The Mystic Group

ABSTRACT

By way of a set of suggestions W. R. Bion offers in “The Mystic and the Group,” this essay begins to consider the relationship between ideas concerning the necessity of deprivation for proper psychoanalytic practice and interpretation and the metaphysical constitution of things. Bion’s conceptual opposition of the mystic and the group, given in his understanding of the role of the mystic in the group, opens a way to investigate—admittedly, against Bion’s grain—the mysticism of the group as resistance to individuation.

Notes

¹ See/hear, s/hear, then share: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE18boJIVrY; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCgmpax04XQ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzhJ1B2zos. And don’t forget an original Leon Russell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37dw2r45Xzg.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fred Moten

Fred Moten is a teacher and writer whose areas of study and practice are poetics, critical theory, performance studies, and black studies. Moten, the author of many books, the latest of which is consent not to be a single being, is engaged in an ongoing collaboration with theorist Stefano Harney. They are co-authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and A Poetics of the Undercommons. He has also collaborated with the artists and artist collectives Arika, Freethought, Renee Gladman, Andrea Geyer, Arthur Jafa, George Lewis, MPA, William Parker, Wu Tsang, Ultra-red, James Gordon Williams, and Suné Woods. Moten teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.