You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
…when a flit of the foreknown blinked off a sunlit lake near the horizon and passed into us ….. Seamus Heaney (Wraiths)
In his treatise “On Poetics” which is an elaboration on the dynamics of tragedy, Aristotle makes - amongst a variety of other suggestions - the following comments regarding recognition:
Recognition is … an alteration from ignorance to knowledge to love or to hate … The finest form of recognition being the
one which involves a reversing transformation [peripeteia]. (: 34)…
Reversing transformation is the alteration of a state of things
to its opposite … in accordance to the probable and the necessary.
(: 22-3)
…
Types of recognition … through memory, by the rendering
into affective awareness of something perceived. (: 37)
These three sentences condense within them a variety of themes that have for ages preoccupied philosophical tradition but have also been at the very centre of contemporary psychoanalytic inquiry.
Summarily these themes are:
- Recognition is characterized by an ‘alteration’. It involves a fundamental modification of the status quo, that is bound to bring about consequences regarding the person's mental functioning.
- This alteration is to be located in the areas of knowledge, love and hate i.e. the three basic axes of human relationships according to Bion. He calls them (±) K, (±) L, (±) H.
- The notion of recognition is linked to the notion of transformation [peripeteia]. It pertains to a psychic movement, i.e. a reversal of the familiar and repetitive, sequential cause-and-effect relationships, and their replacement with until now unforeseen correlations between events and experiences. A process that brings to mind the psychoanalytic concept of ‘working through’.