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”

ABSTRACT

This discussion explores an ambitiously conceived paper by Giuseppe Civitarese and Chiara Berrini (this issue, 2022) as it attempts to shed light on Bion’s use of mathematical concepts—point and line—to better understand the process of symbolization and of desymbolization (e.g., attacks on linking) applied to the clinical situation. Employing the authors’ elaboration of Bion’s thesis that all psychical transformations occur and thinking develops (or fails to develop) within an analytic field marked by emotional experience, I show how this formulation is as relevant to reading a psychoanalytic text as it is to our work in the consulting room. Accordingly, my commentary focuses on how the authors’ theoretical argument and clinical vignette impacted me, which I liken to “possibility clouds” arising in the analytic field. I suggest that such an approach echoes the authors’ openness to “an extraordinary sequence of play” between analyst and patient that inspired their submission to this journal.

This article refers to:

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

View responses to this article:

The Aesthetic-Rhizomatic Matrix of Thinking: Reply to Caron Harrang

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Notes

¹ The topic of presence and absence in Bion’s writings is vaster than can be explored here. One of the more fascinating examples of Bion’s sensitivity to this issue is detailed in Transformations when he intuits that a patient believes him to be synonymous with “the milkman” who earlier in the day had (actually) come to his house. Bion insists this is not transference; the patient is not experiencing him as being like the milkman; he is the milkman. If the analyst is not at-one with the patient’s experience “it makes [him] feel I cannot be aware of my own behavior and am therefore not responsible for my own actions—that I am, in short, “mad” (Bion, 1965, pp. 30–31). My reading of this passage is that the patient will experience the analyst as emotionally absent if he cannot intuit the patient’s psychic reality—which has the analyst being present at a moment when he was, in fact, absent. Conversely, if the analyst is sufficiently receptive to the patient’s experience, delusional as it may be, he is more likely to be unconsciously experienced as emotionally present.

² I’m alluding here to the concept of a “replacement baby” when parents following the death of a fetus/infant/child do not allow themselves time to grieve and instead attempt to fill the loss of one child by having another. Related to Klein’s concept of “manic defense,” action is unconsciously intended to fill the void created by unbearable loss.

³ To watch the famous water scene from The Miracle Worker visit here: https://youtu.be/lUV65sV8nu0.

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Caron Harrang

Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA is a board-certified psychoanalyst and an IPA training and supervising psychoanalyst on faculty at Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She maintains a full-time private practice in Seattle, Washington (USA). Publications include “Painting poppies: On the relationship between concrete and metaphorical thinking” (2012); “Psychic skin and narcissistic rage: Reflections on Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In” (2012); From Reverie to Interpretation: Transforming Thought into the Action of Psychoanalysis (D. Blue & C. Harrang (Eds.) (2016); and “River to rapids: Speaking to the body in terms the body can understand” In C. Harrang, D. Tillotson, & N.C. Winters (Eds.) Body as psychoanalytic object: Clinical applications from Winnicott to Bion and beyond (2021).