Chapter 7. São Paulo 1978 (Ten Talks). Bion in New York and São Paulo

Bion: I have suggested that the potentially intelligent foetus resorts to a mechanism analogous to what Melanie Klein describes postnatally as ‘projective identification’. These primordial germs of thought and feeling become inaccessible – that is to say, out of reach and control of what will later be the character or personality. That state of mind, as soon as the embryo or foetus can be said to have a mind, is different from that of the infant who displays thought and behaviour to which these concepts of conscious and unconscious are applicable. The infant or child who shows unconscious mechanisms and who behaves as if it had an unconscious does seem to experience some kind of caesura, which Rank called the ‘birth trauma’. In other words, there is a continuity between the full-term foetus and the infant although the continuity is both maintained and broken by what appears to be a synapse, or diaphragm, or screen, so that the primordial thought of the foetus is projected onto this caesura and is reflected back from the infant to its primordial levels of thought and feeling. There is a contact through this permeable membrane in both directions; the caesura is a transparent mirror. The infant or child can experience feelings which seep up from the unconscious and which can similarly be affected in the opposite direction. That is to say, the thought of the infant or child can affect these primitive levels of behaviour. This is different from the state of affairs which exists in the embryonic growth of what we would later expect to be its mind. The separation of these two powers of thought is much more nearly complete, but a puzzling situation is produced because it does not appear to be like that. This same genetically gifted creature is able to start, as if after birth, to learn how to behave exactly like everybody else. At first one would suppose

that this organism is highly intelligent, can learn easily and is able to compete successfully with its brothers and s