Psychic rigidity, therapeutic response and time: Black holes, white holes, “D” and “d”

Abstract

Robert Waelder and W.R. Bion share an interest in articulating elemental landmarks within the psychotherapeutic terrain wherein primitive ideation may become transformed into a reclaimed reality orientation. The present paper extends their interest through clinical and literary example. It surfaces an aspect of Bion’s therapeutic calculus, implicit but unstated, in the temporal arrival at multiple and continuously changing “d” structures within the ongoing process of therapy. By recognizing the joint contribution of therapist and patient within these creations in time of arrival at approximations to the depressive position, the authors illustrate the weaving of “white hole” matrices, affording temporary relief from the dread of annihilative anxiety that reclaim the patient’s capacity for non-psychotic self-orientation.

Key words:

• black hole
• depressive position
• Bion
• time
• psychotherapeutic process

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Miller

Authors

Ian Miller, PhD, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Dublin, Ireland, where he teaches in the faculty of psychoanalytic studies at Trinity College Dublin and at University College Dublin. Together with Kay Souter, he is the author of Beckett and Bion: The (im)patient voice in psychotherapy and literature (Karnac, 2013). He is also the author of On minding and being minded: Experiencing Bion and Beckett (Karnac, 2015).

Alistair Sweet

Alistair D. Sweet, MA (PsyA), MSSc, DipCouns (PsyD), MBACP, is a senior psychotherapist and head of clinical services with Addiction NI (previously Northern Ireland Community Addiction Service/ NICAS) and is an honorary lecturer and clinical supervisor on the doctorate in clinical psychology programme, School of Psychology, Queen’s University, Belfast. He is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and director of Meriden Psychotherapy. Research interests include psychotherapy of the addictions, assessment of personality structure and defence mechanisms, disturbances of early attachments, and the history and application of clinical object relations theory within psychoanalysis.