Bion’s O and His Pseudo-Mystical Path

Abstract

The concept of Bion of O is both essential and elusive like few others. By its ambiguous nature it gives rise to the most disconcerting interpretations and many misunderstandings. Among these is the idea of inaugurating a “mystical” psychoanalysis. To refute this thesis, the author proposes a path of reading that is certainly personal and at times even impervious, but that aims to insert this notion within a theoretical framework that is as clear, logical and coherent as possible. The meaning of the concept of O is only delineated in the relationship with other key concepts (mainly: transformation, invariant and at-one-ment). It therefore escapes us if we do not take into account the dialectical tension that arises from this fruitful trade and if we do not pay attention to the always different discursive contexts in which it is found. But above all it is important to realize that the concept of O is peculiar also in comparison to other more clearly specified and circumscribed concepts of Bion. In fact, it itself consists of a constellation of concepts, as many names or partial definitions.

Notes

¹ Cfr. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012, p. 49): “The movements of one’s own body are naturally invested with a certain perceptual signification, they form a system with external phenomena so tightly woven that external perception ‘takes account’ of the movement of the perceptual organs, and it finds in them, if not the explicit explanation, then at least the motive for the intervening changes in the spectacle and can thereby understand these changes.”

² It is worth noticing is also the centrality of the letter O in the word God. By the way, in his essay On the Name Derrida (1993) takes up the same graphic characters used by Angelus Silenius in writing God: GOtt.

³ See; Hegel (2001, p. 406): “by indicating this piece of paper, ‘I’ then experience what is, in point of fact, the real truth of sense-certainty: ‘I’ indicate it as a here which is a here of other heres, in other words a here that involves in its self a simple concatenation of many heres. i.e., a universal. Thus ‘I’ take it up as it is in truth, and instead of knowing what is immediate, ‘I’ truly take, I perceive.” This passage is found in the first section, almost a kind of prologue, of the Phenomenology, which discusses sense-certainty. Hegel’s aim is to argue that there is no perception that is not mediated by language. He is by no means talking about any literally “divine” nature of language, but only of its normal functions. Mostly we do not realize it, but these functions are in fact extraordinary. Language is “divine” because it captures the object perceived through concepts (indeed it could not do otherwise) and thus universalizes it: “[..] it would be appropriate to tell those who allege this truth and certainty of the reality of sensible objects that they have to be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom [..] They mean this piece of paper on which ‘I’ am writing, or rather, have written, this, but they do not say what they mean. If they really wanted to say this piece of paper that they mean - and that is what they wanted to say - then this is impossible because the sensible this, which is meant, is inaccessible to language and language belongs to consciousness, to what is, in itself, universal” (ibid., p. 405–406). The clearest and most authoritative commentary on this passage from Hegel that I know is to be found in Heidegger: “Language is divine because [..] it detaches us from one-sidedness and allows us to state what is universal and true [..] This furthest externalization exists only in the nearest internalization [Erinnerung] of language” (1980/1988, p. 64). Now, to return to Bion: even if it is not an explicit reference of his, I think we can treasure the suggestive halo that emanates from these extraordinary passages, if only to direct our intuition of what it might mean when he refers to O and speaks of it in terms of the Deity, Person-in-Himself, Eternal Light, Divine Being, Godhead, etc. Not the eye of God as a supernatural entity that contemplates the thing in itself, but (the most human) device of the concept that rises above multiplicity and makes it thinkable.

⁴ See Pinkard (1994); and Brandom (2008, p. 2–4): “I do think of the Phenomenology as a large allegory and that what it’s an allegory for is a story about conceptual contents, about selves and about the kinds of normative communities that we institute by our re-cognitive relations to one another. I think one of the principal lessons that we can learn from the Phenomenology is indeed the lesson that the classical American Pragmatists learned from it and is what deeply binds together German Idealism and American Pragmatism and Neo-pragmatism. And that is that we’ll never understand our interaction with the world if we think in antecedent terms of what subjects are—say the way Descartes did—and what objects are—say the way contemporary natural science tells us they are—and somehow try to clamp those two together to understand subjects as able to know about objects and act on objects so understood. Hegel’s recommendation—what was taken up by the Pragmatists—was that we have to think about our interaction. […] And it’s by thinking about that sort of skillful, practical interaction with our environment that we’ll come to understand what knowing subjects and intentional agents really are, that we can then abstract notions of subject and object of mind and world from. […] Self-consciousness is not something that happens principally between our ears. It’s something that happens between our selves; it’s a social achievement, a matter of reciprocal recognition. I am what I’m recognized to be by those I recognize as having the authority to determine what I really am”.

⁵ Cfr. Kirchmayr (2008, p. 119): “Therefore, the Saussurian relationship between signifier and meaning implies an anchorage to the natural world and cannot be defined as completely arbitrary. In fact, in Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, the thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign would limit the consideration of language to the institutional aspect only, that is to say to the language as code and system (langue), losing sight of the concrete use that is made of it (parole)”.

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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) and of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). 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. He has published several books, which include: The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (London 2010); The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis (London 2012); Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict and Psychoanalytic Criticism (Lanham 2015); Truth and the Unconscious (London 2016); Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis (London 2018); An Apocriphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London 2019).