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A cardinal in 1440 (Cusanus) wrote that the inhabitants of the moon lived in the betwixt and between and this is why they are lunatics. Anthropologists (notably van Gennep, Turnbull, Turner, Douglas) are fascinated by the betwixt and between as a function of closed societies: as the place, as well as a state of mind, where dwell marginals and social transitionals, either habitually (actors, transvestites, tramps) or temporarily, as initiates to cults or trainees, people who are changing professions or relationships, or involved in celebrations (like the carnival) or unusual processes like childbirth or dying, or passing through puberty and adolescence. In some cultures the betwixt and between is associated with illegitimacy, with states of being polluted or a pariah. It is above all associated with experiences of psychic death and possible rebirth, moments of paranoid-schizoid conversion or of depressive recognition.
A basic component in the psychoanalytic picture from the start has been the interim nature of human experience, lying, as it does, between primary and secondary process, conjecture in dream and waking thought. Freud's theory of the life and death instincts discovers a Shakespearean resonance in the interim.
In her remarkable 1935 paper, ‘A contribution to the psychogenesis of manicdepressive states’, Melanie Klein describes the meaning of the Freudian conflict in terms of the spatial concept of a threshold to the depressive position, a limen associated with death and suicide as well as development. Bion deepens understanding of the threshold in his theory of catastrophic change, which operates in analysis microcosmically as a function of any true interpretation, and macrocosmically as the turbulence intrinsic to major shifts in development. Bion's theory invites the clinician to focus on the transformatory impetus of states of psychic death in which conceptions of space and time become attenuated and former certitude disappears.
Henri Rey has an unusual co