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Stressing the importance played by Bion's development of the notion of mysticism in the evolution of Freudian theory represents, it seems to us – although we are not particularly Kleinian or Bionian, but rather attached to Freud's thought and the potential developments it contains – the best homage that we can offer Bion.
In Bion's theory, the notion of mysticism is situated at the crossroads of the psychical processes of analytic interpretation and scientific discovery. What we are concerned with is an ensemble, knowledge, the approach of which, in Bion's view, cannot be separated from mystical practice. We will focus on two central ideas of Bion. The first is that ‘psycho-analytical observation certainly cannot afford to be confined to perception of what is verbalised only’ (Bion, 1970: 82). The second – inspired by, among others, Freud who asserts in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938b) that, ‘Reality will always remain unknowable’ (p. 196) – is that the human being cannot have access to knowledge of the object itself; he can only know emanations from it, emergent qualities, evolving characteristics, which have repercussions on it as phenomena; but these sensible and perceptible qualities, verbalisable or representable, differ from the object's ‘ultimate reality’. There exists in every object of study an essence, noumen, or thing-in-itself, in Kant's sense, that remains inaccessible to the observer owing to the very nature of his psychic system, of his incapacity to apprehend non-sensory phenomena, such as the analysand's ‘ultimate reality’, or ‘ultimate truth’ in the case of the analyst, or the object of investigation in the case of the scientist. This reality or ultimate truth, Bion calls ‘point O’; and, all we can know of it is its transformations or emanations. However, Bion thinks that we should try to reach this realm beyond or short of what is sensory, representable and thinkable; and that the only means to do this is through mystical practices.
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