Introduction

Abstract

In this essay, a panel of papers is introduced organized around a target paper by Guiseppe Civitarese on the aesthetics and pragmatics of clinical psychoanalytic practice. Questions of the metapsychology, the clinical utility and the role of the nonverbal are addressed by two discussants (Steinberg and Goldberg) Links between relational and intersubjective analytic practices and theorizing such practices are linked to the development of the aesthetics, sometimes spoken of as “negative capability”, in the work of Wilfred Bion.

Prepare for a voyage. There will be guidance systems. There will be discussions and explications and expansions. There will be productive differences. But, as Guiseppe Civitarese assures us, right from the first paragraph, we are following a consideration of Wilfred Bion’s (1961, 1970, 1992) most demanding and difficult concepts.

And, as all the participants in this project agree, it is one of the most crucial elements in his metapsychology. I would add to this collective judgment that we notice how much the issues developed by Bion and discussed in these essays touch on increasingly visible, useful, necessary aspects of contemporary clinical practice.

Civitarese, perhaps provocatively, engages directly with the problematizing of late Bion: crazy, mystical, was he ill or aging. Gone off the deep end. Readers of scholarship on Bion will recognize the sharp divide in the scholarly psychoanalytic community in regard to late Bion. There are various perspectives and diagnoses. Late Bion went off the rails. The culprits are variously America, mystical leanings, and character.

Transformations in O, the target essay in this panel, for all the playfulness within the text, is also determined to make the case for the important of O. It will center on the importance of the aesthetic paradigm in Bion, a perspective one can find in Green (1973, 1998) Melzer (Meltzer & Harris, 2008) and many others, but deeply in Bionian theory (Civitarese, 2008, 2015, 2017; Ferro, 2009), Lombardi (2013) perhaps particularly in the Italian groups. Within this perspective, we are asked to take on the challenge of enigma, of the unpredictability and complex figurability in clinical experience, for analyst and analysand.

We will sail far from the grounded notion that the analyst is the one who knows. Perhaps it will help those in the relational community for whom some of these ideas are new to think of links to the longstanding interpersonal perspectives of Levenson (1972, 1983) and Wolstein, (1988) the field theory elements in the intersubjective schools, relational and interpersonal, (see Stern, 1997, 2013a, 2013b). Grossmark’s (2012) attention to the “unobstrusive”, companioning analyst is another focus on the delicate often presymbolic or nonsymbolizable aspects of analytic work and listening. Reverie is one framework for this analytic stance. All these approaches acknowledge the limits to knowledge, the transitional and provisional nature of what an analytic couple constructs.

I introduce this demanding paper through three main points. First, Civitarese, in unpacking Bion’s use of O as a theory of mind and as a crucial component of the development of thought, draws on a variety of disciplines: philosophy–particularly phenomenology, the study of the primacy of experienced. O is never directly apprehended, but reflected through representations, both individual and crucially, dialogic. Secondly, representation, to the degree that it is used to link individuals, produces a truth particular to the social circumstance in which it is being made and sustained. Representation, he argues, is a hallmark of human consciousness and he stresses throughout that O is approached but always indirectly through dialogue. Thirdly, the work of analysis – which, following Bion, perhaps playfully and poetically, he terms the “at- one- ment” whereby meaning is co-constructed is the site of psychic transformations achieved as the outcome through shared experience. Truth is best imagined as a matter of pragmatics and social exchange. It is emergent. I think this is another way to approach the dialectical and unpredictable but two person-ness of alpha work.

Secondly, in all the philosophical and religious work Civitarese explores here he is interested not in the object of knowledge but of the subject(s) who engage together to know and be known. Interestingly, here Civitarese pays homage to Klein and to the elaborations of the primacy of fantasy and projective identification, experiences that bind the analytic participants.

Thirdly, this project variously thought of as alpha work and/or transformation makes truth an emergent outcome of interactional process. Like Pichon-Riviere’s (2015) and the, Baranger and Baranger (2006, 1963) notion of the spiral, the dialectical experience of and between analyst and analysand leads to an at-one-ment that is emergent. Civitarese is sensitive to the difficulties in making the pragmatic interaction, the work to share symbolization so potent. How, he asks, does a duo not become a folie a deux? He is relying on the inherent humanity in our use of speech with each other, the deep capacity to address the other as central to becoming a subject. Think Winnicott.

Finally, Civitarese terms these practices “aesthetic”, attending both to the symbolic co-creation and to the embodied, unconscious sensory and rhythmic experience in which dialogue is made and enacted. We can see the links between Bion, field theory, Winnicott (1971) the infant work of Stern (1985) and others. There is some space for Laplanche (1997, 1999, 2015) here, in the idea of messages and translations as the emergent work of both understanding and development.

Civitarese insists that we experience the full power and magic of Bion’s interest and attention to the mystical, the Godhead. But he ends on a note, probably easier for the more secular focus of North Americans. Think, he suggests, of the deity as consensuality, as sociality, as within the property and structure of language. We move in this way to a vision of truth as interactional, interpersonal, and pragmatic.

The first discussion, by Peter Goldberg, engages Civitarese in a conversation and disagreement. This activated a very engaged response from Civitarese. Goldberg is deeply admiring of the work Civitarese has done. But it is also clear that he considers it a revision of theory, as well as an elaboration. “In other words, God is our story about what happens when we re-experience our unity with others (or, as I will suggest, our unity with everything)” (Goldberg, this issue, p. 405, italics in the original).

Goldberg is enormously appreciative of Civitarese’s unpacking and elaboration of Bion’s O, an extremely welcome addition to what he terms “this golden age of the intersubjective paradigm” (this issue, p. 406). His paper is devoted to pushing the reader and Civitarese to attend more to the nonverbal, what he terms the “consensorality” over the “consensuality.” Too much has been left solely to language and speech to carry the meaning of O, or at-one-ment and the aesthetic. He feels this acutely with regard to the implications for clinical theory. Wanting Civitarese to push further into the domain of the nonverbal, the sensory and the embodied, he settles on terms like “syncretic” and “contiguous” as having the potential to include more than speech and language. For Goldberg, Civitarese makes language too much the guarantor of humanity and deity. He misses Winnicott in this paper and some attention to the untranslated, the body, and the existential dimensions of experience, outside of language. He has worked on this topic and brings to this discussion, his idea of a beta function, a space free perhaps of memory and desire, or embedded in these experiences but presymbolically. I am struck by how much this point is illustrated in Steinberg’s clinical material where the advance in understanding and shared humanity was realized in states quite beyond speech.

Beth Steinberg’s discussion of this paper is really a powerful aid on this complex journey. The first half of the paper explicates Civitarese’s analysis of Bion and the second gives a startling and deeply evocative clinical illustration. The explication is so careful and clear, I might suggest reading her work along with and in dialogue with the Civitarese paper, stressing, as she does the consensual capacities of speech and dialogue, alongside the unconscious, which she describes as the “infinite” of language.

Her clinical example begins with an account of analytic work in which O is failing. It is, more accurately, refused by both participants. Meaning and connection is useless, meaningless. The analyst bravely describes her own refusal of her patient’s humanity. The enactment involves an invasion of the analytic space by the patient and an invasion of the patient’s psychic space by the analyst, a re enactment, Steinberg acknowledges, of a certain kind of autistic misattunement in the patient’s own childhood. The capacity for recovery of empathy and linking, by the analyst seemed, she indicates not exactly intentional, more “hallucinosis”, intuitive, not structured by explicit knowledge or plan.

Civitarese’s response to the discussions focuses mostly on the disagreement with Goldberg over the relative power and autonomy of verbal and nonverbal functions. In a long discussion of the relative meanings of semiotics, semantic and symbolic, Civitarese concludes with the following sentence: “Language may well not always be on stage, but it never fails to exercise its function as director from the wings of the theatre of the mind” (this issue, pp. 431–432).

This debate about the question of speech and other forms of materiality is interesting and useful. We might consider how Steinberg’s clinical examples speak to this question. My own work on gender and the social conscious/unconscious (Harris, 2005, 2016) is very much in line with Civitarese’s link of speech to the State. It is hard to imagine the total separation of speech and materiality in the context of how we are claimed by culture, sociality and therefore the State. On the other hand, Steinberg’s clinical example is replete with dissociative phenomena and “the unthought known.”

Civitarese concludes his discussion by recruiting Steinberg’s paper to his argument about the inevitability of the investment/invasion of pragmatic dialogue into clinical work. Reading Steinberg, I had experienced the power of the nonverbal, the sensory, hallucinatory effect of unconscious and preconscious forces which were both projectively and introjectively effective for the analyst and ultimately in the analytic dialogue between patient and analyst.

Interestingly then, the Steinberg clinical example can be drawn to defend both Civitarese’s perspective in which language is inevitably implicated in collective and individual mentalization and Goldberg’s attention to the power and perhaps relative autonomy of the nonverbal, the sensory, the consensorality.

I leave to the readers the task of parse this complex questions rose by this paper and the panel of discussions. Perhaps it remains a provocative question at this moment in the field and Bionian and post-Bionian has a lot to offer her. We cannot escape the imperative and interpellating force of history arriving to for minds and bodies through language, symbolization, and our defining human capacity. But these papers are also insisting that we stay open to the ineffable, to reverie, to the unrepresentable, simultaneously forceful and absent. An engagement with O seems very much one of our most important current imperatives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty and is a supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an Editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies In Gender and Sexuality, and the IPA ejournal Psychoanalysistoday.com. In 2012, she, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safran established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. She, Lew Aron, Eyal Rozmarin and Steven Kuchuck co-edit the Book Series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, a series now with over 100 published volumes.