breast has made it tolerable to the infant psyche. If the projection
is not accepted by the mother the infant feels that its feeling that it is
dying is stripped of such meaning as it has. It therefore reintrojects,
not a fear of dying made tolerable, but a nameless dread.
(Bion, 1984, p. 116, emphasis mine)

In Laub and Lee’s convincing definition, trauma is precisely the rupture

of the empathic dyad between mother and child, or between the inter-
nalized good object and the abrupt erasure of it and the invasion of the
psychic by the ‘horror of objectlessness’ (Laub and Lee, 2003, p. 441).
A personal embodiment or incorporation of the catastrophic ex-
perience of war helped Bion in his capacity to analyze and help his
psychotic patients with precisely this type of extreme and fragmented
mental experience and where a total lack of containment had pre-
vailed, throwing the mind into terror. Dissociated fragments of un-
metabolized experience would still haunt the mind of Bion, as he
re-worked through his memories in his last Memoir.
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 165

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud went beyond his own theo-
rization of the dream (as given in The Interpretation of Dreams), as the
one to one correspondence of referents even in the over-­determination
of elements, so that the dream was similar to a rebus whose obscurity
needed to be dispelled and removed in order for the truth (or light) to
pierce through.
Therefore, a breakthrough in Freud’s theory of dreams comes after
World War I, when he theorized a ‘beyondness’ of the pleasure prin-
ciple where the traumatic core of reality was repeated even in dreams
as a way of mastering traumatization. For Bion, traumatization has
become an epistemology, wherein light or insight is actually a beam
of intense obscurity, but obscurity (at the limits of representation) is
the only way to cut through O and surrender to it, the real embrace-
ment of some kind of redemption for the subject.
At the other side of a metapsychology that places thoughts over
feelings and words over body, Bion re-opens a path for a psychoanal-
ysis where the caesura (between conscious and unconscious, between
mind and body, between prenatal and postnatal, between different
meanings in the same word) is eroded in the direction of openness
and fluidity, the fluidity of the waves, as he describes them in a pas-
sage notoriously commented upon (Memoir, The Dream, I, p. 193).
As Hamlet found method in folly, the reader as well as the patient
and analyst for Bion can find some at-one-ment, a unique moment
of revelation and oneness with one’s multiple selves and at the same
time some restoration and ‘atonement’, expiation-reparation only if
he/she is capable of going through the limits of the oppositions of
conscious-unconscious, mind-body, right and left hemispheres, as we
would say today following Allan Schore (2012).
A Memoir of the Future shows the reader and the subject the path
towards this going beyond of pleasure and the beyondness of the
(Kleinian) death drive too, after the trauma of History; the radicali-
zation of the lack of certainty and the darkness and void from which
subjectivity is born point at a new ‘truth drive’, with its relentless
work towards the irretrievability of a truth that will forever fade or
escape if searched for in the direction of the rational mind (and in the
guise of a language that is univocal and non-poetic, language, like the
language of science). In this way, an aesthetic sensitivity or openness
to ambiguity and ambivalences replaces the rational mind.
166 Clara Mucci

At the mind’s limits, A Memoir of the Future reminds the reader

that, as Aron Appelfeld who survived the Shoah observes, only the
metaphorical disguise of art and literature can render the reality of
the unspeakable aspect at the core of truth, when trauma has pierced
though the surface of reality and exploded the ‘thing’ it posits:

I have never written about things as they happened. All my words

are indeed characters from my most personal experience but
nevertheless they are not ‘the story of my life’ … I tried several
times to write ‘the story of my life’ but all my efforts were in vain.
I wanted to be faithful to reality and to what really happened.
But … the result was rather meager, an unconvincing imaginary
tale. The things that are the most true are easily falsified … I had
to remove those parts which were unbelievable from the ‘story of my
life’ and present a more credible version.
(Appelfeld 1988, p. 29, emphasis mine)

The truth of one’s life after Auschwitz cannot reside in the meaning of
the words of collective understanding, or belong to the ‘Establishment’.
As an end, let me quote the Epilogue Bion/BION/MYSELF/
CAPTAIN BION and the other characters put at the end of the book:

… & EPILOGUE
… FUGUE
… DONA ES REQUIEM
… MANY

All my life I have been imprisoned, frustrated, dogged by

common-­sense, reason, memories, desires and – greatest bug-
bear of all – understanding and being understood. This is an at-
tempt to express my rebellion, to say Good-bye to all that. It is my
wish, I now realize doomed to failure, to write a book unspoiled
by any tincture of common-sense, reason etc. (see above). So, al-
though I would write, ‘abandoned Hope all ye who expect to find
any facts – scientific, aesthetic or religious – in this book’, I cannot
claim to have succeeded. All these will, I fear, be seen to have
left their traces, vestiges, ghosts hidden within these words; even
sanity, like ‘cheerfulness’, will creep in. However successful my
 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’ 167

attempt, there would always be the risk that the book ‘became’
acceptable, respectable, honoured and unread. ‘Why write then’
You may ask. To prevent someone who KNOWS from filling the
empty space – but I fear I am being ‘reasonable’, that great Ape.
Wishing you a Happy Lunacy and Relativistic Fission …
(MF, p. 578)

In the lines right before this epilogue, in the dialogue between A and
Q the page before, 577, A says to Q: ‘Bye-bye – happy Holocaust!’
Bion leaves us with the riddle of transforming the language of ca-
tastrophe into that of a new subjectivity or humanism.
Chapter 10

The ‘Memoir’ experienced

from the standpoint of
contemporary art
A chronicle of a death foretold
Adela Abella

It is said that when Bion first published his A Memoir of the Future,
his fellow analysts wondered if he had gone mad. Indeed, the contrast
with the content and formal aspects of his preceding works is im-
pressive and disconcerting. My readings of Memoir share this initial
reaction of awe: my repeated attempts to get through it invariably
failed. Over and over again, the experience of reading Memoir evoked
in me the experience aroused by some works of contemporary art:
perplexity, amazement, displeasure, irritation, rejection and … an
urge towards thinking.
A famous story concerning Marcel Duchamp comes to mind.
Duchamp, often considered the father of contemporary art, was
famous for his provocative work and life devoted to unrelent-
ingly challenging the whole of the artistic and moral values of his
time (Abella, 2007). Unexpectedly, in 1923, while he was not yet 40
years old, he announced his definite abandonment of all activity as
a painter, proclaiming that he ‘was really defrocked, in the religious
sense of the word … All that disgusted me’ (Cabanne, 1971, p. 67).
The shock was therefore violent when a posthumous strange, uncanny
and unclassifiable work came to light: ‘Given: 1. Waterfall, 2. The
illuminating gas’ (1946–1966), a figurative and kitsch painting, on which
Duchamp had worked during 20 years in the utmost secrecy. In fact,
this astonishing and paradoxical action added an ironic, mischievous
and disconcerting wink to his exuberant renouncement of painting.
A strange, uncanny and unclassifiable work: we might also apply
these terms to Bion’s Memoir. Indeed, both Given and Memoir had
(and still partially have) a similar startling and enlivening effect,
 The ‘Memoir’ 169

forcing a new regard onto a previous body of work that had, in the
meantime, become canonical. (It should be noted that both Bion and
Duchamp repeatedly expressed their worry that new ideas become
familiar and lose their refreshing potential. I will come back to this).
A refreshing potential: like Given, Memoir adds a disquieting wink
to Bion’s work in such a way that other readings of his presently
too familiar ideas become possible. We thought we had understood
Bion. Did we really? Maybe not, suggests Memoir. Was Bion mean-
ing more, less or otherwise than I thought he meant before I tasted
the acidity of this upsetting late work? Should Memoir be seen as the
implicit mourning for the failure of a life struggle for clear thinking
and uncontaminated communicating expression? Or, from another
direction, does Memoir represent a pro-(e)vocative invitation towards
the unknowable, the unreachable O? And, in this last case, is O nec-
essarily so irksome and ugly?
The unconventional tenor and the upsetting effects of Memoir give
rise to two opposite risks. On the one hand, we might be tempted
to put it aside and cut it off from the main body of Bion’s work, as
if it were an old man’s silliness and a sham. On the other hand, we
might idealize it, investing this unsettling work with particularly
profound, far-fetched and esoteric meanings. I will try to show why,
in my opinion, both extremes lead to the loss of something fundamen-
tal. Therefore, the intriguing question is, for me, what to do with this
disrupting work: should we try to understand, and therefore tame,
Memoir’s wildness, or would it be wiser to respect the refreshing po-
tentiality of a space for impenetrability and mystery?

The end of art and the birth of a

new paradigm
It has often been said that the sharp rift brought by contemporary
art concerning what was previously considered art equates to a real
revolution. This rift is so radical that even educated people who enjoy
classical or modern art often go astray when it comes to the artistic
propositions of the last 60 years. Thus, it is not unusual that using
the word ‘art’ for certain creations arouses scepticism, bewilderment,
irritation, fear of being cheated and abused. They can be felt to be
shams and farces, disparaged either as profoundly ugly, disgusting
170 Adela Abella

pieces or as boring, senseless artefacts. Contemporary art’s social and

aesthetic earthquake has been compared to the one brought about by
impressionism in the late 19th century. Both of them aroused similar
feelings and anxieties.
Already in the 1980s, a number of critics suggested the death of paint-
ing, alluding to certain signs of exhaustion. There was a strong feeling
of the impossibility of surpassing what had already been achieved in
the field. No possible progress or improvement in the visual arts was to
be expected. However, in the 1990s, it was in a much more radical sense
that both German art historian Hans Belting (1983) and American
philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto (1997) articulated the idea
of the ‘end of art’. More recently and from a different point of view,
French sociologist Nathalie Heinich (2014) has come to similar con-
clusions, while describing the many social faces of what she agrees
defines a change of paradigm. By this term, and drawing on Khun’s
work (1962), Heinich refers to a general structure of shared conceptions
concerning a given domain of human activity at a particular moment.
A paradigm, she clarifies, is not a rationally and consciously followed
model but, on the contrary, a (mostly) unconsciously accepted foun-
dation, which implicitly determines what can be considered art, what
are legitimate artistic problems and what sorts of solutions can be pro-
posed. This paradigm shift brings about a radical change in collective
representation about the nature and the usage of art and, therefore, in
the attitudes and expectations of artists and public.
J.-F. Lyotard (1979) developed the idea that any great discourse of
knowledge is but a legitimising of a sociocultural practice. For the
three authors quoted, Danto, Belting and Heinich, as well as for many
others, the narratives that legitimise both classical and modern art
have come to an irremediable and no-way-back final point. Briefly
summed up, it can be said that classical art promoted perfect mimesis
and formal beauty (as a worldly equivalent of spiritual perfection).
The successive artistic periods, renaissance, mannerism, baroque,
rococo, neoclassicism and romanticism, evolved gradually, often in
sharp opposition to the preceding period, while keeping a degree of
continuity. It must be noted, and this is a fundamental point, that
this continuity was based on the fact that their central aspiration re-
mained the faithful representation of ‘nature’ (be it in an idealised or
in a realistic way).
 The ‘Memoir’ 171

A shift of paradigm was brought by modern art (which expanded

since around 1880 up to the 1960s) that can be described in terms of
both inward and formal turns. The inward turn: what matters is no
longer mimesis of reality or formal beauty but the expression of the
most personal view of the world. The formal turn: the rules of figura-
tive representation are abolished so that the most personal expression
is sought through manipulation of visual modalities of representa-
tion: form, surface and pigment. It is the triumph of pure art – the
accent lies both on the appeal to the senses and on the authentic-
ity in the expression of the interiority of the artist. Different schools
(impressionism, cubism, futurism, dada, abstract expressionism)
entered into acute competition, each proposing a particular formal
avenue meant to allow this radical personification.
In the 1970s, we witness a second paradigm clash brought about
by the agitated delivery of contemporary art. What is now at stake
is neither the most faithful and beautiful rendering of reality nor the
unbridled expression of the artist’s interiority, but the exploration
and transgression of the frontiers of art (Heinich, 1996, 2014). This
questioning of the limits of art is absolute and boundless. Both the
frontiers with other disciplines and the boundaries with everyday
life are challenged. Thus, the interaction with other disciplines gives
birth to astonishing forms of hybridisation through marriage with
somewhat related fields such as video and dance but also with previ-
ously distant ones such as philosophy or science. As for the interface
with everyday life, we see a two-way fecundation: in one direction,
mundane objects are imported into art (Duchamp’s bicycle wheel,
Spoerri’s dinner tables). In the opposite direction, art literally invades
all sorts of social spaces, blurring and stepping outside its traditional
spatial boundaries, namely museums and galleries (to which we can
add the decorative and propagandistic installation of patriotic stat-
ues in places and avenues). Customary frontiers are overtaken, giving
way to land art (represented by the work of artists such as Smithson
or Christo) and an ever-increasing number of installations and per-
formances in schools, parks, factories, airports and restaurants.
Still more shocking, contemporary art disrupts not only the
­materials used or the contexts of its presentation but also com-
monly shared aesthetic and moral values through attitudes com-
bining playfulness, distancing, cynicism, mockery, scandal and
172 Adela Abella

provocation. The maximal originality is often sought in order to thwart

any ­expectation and achieve greater impact. Anything goes: political
protest can be instrumental as an artistic option (yielding great success,
as is the case with a number of Chinese artists); traditional art values
such as authenticity, disinterest and rejection of financial compromise
are often explicitly dismissed (an avenue opened by Warhol and cul-
minating in spectacular and sensationalist productions reaching unbe-
lievable market prices, such as those by Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons); it
is not unusual for good taste and common decorum to be outrageously
challenged (as in Paul McCarthy’s masochistic and self-demeaning
performances or Piero Manzoni’s non metaphorical Artist’s shit).
Often, art lies not so much in the object but in the discourse and
activities associated with the production and exhibition of the work
(when it is exhibited, which is not necessarily the case with conceptual
art, where the description of a work can suffice. Thus, a big collec-
tor can gather his or her collection almost entirely in a file!). What
matters is not so much the pebble thrown into the lake as the waves
it triggers. Therefore, art is more a question of proposing a certain ex-
perience than a question of a material object. This avenue opens the
way to artistic propositions that can be depersonalised (no personal
expression or implication of the artist), dematerialised (no material
object) or ephemeral (no need of any permanence). The experience
offered to the public can be both of an emotional nature (in the form
of a quest for excitement arousing strong feelings such as amazement,
desire, disgust, compassion and boredom) and of an intellectual na-
ture (stimulating fresh thinking, as Duchamp and Cage championed).
In this last case, the intellectual dimension of the work of art runs
hand in hand with its capacity to foster a variety of interpretations
by the public. The artist may explicitly reject any personal implica-
tion in order to avoid the seductive indoctrination of the public (an
aim explicitly sought by Duchamp, Cage or Boltansky (Abella, 2007,
2008, 2012, 2015). To this aim, a textual discourse must often accom-
pany the work of art in order to furnish an instruction manual to the
disconcerted public (an introductory textual discourse that can, par-
adoxically, pedagogically guide the public’s appropriation to the end
of restraining the freedom to recreate the work of art). Thus, contem-
porary works of art seem to be addressed to a sophisticated and initi-
ated public, to the exclusion of any random audience.1 We might say
that, in a similar way, Bion’s Memoir has been, and still is, difficult
 The ‘Memoir’ 173

to access for a random psychoanalyst, perhaps needing some sort of

introduction for the approach of this disconcerting work.
In sharp contrast with the passionate struggle for hegemony
characteristic of modern art, claims Danto (1997), contemporary art
relies on profound pluralism and entire tolerance. It is, as Belting (1983)
put it, the loss of faith in the existence of a great narrative that deter-
mines the way in which things must be seen. There are no rules and no
values; everything can be art. We seem to be living in a period of dis-
organised information, of aesthetic entropy, almost of total freedom
to create or recreate. In fact, adds Danto, the beginning of contem-
porary art can be placed in the appropriation of preceding works of
art, which are diverted from the original spirit in which they had been
created (for instance, works done by artists aiming for mimesis or
beauty – a founding example being Duchamp adding moustaches to
the Giaconda). More than a rejection of classical or modern art, we
see a playful and ironic recuperation of the past. Therefore, following
the line of M. Duchamp, Danto comes to the conclusion that con-
temporary art is more a business of intellectual understanding than a
question of visual pleasure. Philosophy replaces aesthetics.

Convergences between Bion’s thinking and

contemporary art
There are some profound similarities between the spirit of a number
of influential contemporary artists and the one underlying Bion’s
work (Abella, 2010, 2013, 2016). Maybe the most striking convergences
can be found between him and one of his contemporaries: John Cage
(1912–92) (Abella, 2012, 2015). Of course, given the contemporary
boundless freedom to create, as described by Danto, these conver-
gences between Bion and Cage are not shared by all contemporary
artists. Plurality and stepping outside limits being the rule, there is no
directive canon. Nevertheless, these shared views belong to the array
of legitimate problems and accepted solutions that the contemporary
artistic paradigm allows.
Both Bion and Cage posit mental transformation and personal
growth as the central aim of psychoanalysis and music. As Cage says,

I want to give up the traditional view that art is a means of self-­

expression for the view that art is a means of self-alteration, and
174 Adela Abella

what it alters is mind … We will change beautifully if we accept

the uncertainties of change.
(Kostelanetz, 1988, p. 226)

This view of art meets Bion’s conception of the central role of psy-
choanalysis: ‘In psychoanalytic methodology the criterion cannot be
whether a particular usage is wrong or right, meaningful or verifia-
ble, but whether it does, or does not, promote development’ (Bion,
1962a, p. ix).
For both of them, this aim can be achieved through fresh personal
awareness of reality (external, sensorial for Cage; internal, mental for
Bion) that is countered by habit and tradition. Thus, Cage states: ‘the
function of music is to change the mind so that it does become open to
experience’ in order to allow ‘other possibilities that they had not pre-
viously considered’, ‘to open our eyes and our ears to the multiplicity
and complexity’ of life, avoiding ‘what is too simple and too quickly
satisfied’ (Kostelanetz, 1988, p. 180). In a similar vein, Bion advocates
a ‘naïf-view’ (Bion, 1963, p. 86) that allows openness to whatever new
experience may come up in the moment, while insisting on ‘the fact
that any session is a new session and therefore an unknown situa-
tion that … (must not be) obscured by an already plentiful fund of
pre- and misconceptions’ (Bion, 1962a, p. 39). In strikingly similar
words, Cage warns against the obscuring power of ‘desire, memory
and taste’, while Bion invites the analyst to stay free from ‘memory,
desire and understanding’.
Along the same lines, Cage contends that ‘the function of art is
to hide beauty: that has to do with opening our minds, because the
notion of beauty is just what we accept’ (Kostelanetz, 1988, p. 85).
In a similar way, insists Bion, the truth sought by the analyst should
be a personal truth, not one found in books: the analyst should re-
spect not only the uniqueness of his patient but his own uniqueness
as well. Therefore, if the experience and knowledge of predecessors
is needed, they might be freely used and applied to present circum-
stances and context: ‘Freud’s papers should be read – and ‘forgotten’.
Only in this way is it possible to produce the conditions in which,
when it is next read, it can stimulate the evolution of further devel-
opment’ (1967a, p. 156). In other words, accepted truths should be
suspended, forgotten, hidden or used in whichever way allows new
ones to come to the fore.
 The ‘Memoir’ 175

However, the temptation to avoid the new and take refuge in tradi-
tion and certainty is so overwhelming that both Cage and Bion claim
the need of an active and sustained struggle to resist them. Thus, Bion’s
suggestions both of a mathematical notation and of the grid are meant
to free the analyst of a saturating penumbra of preconceptions, to the
end of stimulating fresh perceptions of reality and clear communication.
Cage tries to counter habit and tradition through the forced introduction
of chance by composing through the Chinese I Ching divination book
or the star maps of Atlas Australis or by playing music through the ad-
dition of pie plates, screws, etc. to the strings of the ‘prepared’ piano …
In fact, what is most feared is the depersonalising power of habit
and tradition, which leads to suggestion, seduction and indoctrina-
tion, a fear shared by contemporary art (Duchamp, Cage, Boltanski
and many others) as well as by contemporary psychoanalysis (Bion
and many psychoanalysts). It is this fear that prompts Bion’s heartfelt
cry: ‘Don’t try to understand me! Pay special attention to your emo-
tional responses to me!’ (Grotstein, 2007, pp. 7–8) as well as to Cage’s
urging motto ‘Get out of whatever cage you happen to be in’ (Koste-
lanetz, 1988, p. 15).
However, the power of previous knowledge and the tendency to
cling to ‘a protective shell of familiar ideas’ (Bion, 1967a, p. 150) are
so pervasive that both of them finally resort to extreme emergency
measures such as emptiness, silence, paradox and provocation. Thus,
while Bion promotes a ‘pro-evocative attitude’, Cage multiplies shock-
ing propositions such as his Silent piece, 4′ 33", a piece composed of
three movements with … no sound at all! Something of this spirit
is illustrated in a famous anecdote extracted by Grotstein from his
analysis with Bion:

After many of my own analytic sessions with him, I would leave

dazed and confused, believing that I had not understood much of
what he had said … During another moment in analysis, he gave
me a series of interpretations which, unusually, caused me to say:
‘I think I follow you’. His reply to this was an ironic: ‘Yes, I was
afraid of that!’ It was only then that I began to realize that Bion
did not want to be followed or understood, let alone idealised. He
wanted me and everyone who was in his presence to be responsive
to his/her own emanations and responses.
(Grotstein, 1981b, p. 10)
176 Adela Abella

A Memoir of the Future as a contemporary

work of art?
Of course not. What I suggest is that Memoir arouses emotional re-
actions and thoughts close to those stirred up by a certain number
of contemporary works of art and, still more important, that Bion
shares some central aspirations and convictions with an important
trend of contemporary artists.
Among the issues in common we might point out: a focus on fresh
and personal perceptions of (internal, external) reality instead of
succumbing to (psychoanalytical or artistic) tradition and habit; the
aspiration to mental transformation and growth; replacing the mere
application and transmission of (psychoanalytical, artistic) knowl-
edge by the re-discovery and re-creation of the heritage; the accent on
truth and discovery instead of beauty and mental comfort; a free us-
age of the knowledge transmitted by predecessors instead of submis-
sion to canonical truths; profound awareness of the difficulty, even
the impossibility, of achieving a ‘naïf-outlook’ and, consequently, the
need to exercise severe discipline in order to free oneself from desire,
memory, understanding and taste; finally, a desperate effort to attain
this asymptotic freedom through extreme disinfecting strategies such
as the use of silence, paradox, nonsense, pro(e)vocation, irony, delib-
erate obscurity and the breaking of conventional boundaries; all of
this ends up in the need for an instruction book in order to be intro-
duced to an hermetic work.
From this standpoint, some of the disconcerting traits of Memoir
become meaningful. A critic once said that Duchamp had ‘reached
the limit of the unaesthetic, the useless and the unjustifiable’ (Lebel,
1959, p. 47). This is near the reaction of Bion’s analytic colleagues at
the time of Memoir’s first edition. Is this attempt to push the limits to
the utmost shared by both Bion and Duchamp for the same reasons?
That is, the unconventional and kitsch presentation of Memoir would
aim to open the mind to unexpected truths, acting like an electro-
shock on a cardiac arrest, in the same way as a work of art seeking to
awake an admiring and submissive public?
The oxymoron contained in its title has a first destabilising and
thought-provoking power: a memoir of the future? Is Bion just mis-
chievously playing with words or is there a deeper sense? Similar to
 The ‘Memoir’ 177

Duchamp, is Bion attempting to subvert common language in order

to uncover other possible meanings? And, if so, what might these be?
Then, concerning the nature of this writing: is this really a memoir, or
rather a novel, or maybe a special type of psychoanalytic discourse,
or an old man’s delirium or just a thought-provoking joke? What is
to be found inside: Bion’s personal phantasies or an esoteric message
containing unexplored theoretical pearls reserved for a selected un-
initiated public? Or else, is Bion forcing us to abandon the protective
shell of accepted ideas by this provocative breaking of conventional
limits? Is this a new version of his abrupt comment to Grotstein,
aimed to remove all trace of submission and defensive idealisation? Is
his baroque and acid wording the equivalent of Cage’s renouncement
of beauty because beauty is lulling and numbing, just as we already
know? In the same spirit as Cage’s passionate summons, ‘Get out of
whatever cage you happen to be in’, is Bion suggesting that we get out
of the psychoanalytical cage we might have built? And if so, what and
where exactly is this cage, and how can we escape it?
When choosing the avenue of highlighting the enlivening and
transformative power of Memoir’s wild unconventionality, a trou-
bling backfire conclusion might follow. Duchamp announced the in-
evitable death, not of modern art but of any particular work of art,
be it the most innovative and contemporary: ‘I think painting dies,
you understand. After forty or fifty years a picture dies, because its
freshness disappears’ (Cabanne, 1971, p. 67). He develops this idea
concerning his emblematic ready-mades, which he wanted to be ‘to-
tally and strategically unaesthetic’:

I haven’t done any now for a long time … because anything, you
know, however ugly, however indifferent it is, will become …
beautiful and pretty after 40 years, you can be sure … So that is
very disturbing for the very idea of the ready-made.
(Collin, 2002, p. 37)

The question might therefore be: what will be the effect of our legiti-
mate efforts to penetrate the mystery and wildness of Memoir? Would
it be possible that his shocking, and therefore enlivening, potential
vanishes under the uncovering power of our attempts to understand?
Once understood and tamed, will Memoir die, suffocated by an excess
178 Adela Abella

of idealisation and understanding? If this were the case, we might say

that it has nevertheless fulfilled its stimulating function for a long
time. I think that Bion might have accepted the irremediable death of
his Memoir, provided that its oblivion might fecundate other analysts’
minds. That is, trusting that other analysts would follow him in the
struggle to be themselves, to respect the uniqueness of their personal-
ity and, therefore, to renew and revitalize our field.

Note
1 Anecdotes concerning the disorientation of the public, even those used
to visiting art fairs and biennials, are common. Sometimes they are
funny, at other times disquieting and even cruel. Thus, there are frequent
versions of the classical case of a well-intentioned visitor who picks up
a shopping-bag or something similar, thinking someone forgot it there,
and is scolded and shamed because he has upset an installation. Another
illuminating example: at the last Kassel Fair, 2012, a group of visitors
was surprised to find the first huge museum room absolutely empty ex-
cept for a bare display stand pushed to one side. What were they meant
to look at? No explanatory notice, no attendant to ask. An animated
debate failed to answer this basic question until a diligent tourist found
the response in his book: the work was a light airstream crossing the
room. The reactions of the visitors were illustrative of the variety of per-
sonal appropriations: laughter, scepticism, irritation, disappointment,
shame, intense musing, blank admiration …
Chapter 11

Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in
A Memoir of the Future
Duncan Cartwright

Me: 2017, are we ready for this tome yet? Did you read it? I mean really
read it?
Duncan: Was it God or Satan who stole the thicket? Yes, I fell asleep
143 times. What nonsense! It’s most positive attribute is its abil-
ity to take up space on my book self to show off my intelligence,
although no one has heard of him. It should be admired for its
potential to induce comas.
Me: You didn’t understand it did you?
Duncan: You’re not supposed to understand it! Didn’t you read the
end?
Bion: (Waking) Oh god, has it become acceptable?
Me: No.
Bion: What a relief!
Selfie☺self: This makes no sense and is taking a lot of time! No one
reads this stuff anymore. Just Google it or take lots and lots of
pictures so you won’t have to think …
Paul S: Motherfucker! An ugly word … But ugly does have a case
to make. It’s not like every rodent gets a birthday cake. No, it’s
‘you’re a chipmunk, how cute is that?’ Did you hear they’ve found
heaven six trillion light years away.
Bion: Genius! Glad I woke up, he’s trapped the light! Have you
heard Bon Iver or Hollis? 2017 and still dancing around the same
crucifix.
Emmature: We can only hope for something to break through before
I drown in pre-mature knowledge and self-satisfaction.
180 Duncan Cartwright

A Memoir of the Future was Bion’s final and most audacious at-
tempt to explore the nature of psychic reality as a here-and-now
living experience. To do so, he employs a host of literary devices,
concepts, fictionalised experiences, characters, presences and reg-
isters of experience to represent a ‘science fiction’ of psychoanaly-
sis. It could be seen as Bion’s Aeneid (Symington and Symington,
1996), a freeing journey that allowed him to explore a lifetime of
experience and intellectual pursuits from multiple perspectives and
in a way that attempts to stay true to his vision of psychoanaly-
sis. The trilogy draws on autobiographical experiences, literature,
psychoanalysis, science, mythology, religion, the arts and history.
Although its structure and style appear influenced by Socrates,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Diderot and Dante (Bléandonou, 1994), as
a whole, it defies categorisation. It could be read as a psychoan-
alytic autobiography, a speculative account of the future of psy-
choanalysis, a demonstration of Bion’s psychoanalytic concepts,
an exercise in psychoanalytic mental gymnastics, a history of ‘the
mind’ through a psychoanalytic lens, a meditation on ‘nonsense’, a
critique of psychoanalysis, or the incoherent ravings of an old un-
hinged psychoanalyst.
As is the case with many of Bion’s offerings, reading him is as much
an experience as it is an attempt to grapple with his ideas. Perhaps
like no other psychoanalytic author, Bion engages his audience in a
way that provokes and challenges the reader to experience and seek
‘personal truth’ as an essential part of reading or learning. It could
be said that Bion is equally concerned with ‘infecting’ the reader or
interlocutor with the problem itself, the experience, as with impart-
ing an accumulation of facts or rationalisations. With this in mind,
in Memoir, Bion takes his reader through periods of disorientation,
confusion and obscurity in a provocative way that appears to contain
an implicit appeal: dismiss the trilogy as nonsense or engage. Fall to
sleep or tolerate ‘something’ that is unknown but ‘becoming’. Choose
oblivion or wisdom.
In this chapter, I consider the place and role of ‘nonsense’ in the
trilogy. I define ‘nonsense’ broadly as all that flouts commonly held
conventions in narrative expression and delivery. In A Memoir of the
Future, ‘nonsense’ appears in many forms ranging from the idiomatic
use of language and dialogue to the general structure of the works.
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 181

Its function or effect seems multifaceted. It could be seen to form the

medium through which the dynamic and multidimensional nature of
psychic reality is represented. Nonsense might also be understood as
a device used to penetrate and disrupt the reader’s desire for coher-
ence, reason and authority. Still further, the ‘roughness’ of nonsense,
its appeal to obscurity, could be seen as demonstrating the essential
processes involved in thought formation as well as an attempt to ac-
curately represent the experience of unconscious life and the influ-
ence of ‘the formless infinite’.
I reflect on the non-sensuous nature of psychic reality as it appears
in the trilogy, its relation to nonsense, the senses, fiction and psychic
truth. Finally, I comment on the trilogy’s currency in today’s world
in terms of our most recent ‘fashionable’ solution to psychic uncer-
tainty: cyberspace. Here, the immediacy of ‘making sense’ poses new
challenges in the journey towards ‘mental oblivion’ or wisdom. The
same ‘memoirs of the future’ and questions remain. Will we make the
mental effort, take the time, to not understand? As a largely dismissed
piece of work, perhaps Bion’s intensions remain as alive today as they
ever were, still awaiting a thinker.

Multiplicity and psychic reality

Bion’s use of ‘nonsense’ starts at the very beginning of the trilogy
with the title of the introduction to the three works: ‘Introduction …
prelude … overture & beginners … one, two’ (MF, p. ix). It might
be read as playful dream-thoughts about ‘beginnings’ and signals an
approach set on drawing on multiple vertices or perspectives rang-
ing from the ordinary to aesthetic, infantile to logical. The ‘nonsense’
continues in the introduction to the first volume, The Dream, with a
reverie about reversible perspectives and binocular vision:

Suppose I use my alimentary canal as a sort of telescope. I could

get down to the arse and look up at the mouth full of teeth and
tonsils and tongue. Or rush up to the top end of the alimentary
canal and watch what arse-hole was up to. Rather amusing really.
It depends what my digestive tract felt about having me scamper-
ing up and down the gut all night.
(Ibid., p. 3)
182 Duncan Cartwright

The Dream leads the reader into a world of confusion and turmoil,
with Bion offering little relief or orientation as to what direction or in-
tention shapes the narrative. Characters and the setting are left unde-
fined and vaguely represented, inducing disorientation, as the reader
hears about a ‘successful invasion, its details unknown’ (ibid., p. 19).
Two couples, Alice and Roland, Rosemary and Tom, undergo a role
reversal and encounter many unknowns as they are joined by a host
of characters: ‘Big sister’, ‘Depressive Position’, ‘Paranoid-Schizoid’,
‘Memory’, ‘Voice’, and ‘Bion’, to mention a few. ‘Alice’, a reference
to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’, stands ‘naked, incongruous, alien, without
a point of reference that made sense’ (ibid., p. 27). She occupies an
upside-­down world where Rosemary, her servant, has become her
master or goddess. The scene is set for turbulent change.
As a representation of dream-life and psychic reality, The Dream
challenges conventional conceptions of time, space and reasoning.
Characters and background presences appear out of nowhere and
remain undifferentiated. They could be understood to represent
dream-thoughts at different levels of representation, past and present
experiences undergoing transformation, or different aspects of a per-
sonality. All suggest a multidimensional timeless space powered by
unnamable psychic turmoil:

Rosemary and Alice have swooned away, but Rosemary still talks.
‘Who are you?’
(Shadowy Figures disguised as S.F. take over.)
‘We are Science Fiction. Who are you?’
‘I am the Artist who made the ram caught in a thicket beautiful in
gold … Who are you?’
‘I am Science Fiction. I am S.F. I am the Fiction that became Sci-
ence Fact … But who now is this?’
‘I am what I am. I am God. I am Satan’ …
‘I am the thought that found a thinker. Who are you?’
‘I am the robber who drugged you so you would not know you
were being conceptualized … You would not know that di-
rection in which I was robbing you would lead from nothing
to unconsciousness to sleep to dream to waking thoughts to
dream thoughts to nothingness to O=zero, from O = zero to
O which is O = oh! to O which is a picture which is a picture
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 183

of a hole or greedy mouth or vagina which offers perfect free-

dom which is death perfect which is perfect freedom which is
perfect pitch …’
(Ibid., p. 36)

Bion was apparently very fond of the Trilogy (Bléandonou, 1994).

One certainly gets the sense of Bion playing with ideas, expanding
themes in an improvised and free manner along multiple dimensions.
Rosemary, for instance, is Alice’s servant as well as a transformation
of Alice’s desire. Their relationship represents masochistic or sadistic
tendencies. We see the experience from both sides and in reverse. This,
in turn, generates other experiences and ‘eruptions’ in the text. Later,
Bion himself is represented in multiple forms, all transformations of
the experience of ‘being Bion’. Some of these characters give voice to
deeply personal experiences, mostly related to the war and childhood
(‘Captain Bion’, ‘Somite thirty’, ‘twelve years’, ‘twenty years’, ‘Boy’, to
name a few). There is the more public, self-satisfied ‘Bion’, possessive
of his own contributions. ‘Myself’, on the other hand, represents a
more reflective state. Still further, ‘P.A.’ is a central, integrative char-
acter, capable of negative capability. ‘The Ghost of P.A.’, who died in
the war, also makes an appearance.
Similar to the ‘Bion’ assemblage, various characters can be seen
to represent differentiations or transformations in a psychic field. In
keeping with this idea, they share similarities that remain fluid and
undefined but suggest a sharing of characteristics that find varying
degrees of representation. Manifestations of evil, for instance, can be
found to exist in ‘God’, ‘Du’, ‘Devil’, ‘Voice’, and ‘Man’ in different
ways. At other times, however, the same characters appear in more
differentiated forms.
The chaotic or nonsensical elements of the text are carried by char-
acters who interact with themselves and others, merge, imitate, resist
or are transformed by each other. For instance, infantile parts of the
personality can be resisted or ‘imitate the sounds that grown up make’
(ibid., p. 121). Alternatively, they are transformed into more elaborate
fictional characters.
The constant and chaotic movements between similarities and
differences might be thought of as representing oscillations between
Paranoid-schizoid and Depressive positions. This is felt in a very real
184 Duncan Cartwright

way by the reader who is required to tolerate half-truths and uncer-

tainty (Bléandonou, 1994). Aside from leaving one to general im-
pressions, these ideas are expressed by the ‘Paranoid-­Schizoid’ and
‘Depressive Position’ characters, as well as by others.

MYCROFT: The paranoid–schizoid position is itself clear and chaotic,

that is, unspoiled by coherence unless spoiled by intolerance of
‘mysteries, half-truths’.
(MF, p. 99)

In addition, oscillations in the text appear to reflect fractal-like quali-

ties typically observed in non-linear dynamic systems (Marks-Tarlow,
1999). Here, different qualities in a field are repeated infinitely in dif-
ferent dimensions and at varying levels of complexity. The qualities or
themes that are repeated are organized around ‘attractor states’ and
share ‘self-similar’ attributes. One example of this in Memoir can be
seen in the constant chatter about ‘fiction’ and its relation to the real.
The idea or experience of ‘fiction’ is repeated along many different
dimensions. At a ‘macro’ level, it is represented by the trilogy itself as
a piece of ‘science fiction’; the characters are fictional; its style draws
the author in as a fictional character. At a ‘micro’ level, some charac-
ters are more fictional than others, and ideas about the relationship
between reality and fiction are expressed in different ways by different
characters. All these ‘positions’ represent ideas about fiction in mul-
tiple forms.
As Grotstein (2007) pointed out, many of Bion’s theoretical con-
cepts (e.g., ♀♂, alpha function, Ps<–>D) share some of these features
and could be seen as cognates of each other. This, it could be said, is
reflected in the trilogy in narrative form.
Multi-dimensionality is also reflected in the sense that dreams exist
within dreams in the trilogy. Still further, the reader is given the im-
pression that all vestiges of experience exist simultaneously, or as a
potential presence, as they weave in and out of the text. In this ex-
pansive space, objects hold subjective and objective positions while,
at the same time, they represent functions, forms and processes. The
timeless and infinite nature of psychic reality and different ‘levels’ of
experience often also appear embedded in the dialogue or are given
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 185

a voice through different characters (‘Depressive Position’, Memory,

Du, Voice, Soma, Albert Stegosaurus, etc.).
At different levels of abstraction, each character and represented
experience, even each book in the trilogy (Meotti, 2000), could be
viewed as representing ‘variations’ or vertices that attempt to give
form to unknowable ‘noumena’ or ‘Ultimate Reality’ (Bion, 1965).
For Bion, ultimate reality comprises non-conscious invariances that
are universal and exist as timeless continuities. Here, interminable
struggles between mind and body, pre-natal and post-natal lives, pe-
nis and vagina, omnipotence and insignificance, life and death, God
and evil, reality and fiction, emerge from invariances that play out as
‘memoirs of the future’ and exist as part of the human condition.
The trilogy’s evocative style, structure and use of ‘polylogues’
(Bléandonou, 1994) pay homage to Bion’s (1965) idea that ultimate
reality, or O, can never be known. Only its essence can be repre-
sented in imperfect multiple forms as it exists in the constant circular
chatter of his characters. If we are not to see this as pure nonsense,
the reader has to adopt a suitably receptive state akin to ‘binocular
vision’ where vertices ‘separate and distinct … contribute to a har-
monization’ (MF, p. 3) and allow for an expanded view of emotional
and mental realities.
All the above suggest that the trilogy is an exercise in multiplic-
ity like no other. One wonders if it would be possible to evoke this
kind of imaginative landscape without Bion’s provocative use of ‘non-
sense’, obscurity and confusion. Perhaps it is possible in the simple
descriptive sense. However, my view is that Memoir’s ability to impact
the reader is precisely due to these ‘nonsense’ qualities. It brings to
life the very movements of a living psychic system, the feel of chaos,
turbulence and the complexity of psychic reality.

Nonsense: disrupting the dead

Bion uses reversal of perspective, paradoxical tensions, ambiguity,
unresolved dialogues, de-contextualisation, punning, bizarre imagery
and obscure language to generate ‘nonsense’ in the text. Dense refer-
encing drawing on his favourite sources (Milton, Keats, Shakespeare,
Kant, Plato, Freud, Doyle, the Bible, mathematics, Greek and Hindu
186 Duncan Cartwright

mythologies), his use of neologisms and deeply personal references

further add to a narrative that resists being saturated by simple un-
derstanding or interpretation. I imagine that the ‘nonsense-making’
aspects of the trilogy were intentional but then gained a life of their
own as Bion freely engaged unconscious emergences. Space only per-
mits a few samples. Here is ‘Du’, the germ of an idea, trying to escape
Roland’s mind.

ROL AND: You’re an ugly-looking devil. Who are you? …

DU: I am the future of the Past: the shape of the thing-to-come … Do
I grin like a ghost? How do you like these teeth? All my own. I
fasten myself to you psyche–psycho-lodgement, we call it. Most
amusing …
ROL AND: I thought it wasn’t a dream. Is it a psycho-drama? No?
DU: No; Psycho-sthan itself. Poor Bunyen – you remember him of
course. He thought it was Vanity-Fair, but we are imaginery vain
things. What the ‘people’ do, you know. They are what you will
call God some day …
ROL AND: Poor devil
DU: I told you not to use that word. Do you want you want your teeth
smashed in? Or shall I have them filed away?
ROL AND: Filed away, filed away death, or is sad sigh press let me be
laide.
DU: Wider yet; and wider let your jaws be set. You can have them set
in a grin like mine. They’re fashionable in psychosis, but some
wear them that way in psycho-sthan too. As you descend the steep
with our orphean Liar you can sing of chaos and eternal night …
That’s hard and rare, you know, without a heavenly Muse to go
ting-a-ling.
ROL AND: … Oh death where is Thy sting-a-ling.
(Ibid., pp. 274–275)

In The Past Presented, Robin, P.A. and company have just finished a
discussion about sex, beauty and religion:

ROBIN: You are going round in circles.

P. A: ‘Circles’ are a poor visual image.
ROBIN: Perhaps I should have said you are going round in a helix—
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 187

ROL AND: And should have kept your mouth shut

ROSEMARY: Roland, I told you you could go.
P. A: You might as well talk to D.N.A.
ROBIN: What’s that?
P. A: Doubt, Nature, Art.
ROSEMARY: Art, Nature, Decay. You’ve got the order wrong.
ROL AND: I had to use my arts to prosper the crabapple before it be-
came an apple fit to eat; fit to be turned into natural manure.
(Ibid., pp. 359–360)

Aside from the above samples obliquely referring to aspects of

primary process thinking and psychic processes, the effect on
the reader is confronting and disrupts attempts to make sense of
the narrative using memory, desire or understanding, at least in the
conventional sense. One has to take it for what it is and suspend
rational sense-making. Although this is most evident in The Dream,
it occurs throughout all three books as the dialogue moves between
moments of confusion and clarity. While the three volumes appear
to progress in terms of maturity and differentiation they all lack a
coherent narrative structure that progresses towards a conclusion
or resolution.
Bion’s use of nonsense, incoherence and obscurity appears to quite
incisively force a choice: reject the trilogy as pure nonsense or, ‘for
those willing to make the mental effort’ (MF, p. ix), tolerate the agony
of doubt, confusion, obscurity, until ‘something’, some personal
meaning, starts to erupt or evolve. It is a choice between oblivion (or
obliviousness) and wisdom. Put another way, the text appears to be
as alive or dead to the reader as he or she wants it to be. Its ‘nonsense
value’ and complexity resist saturation and induce a Rorschach-like
effect where one has to allow for the emergence of their own point
of view. In this way, a second or third reading often turns up some-
thing quite different. A different train of thought or point of view is
discovered.
This dilemma appears to constantly challenge the reader as he or
she engages in an attempt to ‘make sense’ or ‘acquire knowledge’ but
is regularly frustrated by uncertainty and the circular nature of the
dialogue. It disrupts the ‘narrative desire’ of the reader, the comfort
in following a narrative that makes immediate sequential sense with
188 Duncan Cartwright

a beginning, middle and end and a clearly observable intention. Bion

emphasises the fact that language, grammar and the need for clear
coherent narratives are modelled on the senses. In the physical world
objects appear to the senses in spatial terms and move through time
in logical fashion. The object can only be present in one place at a
time, and our observations of its appearance and disappearance have
a clear beginning, middle and end. The way we read, write and listen
is serialised in a similar way, borrowed from the same preconceptions.
Memoir unapologetically lacks such comforts and requires the
reader to manage and contain experiences of irritation, frustration
and mental oblivion, while wading through ‘nonsense’. The characters
themselves express similar concerns in their constant references to the
boring, soporific effects of conversation, expressions of intolerance
towards nonsense and the apparent pointlessness of much of the dia-
logue. ‘So we are back to square one?’ (Ibid., p. 215), Alice asks at the
end of The Dream.
The struggle between sense-making and nonsense represents a
central interminable struggle between our desire for linear, logical
thinking and articulate language, on the one hand, and embodied,
‘emmature’ (ibid., p. 429) psychic experiences that attempt to express
emotional truths, on the other. Articulate speech and the ‘Laws of
logic’ are poorly suited to exploring and expanding psychic real-
ity. However, their appeal lies in the security and pleasure found in
­sensuous and ‘sensible’ experience in a way that ‘gives immediacy and
reality to something which might otherwise be hard to understand’
(ibid., p. 172). It satisfies the ‘greedy swallower of mental bait’ (ibid.,
p. 269). The cost is the narrowing of perception that deadens the vital-
ity of emotional and psychic experience.

P. A: The so-called laws of logic were a prescription for Chaos. They left
no living space at all for vitality. Even today it would be still-born
if it had not found refuge in what Alice would call craziness or—
(Ibid., p. 446)

Although we cannot escape language and thinking derived from the

sensory domain, attention to apparent ‘nonsense’ may help keep lan-
guage in good repair and buffer against the immediate saturation of
meaning that leads to dead, mindless states. Therefore, in addition to
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 189

‘disrupting the reader’ and forcing a choice, the use of nonsense also
constitutes a rebellion against certainties, facts and rational think-
ing. Nonsense and ‘craziness’ are attempts aimed at disrupting the
‘cheerfulness’ and apparent sanity that facts and articulate speech
profess. In the closing passage of the trilogy, Bion shares some pas-
sionate parting reflections along these lines. In his characteristically
obscure style, he writes:

All my life I have been imprisoned, frustrated, dogged by

common-­sense, reason, memories, desires and–the greatest bug-
bear of them all–understanding and being understood. This is an
attempt to express my rebellion, to say ‘Good-bye’ to all that. It
is my wish, I now realize doomed to failure, to write a book un-
spoiled by any tincture of common-sense, reason, etc. (see above).
So although I would write, ‘Abandon Hope all ye who expect
to find any facts–scientific, aesthetic or religious–in this book’,
I cannot claim I have succeeded. All these will, I fear, be seen to
have left their traces, vestiges, ghosts hidden within these words;
even sanity, like ‘cheerfulness’, will creep in. However successful
my attempt, there would always be the risk that the book ‘became’
acceptable, respectable, honoured and unread. ‘Why write then?’
you may ask. To prevent someone who KNOWS from filling the
empty space–but I fear I am being ‘reasonable’, that great Ape.
Wishing you all a Happy Lunacy and a Relativistic Fission …
(Ibid., p. 578)

The sense of feeling imprisoned by reason and understanding and

the idea of preventing ‘someone who KNOWS from filling the empty
space’ are constantly present throughout Memoir.

Nonsense, authority and authorship

P. A: … We want someone or something authoritative to tell us we out-
shine these beauties of the night.
(Ibid., p. 255)

MYSELF: … Here I have just written ‘myself’ as if I wanted to give it a

status different from me. I could call ‘Bion’ a second-class citizen
compared to ‘Myself’. I indicate without definition that the opinions
190 Duncan Cartwright

expressed by me, even if fiction, are worthy of being treated with

respect. Those opinions are of superior status to opinions claimed
as mine and spoken as if I claimed ‘ownership’ over them.
(Ibid., p. 95)

As well as disrupting the ‘narrative desire’ of the reader, nonsense

appears to call into question the authority of authorship in a number
of ways. Aside from this simply being related to the idea that we have
limited control over unconscious life, the selfless quality of attempting
to express ‘thoughts without a thinker’ challenges ideas of ownership
and authority over ideas. From this point of view, emotional truths
have to emerge, or erupt, and cannot be ‘authored’.
‘P.A.’, ‘Bion’, ‘Myself’, ‘Rosemary’, ‘Priest’, ‘Man’ and many others,
often engage in imaginative speculations that diverge and converge in
unexpected ways. Ideas are passed through different registers of experi-
ence and viewed from different points of view, making definitive conclu-
sions or answers difficult to find. The circular and often obscure nature
of the dialogue also appears to act against certainty and ownership. As
often expressed by Bion in later publications, the ownership of ideas,
‘the answer’, kills curiosity and the emergence of universal truths or un-
derlying constant conjunctions that are in search of a thinker. Without
an openness to speculative reasoning we descend into a ‘sane’ shared
hallucinosis where everything is ‘known’ but nothing is explored: ‘The
“Yes I know” surface, the lifeless society, is all that is left’ (ibid., p. 501).
Appeal to the ‘omnipotent knower’ appears in many guises in
Memoir as an antidote to thinking about our own insignificance in an
unknowable universe. Most notably, it surfaces in debates about the
certainty of God’s real existence, God as author, and a correspond-
ing intolerance for mental intercourse and the confusion caused by
container-contained.

MAN: God threw these presumptuous objects, ♀♂, out of eden. The
Omnipotent opposes the extensions of the human ability to have
intercourse.
(Ibid., p. 160)

Similarly, the proliferation of ‘authoritative’ jargon in psychoanalysis

is often attacked for its deadening effects on the field.
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 191

ROSEMARY: Shut up! Who was that? Respectable, shoddy, worn-out

psycho-analytic, mental ‘reach-me-down’ mental clichés for the
dead-from-the-neck-up! Go to sleep I say!
(Ibid., p. 66)

Wars over the ownership of ideas, the certainty of science, cause-­

effect reasoning, are other representations of attempts to circumvent
­inevitable confusions and psychic turmoil. The desire for certainty
leads to a blind following of authority, ‘… to the master’s point-
ing hand rather than at the object the hand is trying to point out’
(ibid., p. 266). The best we can do to counter the certainty of the au-
thor is to be receptive to the infinite and ephemeral qualities of psy-
chic reality and the existence of multiple perspectives.
Bion’s audacious appeal or desire not to be understood brings this
to life as part of the experience of reading Memoir. I hear it as a deep,
resounding appeal: ‘Don’t understand me, follow my fictions and non-
sense’. It remains a living appeal to allow the reader to engage in a pro-
cess of ‘becoming’ rather than deadening the process by locating the idea
in the author. Once we are in search of what Bion actually means (‘me’),
we lose sight of his fleeting, always incomplete, attempts to give expres-
sion to ‘thoughts without a thinker’. The former relates to assumptions
that rely on a unified, common sense view of the subject where articu-
late speech and instrumental language assume authority and ownership
over ideas. As Bion is at pains to point out, these are assumptions bor-
rowed from the senses and the cause-effect nature of logic.

‘Something more’ and truth

MYSELF: What next! Someone will say that something, a configuration
or pattern, might be covered and revealed by the cover. (Bion,
1991, p. 119)
P. A: The ‘real psychoanalysis’ to which we aspire is at best only
a reaching out towards that ‘real psychoanalysis’. But it is real
enough to make people aware that there is ‘something’ beyond the
feeble efforts of psycho-analyst and analysand.
(Ibid., p. 510)

Moments of clarity in dialogues among ‘Bion’, ‘Myself’ and ‘P.A.’

suggest links between Truth, confusion and nonsense. In response
192 Duncan Cartwright

to ‘Bion’, ‘Myself’ suggests that the mental domain ‘is the source of
endless confusion and difficulty and in which unending confusion
is an essential, not accidental, feature, I do not suppose I shall ever
know escape …’ (ibid., p. 189). Although the possibility of penetrating
‘true’ experiences lies beyond the limits of articulate language, paying
attention to nonsense is essential because it better reflects the nature
of psychic reality and the manner in which ‘true’ personal experi-
ences emerge from the ‘formless infinite’.

ROBIN: Really – do you blame us if we don’t know what you are talk-
ing about?
P. A: No, I don’t. I am not surprised at your protest; in extenuation I
found that if I say what I mean it is not English; if I write English
it does not say what I mean.
(Ibid., p. 229)

A similar problem is posed by ‘Bion’: the moment one discusses some-

thing in more definitive, direct ways, we lose a more ‘truthful’, expan-
sive level of experience that is obscured and narrowed by conventional
language and its appeal to the senses.

BION: I want to discuss man, but as soon as I say that, I realize the
word ‘man’ has a definite, perhaps misleadingly and frustratingly
definite, meaning. I can say I want to discuss ‘wilfred dr bion’.
That would have a definite meaning to some, but it is not true; I
don’t want to exclude whatever is ‘represented’, signified, denoted
by those letters, ‘rbidefilnorw’, arranged according to certain con-
ventions, to form a visual pattern on paper. The problem is ob-
strusive, but not informatively displayed.
(Ibid., p. 87)

BION: O is by definition indestructible and not subject to, circumscribed

by, beginnings and ends, rules, laws of nature or any construct of
the human mind. Melanie Klein could not reconcile herself to the
fact that whenever she had made herself understood, that fact ren-
dered what she understood no longer ‘alive’.
(Ibid., p. 88)

As the above examples suggest, apparent clarity, understanding,

and pursuit of the ‘right’ answer violates the curiosity of an ‘alive’
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 193

unsaturated mind. It removes the personally felt but ineffable quali-

ties of emotional experience that exists in constant flux. This line of
thinking challenges usual associations among truth, consciousness,
reasonableness and vitality. In Bion’s characteristic style, the reversed
perspective requires attention: conscious states largely appeal to a
saturated ‘groupish’ mentality that is mindlessly adaptive and dead.
Conversely, vitality and truth are to be found in obscure reasoning,
waking dream-thoughts and nonsense.
For this, perspective nonsense thoughts, speculative imaginings
and intuitions appear to represent our best efforts at penetrating
experiences closer to O and expanding psychic reality. Although O
remains ‘indestructible’, unknown to the human mind and not in
compliance with the laws of nature, time, or logical thought, the best
we can do is represent its essence in a very personalized way.

ALICE: Even Man thinks that by murder … men would reach the
throne of Heaven. Victory! With a capital V.
P. A: Wee, capital wee-wee.
Roland: Ghastly pun – even for you.
P. A: What is a ghastly pun for me may be the first step in a new
language.
(Ibid., p. 465)

Whether nonsense becomes ‘the first step in a new language’ depends on

whether it can be put to good use. The production of nonsense, when ex-
pressed with destructive intent, can certainly have the effect of obscuring
mental growth. But it may also be motivated by an expression of truth
and the conveyer of ‘thoughts without a thinker’. As ‘Myself’ puts it,
Is ‘Sordello’ incomprehensible on purpose to make it difficult, or
is it Browning’s attempt to express what he had to say in the shortest
and most comprehensible terms? (ibid., p. 121)
Later, this line of thought is taken further with the idea that the
use of obscurity may hold a deliberate intension that aims to evoke
unconscious mental activity that cannot find representation in ‘sense’:

BION: … people say they don’t know what you are talking about and
that you are being deliberately obscure.
MYSELF: They are flattering me. I am suggesting as aim, an ambi-
tion, which if I could achieve, would enable me to be deliberately
194 Duncan Cartwright

obscure and precisely obscure; in which I could use certain words

which could activate precisely and instantaneously, in the mind of
the listener, a thought or train of thought that came between him
and the thoughts and ideas already accessible and available to him.
ROSEMARY: Oh, my God!
(Ibid., p. 191)

Being ‘precisely obscure’ reminds me of Ogden’s (2007) reflections on

some of Bion’s clinical seminars. He suggests that Bion’s style as a
supervisor and analyst aimed to ‘speak past’ (p. 1191) the presenter
or patient so as to speak more directly to the unconscious. It aims to
stimulate more vital, creative evocations, the ‘something more’ that
cannot be expressed in a conventional form. There are many exam-
ples of how this is effected in the trilogy. Perhaps the most apparent
occurs through the deliberate effect of confusion and disorientation
on the reader as it connects with his or her own ‘alive’ internal tur-
bulence. If Bion were to narrate the trilogy in more conventional
terms, the effect would be very different. Characters in the trilogy
also often ‘speak past’ each other in search of the true essence of their
experience.
Does this process bear any resemblance to the ‘real’ psychoanalytic
session? Do we need nonsense and obscurity as a means to get closer
to emotional truths? Certainly, non-rational emergences are central
to all psychoanalytic approaches. Although I imagine few would pro-
fess to being ‘deliberately obscure’ in their approach, I think the re-
ality of the session, as it turns up ‘unknowable’ disturbances, leads
to necessary or inevitable obscurity as one tries his or her best to give
voice to ineffable movements in the analytic field.
Reading Memoir often leaves me re-sensitised to the noise of the
session, confusions, nonsense thoughts and verbalizations, chatter,
gestures, reveries that seem to have little connection to the material,
that can too quickly be dismissed, corrected, or formulated in some
‘understandable’ manner. I am reminded of keeping my ear in con-
stant and good repair. I am also sensitised to the constant effort and
discipline required to adopt a stance of ‘negative capability’ (Bion,
1970). The thought occurs to me that although not ‘real’ psychoanal-
ysis, Memoir would make a formidable training manual for exercising
one’s capacity for ‘negative capability’.
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 195

Sense, nonsense to the non-sensuous

I cannot promise communication of pure non-sense without the
contamination of sense.
(MF, p. 429)
The experience of physical, sensuous space was not abandoned. It
was clung to with such tenacity that it prevented the loss of secu-
rity involved if pictorial sense where lost.
(Ibid., p. 171)

There is constant chatter about how language, conscious thought,

logical reasoning, even fictions, are modelled on the senses. There is
little escape in terms of communicating or envisioning non-sensuous
psychic reality and transformations derived from contact with O:
‘… all to which the term “phenomena” applies are by definition part
of the domain of the senses’ (ibid., p. 203).
Problems occur when the world derived from the senses is confused
with psychic reality and taken to be the ‘thing-in-itself’. This halts the
evolution of intuition and the non-sensuous qualities of mind. For
instance, when the existence of God is taken to be a fact, intuitions
about the existence of psychic forces that ‘require’ a god are ignored.
Similarly, when psychoanalytic theories are confused with the ‘thing-
in-itself’ other perspectives or vertices are ignored. The same confu-
sion is responsible for debasing language and the words we use. For
example, ‘love’ is attributed to the sensory qualities of the object in-
stead of attending to the evolving psychic turmoil and qualities of
‘loving’.
The imposition of the sensory domain on psychic qualities allows for
simple, plausible, theories of causation to be settled for. That time and
space no longer exist in the same way in the ‘formless infinite’ need not
be confronted and one’s truth remains unobserved. Solutions to this
problem, posed mainly by P.A., involve attempts to ‘augment the bound-
aries of perception’ (ibid., p. 244). There are suggestions about using
‘infra’ and ‘ultra’-sensory approaches and intuition for this purpose. As
mentioned earlier, ‘binocular vision’ also enables the observation of dis-
tinct perspectives or vertices that, in turn, generate broader powers of
perception and thought formation. This applies to maintaining multiple
196 Duncan Cartwright

perspectives on sensuous and non-sensuous reality so as to facilitate a

reflective stance that keeps language in good repair.
If this separation can be maintained the appeal of the senses might
function to hold interest long enough for meaning to evolve.

ROBIN: … The beauty of Paradise Lost made the truth last long
enough for someone to receive the message.
P. A: Don’t you agree that the longevity with which those formulation
were endowed was a consequence of beauty? Then work had to be
done to recognise the truth.
(Ibid., p. 359)

Listening to the apparent nonsense inherent in talk and language,

non-sequiturs, verbal tics, the odd use of words, incomprehensible
references, parapraxes, may also suggest evocative meanings or pat-
terns beyond the senses. ‘Myself’ sketches out a wonderfully imagina-
tive depiction of this process as he tries to explain this to ‘Bion’ who
has fallen back on existing conventions:
Imagine a piece of sculpture which is easier to comprehend if the
structure in intended to act as a trap for light. The meaning revealed
by the pattern formed by the light - not by the structure … if I could
learn how to talk to you in such a way that my words ‘trapped’ the
meaning which they neither do nor could express … which is an ex-
tension of conversation into non-conversation (ibid., pp. 189–190).
Further, the work of ‘nonsense’ might be thought to assist in sepa-
rating the over-reasoned ‘understandable’ use of language from truth
and its non-sensuous origins. Although modelled on the senses, the
obscure use of the fundamentals of language and the ‘confusions’ of
dream states may be thought of as generating resistance to the obliv-
ious consumption of dead ‘facts’.

P. A: The night, the dream, is a ‘roughness’ between the smooth pol-

ished consciousness of daylight; in that ‘roughness’ an idea might
lodge. Even in the flat polished surface there can be a delusion,
or an hallucination, or some other flaw in which an idea might
lodge and flourish before it can be stamped out or ‘cured’ … The
drunkard, like the dreamer, is less likely to be an efficient liar; he
is unlikely to smooth the ‘rough place’. But his inefficiency can be
turned to good account.
(Ibid., p. 268–269)
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 197

Attending to nonsense or ‘roughness’ requires patience and a differ-

ent perspective that loosens our grip on a need for logical sensuous
references. It induces confusional states and emotional turmoil and
gets one closer to the non-sensuous ‘truth’ of psychic reality. Put an-
other way, nonsense is transformed into non-sense.

P. A: They are having an occulo-gyric crisis in unison …

MAN: That is nonsense
P. A: No, it is Non Sense
MAN: It sounds mad to me
P. A: You have forgotten all changed here, and what was nonsense
became Non Sense. The Laws of Nature are now the Laws of
Un-Reason. This is the post Big Bang Era …
MORIARTY: … there is not Time as you used to know it. I never set
much store by it – or any figments of Reality.
(Ibid., pp. 418–419)

Drawing on Bion’s (1962a) theory of thinking and the dramatized

transition suggested above, nonsense qualities may be thought of as
creating or suggesting a negative realization. Because nonsense has
a more tenuous connection to an external object, it is a reminder of
objects that are not immediate, present and satisfying (a reminder of
‘no-breast’). Perhaps that is why one hears one’s thoughts so loudly
when reading Memoir. In this absence, a thought is produced. To
quote Bion: ‘If there is no “thing”, is “no thing” a thought and is it by
virtue of the fact that there is “no thing” that one recognises that “it”
must be thought?’ (1962a, p. 35)
The absence of the satisfying object is felt as the presence of some-
thing unpleasant and requires containment if it is to lead to produc-
tive psychic growth. In this way, nonsense may be seen to precipitate
non-sense. Even the very concept of ‘mind’ in the trilogy is based on
negative realizations mediated by ‘nonsense’.

MYSELF: Hitherto, the term ‘mind’ has proved serviceable. I propose

to use it as a meaningless term, useful for talking or writing about
what I don’t know – to mark the ‘place where’ a meaning might be.
(MF., p. 141)

Finally, fictionalisation offers another possibility that escapes psy-

choanalytic jargon, over-reasoned ideas and mystification. Although
198 Duncan Cartwright

imaginative depictions and characters borrow from the senses, they

are freed to generate nonsensical possibilities that paradoxically may
bring us closer to truth.

P. A: His Satanic Jargonieur took offence; on some pretence that

psycho-­analytic jargon was being eroded by eruptions of clarity.
I was compelled to seek refuge in fiction. Disguised as fiction, the
truth occasionally slipped through.
(Ibid., p. 302)

The paradox that fictional characters are more real, alive and vital to
our existence than real people is a dominant theme in Memoir. In the
prologue to The Dream, Bion suggests this to be one of his intentions
in putting together a work of fiction:

Falstaff: a known artefact, is more ‘real’ in Shakespeare’s verbal for-

mulation than countless millions of people who are dim, invisible,
lifeless, unreal, whose births and deaths – alas, even marriages –
we are called upon to believe in, though certification of their ex-
istence is vouched for by the said official certification.
(Ibid., pp. 4–5)

‘Sherlock’, ‘Watson’ and ‘Mycroft’, as fictional characters, often boast

about their existence beyond human mortality. The vitality and lon-
gevity of good stories, from Sherlock Holmes to The Bible, is testa-
ment to the existence of invariants in human experience that seek
expression in disguised form. It seems to me that their ‘disguise’ serves
two functions from Bion’s point of view. It allows for the articulation
of ‘personal truths’ in an over-reasoned and rational world. Second,
fictions help shield the individual from unbearable truths and deliver
more containable representations of O. In this way, fictions are like a
transitional delivery system that renders psychic objects amenable for
processing and digestion.

MYSELF: I should have thought that during the course of your sojourn
in my mind–if that’s where it and you have been–you would have
become transformed from a relatively minor, fictitious character
into a somewhat major part of your more useful characteristics.
If there were such a thing as a mental digestive system, I could
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 199

say that the mental diet of entertaining fictitious characters has

contributed greatly to my mental health.
(Ibid., p. 124)

Fictions and myths delineate an area for ‘something’ to evolve, just

as sense in the external world signals the presence of something that
can be seen (Levine, 2015b). They act like living markers or reference
points that help break up the dominance of the senses. This allows for
the linking of previously disparate occurrences, in turn, giving rise to
new emotional experiences. As Vermote (2015) puts it, it ‘leads to the
witnessing of a pattern in the life of the patient, which is in constant
movement’ (p. 347). Simply observing this, seeing it, is itself a new
emotional experience less mired in the sensory domain.

No time for nonsense

‘Thoughts without a thinker’ have a timeless quality that makes past
and future indistinguishable. They emerge from invariances or pow-
erful ‘vogue’ states (Bion, 1991a) that are part of the human condi-
tion. Although fashions in religion, culture, philosophy come and
go the same human dilemmas and turbulences, irreconcilable differ-
ences between psychic and somatic states, are observable in different
transformations.
One of my more persistent dream-thoughts evoked by reading and
re-reading Memoir was ‘no time for nonsense’. It seemed to represent
an identification with many of the characters who express intoler-
ances and irritation with having to endure long periods of confusion
and nonsense. But it also appeared linked to thoughts about the rele-
vance of the trilogy today. ‘No time for nonsense’ felt like a comment
emerging from a field of experience embedded in today’s ‘cultural
fashion’: our immersion in cyber technologies.
Does the world of high-speed Internet, social networks and cell
phones mediate our experience in ways reminiscent of some of the
‘vogue’ struggles evident in the trilogy? The Internet has made access
to information and knowledge infinitely better and more available to
all. The immediacy of access to others through social networks ap-
pears to create greater opportunity for connection. But how does it
impact on our emotional lives and what does it say about deeper mo-
tivations from a psychoanalytic point of view? What does the ‘manic
200 Duncan Cartwright

googler’, in search of immediate bullet-point facts, tell us about cur-

rent transformations of ‘memoirs of the future’? What of the seemly
endless desire to mediate experiences through video, photos and mes-
saging? Is this a version of Bion’s ‘greedy swallower of mental bait’
(MF, p. 269) and fantasies related to the ownership of knowledge?
The seduction of immediacy and the rapid delivery of answers and
facts seems to update Memoir’s account of ways to avoid the noise,
confusion and ‘roughness’ of psychic reality. It flouts the necessity
of dwelling in deeply personal, messy, nonsensical reveries, and the
importance of learning to bear inevitable frustrations. Is this the lat-
est rejection of the idea that nonsense, doubt and uncertainty are re-
quired to keep the mental digestive system in a state of good repair?
The overwhelming desire for facts, ‘connection’, self-satisfied cer-
tainties, sensory stimulation, even interruption, perhaps points to a
version of Bion’s ‘cheerful’ sane society that avoids turbulence and
the dream states required for creative, genuine thinking. Evoking the
essence of the trilogy, ‘the web’ might be seen as the latest vessel in
which we can learn how to be ‘just like’ a human being as a substitute
for ‘becoming’ one. It exposes an ‘articulate’ world and the desire for
omnipotent answers that kills curiosity and real intimacy.
Visual representations of the Internet easily conjure up an image of
a world connected, networks of multiple spaces and dimensions, func-
tions and content accessible at different levels. Ironically, it seems to
reflect an image or model that is remarkably similar to a psychic real-
ity in multi-dimensional form. Is it too far-fetched to say it is like an
enticing copy of psychic reality without the messiness of the human
factor? This is reinforced by the idea that connection to cyberspace
or computers supports the externalisation of mental functions like
memory and thinking.
There is mention of ‘the machine’ in Memoir, with reference to the
ultimate need for human interpretation. Based on the above specu-
lations, however, the latest transformation attempts to eliminate the
‘experiencing’ interpreter altogether through seductive mimicry. It is
best expressed as the creation of a ‘cut and paste’ reality, a reality that
looks ‘just like’ our abilities to think minus the nonsense and time it
takes for real human connection. It might be thought of as another
attempt to bring to ground psychic and emotional life by treating it
as concrete fact. Although this holds great promise as a substitute
 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future 201

for having to endure the inevitable frustrations that make genuine

thinking possible, it never delivers and further exacerbates isolation,
‘sensory greed’, and a sense of feeling ‘alone together’ (Turkle, 2012).
This appears no different from the ‘many ‘glittering’ prizes offered
for the greedy soul’ (MF, p. 269). Following Bion, if we are to turn
this to good use we cannot lose sight of the time it takes for the inter-
preter, the thinker, the perspective taker, to tolerate nonsense until
awareness is expanded.
Nonsense requires a receptive state, relatively free of preconcep-
tions and open to confusional states (PS) that have no clear beginning
or end. From this point of view, we have no choice, as ‘Bion’ suggests,
but to ‘begin in the middle’ (Bion, 1991, p. 197), immersed in the un-
known, waiting for something to evolve. When all ‘reasonable theo-
ries’, science, religion, music, fail us,

Sooner or later we reach a point where there is nothing to be done

except – if there is any exception – to wait. The ‘impasse’ is itself
a word which, in the context of this writing, is known to denote
a feeling.
(MF, p. 61)
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Index

Abella, Adela 7 authority: of authorship 190;

absolute truth 75, 122, 155 nonsense and 189–91
aesthetic enquiry 92–96 authorship and nonsense 189–91
aesthetics of literature 4, 53, 56–57 autistic-contiguous position
‘a flower of speech’ 147 (AC) 112
‘The Aleph’ 30
Alice character 12, 21, 22, 182, 183 Bahktin, M. M. 24–26
allegory 141–2 Barnes, J. 28
All My Sins Remembered (Bion) 162 Barth, J. 30
alpha function 45–47, 107 Barthelme, D. 34
ambiguity 28, 45, 165; quotient of Barthes, R. 20
43 Baruzzi, Anna 36
Améry, Jean 6, 147, 161 battle of Hastings 88–90
animistic thinking 128 Baudrilliard, J. 33
Anzieu, Didier 94 Bayeux Tapestry 89
apes’ gestural language 49–50 Beckett, Samuel 70, 81, 93
Appelfeld, Aron 166 becoming 7, 47, 154, 180, 191, 200
Ariadne’s thread 70, 77, 122 Belting, Hans 170, 173
art, contemporary 7, 169–78 Bergstein, Avner 5
articulate communication 21, 23, Berkeley, George 122
188–9, 191–2 beta elements 46, 58, 153
articulate language 11, 23, 26, 188 Beyond the Pleasure Principle
artistic communication 21 (Freud) 165
at-one-ment 165 binocular vision 181, 195
Attention and Interpretation (Bion) Bion, Francesca 123, 162
42, 45 Bion, Parthenope 162
Auden, W. H. 48 Bion, Wilfred: aesthetic function
‘The Authentic’ (Schulz) 34 of thinking 55–57; containment
authenticity of imagined theory 164; defining hypotheses
characters 11 86–87; the dream 11–21; encounters
216 Index

with Carl Jung 65–66; feeling Cartwright, Duncan 7, 8

of being imprisoned 63–64; on Cattelan, Maurizio 84
God 6, 32–33, 74–75, 190; group Celsus 131
thinking and dynamics 87–88; how characters 6, 11–13, 20, 24–30,
to read his works 45; hyperbolic 38–41, 82–83, 107–10, 166, 182–5,
use of quotations 47; interest in 188, 198–9; created for what
1; on Jewish mysticism 129–30; reason 16–17
later works of 42–45; mental chimpanzees and their gestural
transformation 173–4; naïf-view language 49–50
174, 176; negative in psychoanalytic Civitarese, Giuseppe 127, 131, 148,
thinking 125–9; parallel theme as 149
Samuel Beckett 93–94; personal clinical research and symbiosis
comparison to Mikhail Bahktin between literary practice 92–93
24; personal growth 173–4; Coetzee, J. M. 4, 51–56, 60
postmodern 26–33; pro-evocative communication: articulate 21,
attitude 175; psychoanalytical wars 23, 188–9, 191–2; of artists 21;
86; quest for truth 43–44; reading as urge to and difficulty doing
part of mental diet 40–41; reading 122–5
of himself 61–62; representing concepts and ontological distance
fragments of his identity 11–12, between objects 5
183; revived interest in 33–34; confusion and links between truth
similarity with contemporary art and nonsense 191–2
173–5; sympathetic imagination consciousness 19, 25, 69; multi-
extending inward 61–62; thinking languaged 24
as product of problem posed by constraints of reason, relief from
thoughts 51–52, 54; vertices concept 152–3
28; war experiences of 20, 162–3 containment theory 25, 164
Bion’s Dream (Harris Williams) 36 contemporary art 7; boundless
Bion’s razor 96–98 limits of 171–2; intellectual
Black Book (Jung) 67 dimension of 172–3; paradigm
body: mind and 69–70, 160–1, 165, shift in 169–73; perspective of
185; theorization of the experience A Memoir of the Future 168–78;
and 161–2 similarity with Bion’s thinking
Boffito, Sara 3 173–5
Boltanski, Christian 7 Conversations at the Frontier of
Borges, J. L. 12, 27, 30–31 Dreaming (Ogden) 39
Botella, C. 127 Corrao, Francesco 36, 69
Botella, S. 127 Cortazar, Julio 27
Broadfoot, K. 149 Costello, Elizabeth 51
Buber, Martin 120, 129, 135 Couser, G. Thomas 3, 38
crust notion 26
Cage, John 7, 173–5, 177 curiosity 81; being killed 190; and
Captain Bion character 15, 28, 111, being right 192–3
153, 162–3, 166, 183 cyberspace 8
 Index 217

Danto, Arthur C. 70, 170, 173 environment exerting pressure to

The Dawn of Oblivion (Bion) 22, 87, think 51–52
91, 94, 113, 122 epiphany 154
defamiliarization of the familiar 151 estrangement 151
defences against knowledge 82–84 ethics of thinking 54–55
delusions 153 Evidence (Bion) 139
depersonalising power of habit 175 experiences 37, 45–46, 62, 96–99,
Depressive Position character 14, 104–7, 115–16, 129–38, 142–4,
183–4 158–60; of the holy 76; of
desire not to be understood 191 thinking 53–55, 58; transitioning
Diary (Bion) 123, 163–4 to speech 120–4
disorienting effect of postmodern external reality 13, 82, 128–9,
fiction 28–29 143, 149
Divine Comedy (Dante) 70
dogma as opposed to mysticism 5, fascinosum 4
132–5 Ferro, Antonino 5, 11, 108
Domesday Book 89 fictionalisation 197–8
doubt in psychoanalysis 90–96 fiction and its relation to the real 184
The Dream (Bion) 11–21, 85, 181–2 fictitious characters 20
dream autobiography 37 figurative language 6
dreaming analysis 103–4, 107–10, Foresti, Giovanni 5
114–15 formal turn in modern art 171
dreaming ensemble 77–78 Foster, Jodie 22
dreams 182; Freud’s theory of 165; Fowles, J. 27
multi-dimensionality of 184–5; as The French Lieutenant’s Woman
a narrative activity 2; states 196 (Fowles) 27
‘The Dream Work’ (Freud) 27 Freud, Sigmund 2, 17, 27, 66, 68,
Duchamp, Marcel 7, 168, 176, 177 125, 126, 160; on punning 156–8;
theory of dreams 165
Eckhart, Meister 74
Eco, Umberto 87, 99 Given: 1. Waterfall 2. The
Eliade, Mircea 76 illuminating gas (Duchamp)
Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee) 4, 51, 168–9
52, 55–56 gnosticism 75
elucidation and stupefaction 60 God 195; avoiding union with
emotional experience 140–4 132; belief of 74–75, 195; as
emotional truth 16, 129–30 omnipotent knower 190; personal
emotions into images 67 relationship to 31–32; as symbolic
empiricism 5, 86 representation as ultimate reality
‘empty circle’ 150 129–30
England: being dominated by the Godhead 74–75, 120
Normans 88–90; chronicled Godwinson, Harold 89
by prototypical individuals 89; Green, A. 126
identity derived from a defeat 89 Grenzbegriff 92
218 Index

Grotstein, J. S. 37, 74, 76, 108, 109, Jung, Carl 4, 70; encounters with
154, 177, 184 Wilfred Bion 65–66; religious
group as an individual 89 perspective of 75; view on
group thinking and dynamics 87–88 psychosis 77; work on the
unconscious 66–67, 76–77
hallucination 153
hallucinosis 127–8, 153, 190 Kabbalism 128, 132, 143
Harris Williams, Meg 36, 45, 132 Kallalistic symbol 143
Heinich, Nathalie 170 Kant, Emmanuel 122
Hellner-Eshed, M. 136 Klein, Melanie 42
heteroglossia 24–25 knowledge: defences against 82–84;
Hinshelwood, R. D. 97 instinct 4
historical reality 82 Köhler, Wolfgang 4, 50, 53–57, 63
A History of the World in 10 ½ Kristeva, J. 155
Chapters (Barnes) 28
Hitler, Adolf 84 Lacan, Jacques 149, 150, 152, 154
Holquist, Michael 24 language 18; articulate 11, 23,
holy, experience of 76 26, 188; gestural language of
Hopscotch (Cortazar) 27 chimpanzees as progenitor
Hume, David 122 to human language 49–50;
inadequacy of 122–5; paradox of
identity: personal 91; represented in 16, 121; poetic function of 157;
The Dream 11–12 relationship with reality 26–29;
imaginative activity 158 relationship with truth 5–6, 192;
imagined characters, authenticity vulgar languages of the street 26
of 11 Laub, Dori 150, 164
imprisoned by reason 189 laws of logic 188
individual as a group 87, 90–92 learning from experience 53
ineffable reality 120–45 Learning from Experience (Bion) 45,
infantile trauma, negative of 127 51–52, 54, 98
internal reality 143 Lecter, Hannibal 22
Internet 199–200 liminality 151–2
interpersonal conflict 22 linguistic isomorphism 18
intuition 97, 110, 126, 128, 144, linguistic norms 26
193, 195 literary aesthetics 4, 53, 56–57
inward turn in modern art 171 literary practice and symbiosis
Isaac of Acre 128 between clinical research 92–93
Italian Seminars (Bion) 160 literature: aesthetics of 4, 53, 56–57;
applied to psychoanalysis 40–41;
Jakobson, Roman 6, 156, 157 exerting pressure resulting in
Jameson, F. 33 thinking 52–53; posing problems
Jewish mysticism 129–30, 132 that have solutions 57–58;
Jokes and their Relationship with the problem leading to the more
Unconscious (Freud) 156–7 interesting thought 59–60
 Index 219

The Long Week-End 1897–1919 Part trauma in 150–67; traumatic

of a Life (Bion) 162 truth 147; trilogy structure of 70;
López-Corvo, R. E. 74 as unconscious biography 74; as
Lost Paradise (Milton) 70 Wilfred Bion’s Red Book 4, 68–74
Luria, Isaac 123, 129 memoirs of the numinous 77–78
Lyotard, J.-F. 170 memory: suspension of 128;
traumatic 150–1
Manica, Mauro 4 mental health and literature 40–41
material reality 121, 126–7 The Mentality of Apes (Köhler) 4,
Meltzer, D. 132, 141, 158 50, 63
memoir as a literary genre 2, 3, mental transformation 173–4
37–38 Meotti, Alberto 70
A Memoir of the Future (Bion) 1, Michael, Leonard 27
122, 162; aesthetic function in Milton, John 70
thinking 56–57; alpha function mind: body and 69–70, 160–1,
in 45–47; as an enigma 36–38; as 165, 185; at its limits 153, 156;
an extraordinary Mnemosyne of perceiving psychic quality 17
psychoanalysis 104–7; criteria for Mist (Unamuno) 27, 29
evaluating 3–4; defence against Mnemosyne (Warburg) 104–7
knowledge and 79–84; discerning Mnemosyne Atlas 104–7
purpose 15–16; as a dream Mucci, Clara 6
autobiography 37; experienced multi-dimensionality 184–5
from contemporary art standpoint multi-languaged consciousness 24
168–78; heteroglossia 24–25; multiplicity and psychic reality
leading to a more interesting 181–5
thought 59–60; multi-languaged Murphy (Beckett) 93
consciousness 24; nonsense in Myself character 17, 19–20, 28,
179–201; not posing problems 40–41, 47, 59, 145, 153, 163–6,
that have solutions 58; novel form 183, 189–93
of 23–26; personal relationship mystic 137–8
to God 6, 31–32, 74–75, 190; as mysticism 31–32, 42, 126, 128, 131–
a postmodern novel 26–33; quest 5; Jewish 129–30, 132; as opposed
for truth 43–44; reading 85–99; to religious dogma 132–5
relationship with language and
reality 29; revived interest in Nabokov, Vladimir 28
33–34; search for transcendence naïf-view 174, 176
30–33; similar to a contemporary nameless dread 164
work of art 176–8; similar to the narrative as factor in psychoanalysis
Zohar 136–7, 140; struggle to 107–10
get published 103; taking place negative capability 127–8, 194
in the present 24; thinking as negative in psychoanalytic thinking
outcome of demand from world 125–9
to think 51–52; thinking one’s way negative realization 197
into the being of another 60–64; nominalism 5, 86
220 Index

non-event 126 paranoid schizoid position 183–4

nonsense 193–9, 201; authority and paronomasia 6, 147, 156–7
authorship 189–91; links between The Past Presented (Bion) 123,
truth and confusion 191–2; in 148–9, 186–7
A Memoir of the Future (Bion) patient knowing facts 160–1
179–201; no time for 199–201 permutation 27
non-sensous reality 196–9 personal growth 173
Norman domination of England personal truth 7, 75–76, 174,
88–90 180, 198
noumena 185 Pietrantonio, Violet 5
noumenon 92, 106 Pirandello, L. 11, 81
novel: as a form of writing 23–26; Plato 122
taking place in the present 24 poetic function of language 157
numinous 76–78 postmodernism in fiction 26–33;
search for transcendence 30–33
O (concept of) 3–5, 10, 19, 24, 29, ‘praise of folly’ 156, 159
30, 42, 43, 98, 106, 120, 122, 149, pre-conceptions 5, 103
154–5, 169, 193; numinous 74–78; pressure of problem resulting in
spiritual experience and 32–33 thinking 51–52
object a 149, 150 Priest character 6, 28, 32, 134
objects and ontological distance problem: creating pressure resulting
between concepts 5 in thinking 51–52; leading to the
obscurity 193–4 more interesting thought 59–60;
Ockham’s Razor 87 not having a solution 57–58
Ogden, Benjamin 3 pro-evocative attitude 175
Ogden, T. H. 39, 45, 108, 109, 112, psyche 18, 85
194 psychic objects amenable for
oneiric functions 107–10, 155–6 digestion 198
ontological distance between objects psychic reality 7–8, 11, 126, 129, 181;
and concepts 5 multiplicity and 181–5; similar to
The Original of Laura (Nabokov) 28 the Internet 200
O’Shaughnessy, Edna 42 psychoanalysis: aesthetic 1;
Otto, Rudolf 76 clinical dialogue and theoretical
Ozick, C. 30 discussion 90; literature applied to
40–42; narrative factor in 107–10;
P.A. character 6, 12, 28, 32, 39, need for orthodoxy 83–84;
40–42, 99, 120, 126, 134–5, 183 negative in 125–9; relational turn
‘The Pagan Rabbi’ 30 in 86; somato-, 110–14; theories
paradigm shift in contemporary art 65–66; value of theory 91–92
169–73 psychoanalyst: being an artist 81;
paradox of language 16 having mystical qualities 138–40;
parallelism 18 ignoring characters 83; negative
Paranoid-Schizoid character 13–14, capability of 127–8; suspension of
182–4 memory and desire 128
 Index 221

psychoanalytic epistemology into Scholem, Gershom 129, 132, 136,

aesthetic epistemology 4, 56–64 139, 141
psychology and art 54–56 Schore, Allan 153
psychosis 77 Schulz, Bruno 9, 23, 30–31, 34–35
punning 156–8 The Science of the Art of
Psychoanalysis (Schore) 153
quotations, hyperbolic use of 47 self-representations, multiple 28
sense of truth 121, 129
reading: experience of and thinking senses 110–14, 195–9; experience
53; as part of mental diet 40–42 through 160–1
Real, Lacan’s concept of 154 sensuous reality 126, 196–9
reality 3, 82, 98, 176; after trauma sequential thinking 97
154–6; historical 82; internal Shakespeare, William 81
143; material 126; multiple Sherlock Holmes character 17,
interpretations of 27–28; non- 40, 59
sensuous 196–9; psychic 126, 129; Shoah survivors 161
relationship with language 26–29; The Silence of the Lambs 22
sensuous 126, 196–9; ultimate somato-psychoanalysis 110–14
129–30, 185 The South (Borges) 27
realm of Minus 127 speculative excesses, avoidance of 5
reason 16–17, 152–3, 189, 190 speculative reasoning 190
Red Book (Jung) 4, 67–68; similarity spiritual experience and concept of
to A Memoir of the Future (Bion) O 32–33
70–74 stupefaction and elucidation 60
rediscovery of something ‘supposed to think’ feeling 51–52
familiar 157 symbol 141–2
religion: curbing emotions 84; as sympathetic imagination 60–64
opposed to mysticism 132–5
return of the repressed as acceptable Talamo, Bion 70
156–7 Tavistock 65, 66
reversal of perspective 151, 181, 193 Tavistock Lectures (Bion) 66
Robbe-Grillet, A. 28 temporality and space dissolution 13
Roland character 12, 14, 19, 88–89, Tenerife 49–50
182 Teuber, Eugene 49
Rosemary character 12, 17, 19, theorization of the experience of the
88–89, 182, 183 body 161–2
Rothman, Max 49 theorizing 60
thing-in-itself 195
sacred 76 thinkers without thoughts 92–96
Sandler, P. C. 127, 131 thinking: aesthetics of 55–57;
‘Sanitarium under the Sign of the animistic 128; apes exhibiting
Hourglass’ (Schulz) 30–31 50–51; ethics of 54–55; experience
Satanic Jargonieur 38, 39, 94 of reading and 53; mystical 126;
schizophrenia 77 one’s way into another’s being
222 Index

60–64; other modes of 23; in truth instinct 4

response to environment which Turner, Victor 151–2
thinking is expected 51; sequential
97; wakeful dream 153–4, 160 ultimate reality 129–30, 185
The Third Policeman (O’Brien) ultimate truth 75
26–27 Unamuno, M. 11, 27, 34
thoughts: creation of 22; ever uncertainty 90–92, 155
changing 21; expressing all 79–84; unconscious 3, 4, 5, 10, 30, 33,
posing problem to make one think 76–77, 143; as another language
51–52; reality preceding 120; or immigrant culture 25; attaining
without thinkers 92–96 truth 155; speaking to 194; work
Tom character 88, 152, 182 by Carl Jung 66–67
transcendence, searching for 30–33 unconscious biographies 69–74
transformation 19–20 unknown (Jung) 4, 77
trauma 150–67; truth and 166–7 unverbalizable part of the self 124
traumatic memory 150–1
traumatic reality 6 Vermote, R. 199
traumatic truth 147 vertex of observation 20–21
tremendum 4 vertices concept 28
truth 3, 154, 176, 192–3; absolute visual scene 20
75, 122, 155; being dynamic voice’s role in psychoanalysis 38–40
121; disguised in fiction 159–60; Volosinev 24
distorted representation of 152; The Voyeur (Robbe-Grillet) 28–29
emotional 129–30; enigmatic vulgar languages of the street 26
quality of 148–9; evolving into
material reality 121–2; links Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 70
between confusion and nonsense wakeful dream thinking 6, 153–4, 160
191–2; paradoxical relationship Warburg, Aby 104–7
with language 5–6, 121; personal war experiences 20, 162–3
7, 174, 180, 198; personal and War Memoirs (Bion) 122, 162
subjective 75–76; qualities of Weinstein, Lissa 2
131; quest for 43–44; sense of Winnicott, D. W. 126
121, 129; trauma and 147, 166–7; words treated like body 158
ultimate 75
truth drive 165 Zohar 136–7, 140