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 challenges to organized connections to spirituality have left us floundering in a secular universe with scarcely any impetus for believing in some system of defined purposefulness or morality. Secular society has depended on scientific proof for the scaffolding for some sense of rightness or truth, while others have attempted to maintain or revive religious notions of morality. Both have leaked into psychoanalytic theories, blocking and stagnating contact with the unknown or unborn. Blame or faultfinding need not come up here; that is the very trap we would want to avoid in seeking out the blockages to our potential sense of purposefulness.
Bion's realization that the human mind, particularly the infantile mind, survives and grows through maternal reverie changes our concepts of the relationship of the unconscious to the conscious in the way that Copernicus changed our view of the relationship of the earth to the sun. Bion's conceptions about dreaming the as-yet unknown helps us to make contact with emotional forces that are difficult and painful but that expand the parameters of the contribution of the unconscious as messages from the infinite.
Bion (1997) addresses this contact with the ineffable and the unknown in Wild Thoughts. He explains that fear of the unknown plays a significant role over the eons in deeper feelings becoming translated—better yet, transformed. He adds that our efforts can be seen as a clumsy archeological dig. A camel brush is needed, not a shovel. He suggests that wisdom lies fast asleep somewhere in the thickets, somewhere buried, not only—literally—under