Chapter 5. Transformations: Change From Learning to Growth

The patient's reaction to O is primitive with material belonging to the categories of rows A and B.

His presence shows that he knows that I am present. This fact is used, conformably with column 2 categories, to deny my absence. He reacts in the session as if I were absent. This behaviour, in accordance with column 2 categories, is intended to deny my presence. Though ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ are each characteristic of column 2 they are brought together at this stage in the analysis, in accordance with A4 and B4 categories.1

The state of mind I have described is represented for me by a model – that of an adult who violently maintains an exclusively primitive omnipotent ↔ helpless state. The model by which I represent his ‘vision’ of me is that of an absent breast, the place or position, that I, the breast, ought to occupy but do not. The ‘ought’ expresses moral violence and omnipotence. The visual image of me can be represented by what a geometer might call a point, a musician the staccato mark in a musical score. As this attitude is important I shall deal with it in detail, using ideas expressed earlier in the book.

The name given an object, often regarded as the sign for a quality abstracted from something, or from which something has been abstracted2, I define as genetically related to a Selected Fact. It is a sign intended to mark and bind a constant conjunction. It is therefore significant, but devoid of meaning3; it receives its accretion of

meaning from experience. It is similar to a theory in that both imply that certain qualities are constantly conjoined; therefore, it cannot properly be described as true or false in its relationship to O. These terms express judgements on the health-giving effect of the theory to which they are applied. And upon the personality entertaining the t