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‘Metaphysics’ and ‘morals’ are not exactly buzz words in psychotherapy. Freud in 1901, on the crest of the popular belief that science can provide the answer to pretty well everything, proudly declared that the psychology of the unconscious will explain ‘the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology’ (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life). Few scientists took much notice of this declaration. If we look, for example, at the founders of the two most important scientific theories in this century, relativity and quantum mechanics, we find that they were deeply influenced by metaphysical thought; Einstein by Hume and Kant, Niels Bohr by Kierkegaard, Schrodinger by Schopenhauer and Vedanta, Heisenberg by Plato. As the century draws to its close there is little evidence that metaphysical thinking is finished, let alone being replaced by metapsychology; as so often before in its long history, it has changed direction according to the times.
One way for psychotherapists to approach this book is through the thought of Bion. In his later work Bion wrote about ‘0’ which was the sign he used to denote ‘ultimate reality’, that which does not fall into the domain of knowledge; he claimed it could ‘become’ but cannot be ‘known’ and that during therapy the analyst must focus his or her attention on it. Bion is a bit crude compared to traditional metaphysicians; for example, if ‘0’ cannot be known how does Bion know it can ‘become’? And how can one focus one's attention on ‘something’ that is not known? Thus how does one know it is a something rather than a nothing? Nevertheless he made a start. Roughly speaking, metaphysics is the study of ‘0’.
The study of ‘0’ must be strictly differentiated from the study of the unconscious which is the domain of psychoanalysis. The unconscious connotes those contents of the mind that are not present in the field of consciousness; these contents includ