Plato's Theory of “Form” and Homeomorphic Transformation of Pre-Conceptual Traumas, Using Bion's Model of Container-Contained

CASSIUS

… Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

BRUTUS

No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself …

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Why do I have an obsessive Plato problem?

Most people need to surpass their predecessors; Plato managed to surpass all his successors.

I define psychic traumas as pre-concepts resulting when a transient event changes into a permanent one that will remain constantly conjoined1 and is structured as an unconscious emotional narrative that compulsively repeats. I refer to pre-conceptual traumas because they represent events that took place at a time when there was not a mind capable of containing them. All forms of existing psychopathology are, in summary, the result of the way that explicit pre-conceptual traumas have eroded and outlined the Oedipus complex. Thus, the superego is not heir to the Oedipus complex alone, as Freud (1923, pp. 34-36) once remarked, but heir to an Oedipus complex specifically chiseled and modified by the precise pre-conceptual trauma experienced; a condition I refer as the “mark of Cain.” The unconscious sequence of events that structure the “pre-conceptual” trauma follows a logic based on a kind of pseudo-causality or chain of beta elements (Bion, 1963, p. 40) in wait for a mind that could change them into a meaningful “concept.” This form of pseudo-causality, considered as a

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minus knowledge (−K) (Bion, 1962, pp. 97-99), is the consequence of a continuous association of no-things or absences, that are modified with time: the appearance, form, or container, changes, but the meaning, or contained, remains the same. It is similar to the way that primary objects transform as the child grows, from breast to thumb, to a security blanket, to sexual acting out, smoking, obesity, drugs, and so forth. I have referr