On Using Bion’s Concepts of Point, Line, and Linking in the Analysis of a 6-Year-Old Child

ABSTRACT

In Transformations Bion deals extensively with the concepts of point and line. Investigating their origin and nature, he explores the process of symbolization that leads to the birth of the psyche—and to the continuous re-birth that occurs (or should occur) in analysis—as well its failures in psychosis. His thesis is that the point is equivalent to the perceptual and emotional experience of the no-breast, the line to the temporal evolution of the point. Here we attempt an introductory reading to these rich but difficult pages in the light of Bion’s concept of attacks on linking and of clinical material.

This article is referred to by:

Possibility Clouds Arising from a Close Reading of Civitarese and Berrini’s “On Using Bion’s Concepts of Point, Line, and Linking in the Analysis of a 6-Year-Old Child”

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ As, by the way, one of us (C.) did with that of invisible-visual hallucinations (Civitarese, 2020).

² See Bion (1965, pp. 86–87): “Two breasts have disappeared. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they have shrunk or faded away until only two points remain. The protagonist may feel reconciled to this fact or he may feel quite unable to tolerate these spots (or points or (·)) as to him they are either places where the breasts were, or, more poignantly, no-breasts. As he watches they appear to come together until they are coincident with each other and the boundary of his personality. […] Then they disappear. Where have they gone?”.

³ See Grotstein (2007, p. 240): “I can make a pun, the point that is felt to be concrete becomes pointless for thinking”.

⁴ The difference between geometry and algebra is that the former is related to the absence/presence or existence/nonexistence of an object, the latter instead is related “the state of the object, whether it is whole or fragmented, whole object or part object” (Bion, 1965, p. 151).

⁵ For Barthes (1977/1990), the object offers itself to the subject as always fading or “perpetually departing”. It can only be glimpsed in a “movement of disappearance” (Lacan, 1973/2004, p. 208). As such, it is but the negative of the subject’s lack-in-being.

⁶ See M. Klein (1924, p. 324): “For little Fritz in writing the lines mean roads and the letters ride on motor-bicycles—on the pen—upon them. For instance, ‘i’ and ‘e’ ride together on a motor-bicycle that is usually driven by the ‘i’ and they love one another with a tenderness quite unknown in the real world [emphasis added]. Because they always ride with one another they became so alike that there is hardly any difference between them, for the beginning and the end—he was talking of the small Latin alphabet—of ‘i’ and ‘e’ are the same, only in the middle the ‘i’ has a little stroke and the ‘e’ has a little hole”.

⁷ See Bion (1970, p. 123): “The primitive formulation of ♀♂ in C category terms of breast and mouth, penis and vagina, has the simplicity of all C category formulations. […] Both appear to differ from the configurations represented by the Kleinian theory of paranoid—schizoid and depressive position interplay. I am unwilling to accept this apparent cleavage”. This quote tells us that we must always keep in mind that on the one hand these terms always maintain a strong metaphorical character (row C of the grid is that of dream and myth); on the other hand they reformulate and enrich known and established concepts of psychoanalytic theory.

⁸ Cfr. M. Heidegger: “Inasamuch as being-there is at all, it has the manner of being we characterized as being-with-one-another. This cannot be conceived as a summative result of several ‘subjects’ coming together’” (Heidegger, 1927/2001, pp. 158-159); and elsewhere (1987/2001, p. 200), he writes that “receiving-perceiving is always language and jointly a saying of words”.

⁹ It is worth remembering that Winnicott is the other author that give much importance to the concept of “feeling real”. On this, see Ogden (2018).

¹⁰ We do not have the room here, but a fertile comparison could be made between Bion’s idea of the point and Aulagnier’s (1975/2003) of “pictogram” as the basic sensory form of psychic experience.

¹¹ A weekly Italian word puzzle and word search magazine.

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Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Civitarese

Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D., Ph.D., is a training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA). He lives and is in private practice in Pavia, Italy. He is the past-editor of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. Among his books are: The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (2010); The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis (2012); The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (2014); Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict and Psychoanalytic Criticism (2015); The Analytic Field and its Transformations (with A. Ferro, 2015); Truth and the Unconscious (2016); Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis (2018); L’ora della nascita. Psicoanalisi del sublime e arte contemporanea [The Hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art], 2020, and recipient of the Gradiva-Lavarone prize; Vitality and Play in Psychoanalysis (with A. Ferro, 2022, in press).

Chiara Berrini

Chiara Berrini, Psy.D., is a psychologist, psychotherapist and candidate analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI). She lives and is in private practice in Milan, Italy. She has worked for several years in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in Unaccompanied Foreign Minors.