Chapter 11. Book III: The Dawn of Oblivion. A Memoir of the Future

ALICE Surely it should be possible to discuss reasonably.

BION It is also possible – as we have reason to know – to resort to arms. The disastrous meeting I have been imagining as taking place between a potentially gifted fetal mind and its divorced but equally gifted post-natal self also occurs when two or more groups of individuals meet. The history of the relationship between French and English, German and British, and now Black and White races looks likely to end in mutual annihilation, not mutual beneficient stimulation.

ROLAND What is the ground for disagreement – colour? sex? prosperity?

ROBIN Father and son? Guardian and ward? Exploiter and exploitee? Mother and daughter?

P.A. The possibilities are endless. Once the problem obtrudes there is no end to explanations – rational explanations, though I would not like to say how a ‘rational’ explanation is distinguishable from a rationalization.

ROBIN You are as bad as the Intuitionist mathematicians who seem to disparage logic.

P.A. The Intuitionists would say that logical and intuitionist mathematics can exist happily with one another provided the logicians admit the reality of another approach. Quantum mechanicians do not deny the existence of wave motion.

ROBIN Is there an analogy in the relationship between group analysis and psychoanalysis proper?

P.A. It is a seductive possibility. Detailed psychoanalytic scrutiny reveals movements, up and down, of the individual particles composing a group; the ‘up and down’ movement would give an illusion of

waves, as when the sea is compared visually with the drops of water in it. Visual images penetrate deeply in the way that a capacity for sight extends the range of the infant; it is not limited to what it can grasp or touch. Mobility does not extend as far as the eye can reach.

ROBIN What about the range of visual images in geometry? That was extended by algebraic, not visual pictures of lines and circles.