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.
The title of this book (A Beam of Intense Darkness) and its dedication (To Wilfred Bion. My gratitude to you for allowing Me to become reunited with me — and for encouraging me to play with your ideas as well as my own) deserve some preliminary comments.
A ‘beam of darkness’ constitutes an antidote to the tendency, often found in the human species, to carry out ‘transformations in hallucinosis’ (Bion, 1965), to impose meanings on what has no meaning because of our incapacity to wait for shreds of meaning to emerge. Like snails which produce slime, we are a species that continuously ‘s limes’ meanings because we cannot bear the darkness of our not-knowing. In the book's title we find a sort of celebration of that ‘negative capability’, the capacity, that is, to remain in the paranoid–schizoid position without feeling persecuted — the mental state which, more than any other, should belong to the psychoanalyst (and, indeed, to any man or woman).
We are the victims of that excess of light continuously produced by our pseudo-knowledge which pollutes our minds and prevents us from truly expanding our authentic knowledge. Let us switch off the lights and wait for something to emerge, even if it is only its shady shreds … If successful, such an operation will simply allow us to reconnect us to ourselves, to weave threads of meaning with the parts of ourselves which were kept disconnected or which were denied, and it will open our minds as wide as our current degree of evolution will allow: it will let us play with our ideas with the same intensity, seriousness, and also enjoyment that we find in children playing with their toys, that is, with the dwellers of their internal world and with the phantasy ones of their relational world. More generally, our species causes the greatest disasters when it ignores the playful dimension of things and tragically takes them too seriously.
I could go on with more observations inspired by the book's suggestive title and its dedication, but t