Chapter XI. “Learning about” as a Resistance to “Becoming”

In the two previous chapters it was suggested that ‘Transformations’ could be read as a series of experiments in mathematical modes of thought, beginning with the last part of ‘Elements’ and continuing into ‘Attention and Interpretation’, aimed at evolving a language of precision for describing the methods of observation, thought and communication employed in the psycho-analytical method. The stimulus for this effort, starting with ‘Learning’, had been the recognition of the role played by disorders of thought in severe mental disturbance, (schizophrenia in particular), related also to phenomena described earlier as peculiar to Basic Assumption Groups. What began as an attempt to avoid the ‘penumbra of existing meaning’ in ordinary words for the sake of positing an ‘empty’ hypothetical apparatus of thought: alpha-function, in ‘Learning’, expanded into a ‘periodic table’ of the ‘elements’ of thought, the grid, from which Bion first attempted a description of ‘psycho-analytical objects’, tripartite ‘molecules’ compounded of sensa, myth and passion.

This first attempt seemed not to lead anywhere and a new attempt, an illustration of the ‘psycho-analytic game’, has been undertaken in ‘Transformations’ using the grid to trace the ‘growth’ of ideas. The second attempt, in the form of a ‘Theory of Transformations’ failed also but brought forward certain important realizations, such as the central role of aesthetic intuition, its relation to love of the truth, the slaying of the concept of causality in favour of exploration of an infinite universe of meaningful discourse, finally the humbling of the analyst to the position of merely offering ‘opinion’. But a third attempt utilized a broadened idea of ‘binocular vision’ to erect a concept of multiplicity of vertices, again using a mathematizing format but more for analogic illustration than as an experimental method. The attempt to solve the problem seems to come to grief over the failure to distinguish between the internal w