Where are We When We are At-One? Discussion of Bion’s O and His Pseudo-Mystical Path

Abstract

Civitarese’s demystification and reinvigoration of the Bion concept of O (this issue) are applauded for its effective re-grounding of the concept in the experience of unison. Yet the paper leaves ambiguous the question of whether the experience of unity in O depends upon how language brings us together; or whether, on the contrary, O reflects events occurring sub-symbolically, unmediated by language and self-reflectivity, through performative engagement in the communal world of psycho-sensorial experience. Eloquent references in the paper to non-linguistic and sensory-based phenomena seem to suggest that O might happen precisely where language does not, which Bion himself seemed to be pointing to in his insistence that O cannot be known, but only experienced. But in then reasserting the primacy of words and the oneiric functions of the mind, does Civitarese undercut the most radical insight of this reimagining of the concept of O, namely that O is the experience of living beyond our individual identities, unarticulated by language? Distinguishing three terms - the linguistic, the emotional, and the sensory – might allow us to consider that O is not a meeting of minds, nor even the consecration of an emotional event, but is a realization of the profound pre-reflective experience of de-subjectification, where one’s existence is affirmed beyond one’s individual identity by entering the world of shared sensory perception.

Notes

¹ Perhaps the difference between presentation and representation (Freud, 1915; Scarfone, 2015) is worth considering here, as a factor of the specific nature of O.

² Winnicott’s thinking would seem germane to this “embodied” way of thinking about O. In particular, Winnicott (1949) emphasizes the idea of “going-on-being”, which rests on the sense of continuous embodiment, or what Winnicott refers to as indwelling in the psyche-soma. Clinically, then, the ongoing experience of embodiment takes precedence over symbolic meaning, interpretation, and representation in words.

³ In Bion’s (1970) theory of lies, knowing in the mind may readily be deployed as negation or refusal of truth (-K). Verbal-symbolic thought always threatens to betray the realization of O. The irreducibility of the layers of psychic reality is formulated in Bions (1965) model of transformations, in which Transformations in O never coincide with transformations in symbolization.

⁴ I am indebted to Michael Levin and Adam Blum for their creative reflections on what it means to be inducted – or woven – into the embodied ethos of human experience.

⁵ Winnicott’s partial theorization of the body as “psyche-soma” is an exception to this.

⁶ Bordieu’s (1977) concept of habitus and body hexis is germane here.

⁷ It is worth comparing Bion’s interest in O with Winnicott’s (1963) exploration of a “True Self” area of psychic life where there is no explicit communication via language. Winnicott describes the existence of a “part of the self and an area of subjective objects or movements or sensations or undescribed phenomena”, a non-verbal dimension where we communicate directly with objects, without the intervention of symbols or language.

⁸ In fact, it is the communal dreaming of sociality and cultural formations that affords the individual the opportunity to be held in unison.

⁹ Here we might note the difference between the O of a negative emotional experience, which will unfold in every analysis as a matter of transference and countertransference; and the O of an alienation from shared experience itself. The latter would constitute a negative O requiring repair through consensorial induction.

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Notes on contributors

Peter Goldberg

Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute, Berkeley.