XVI. On Turbulence

If Bion's Theory of Thinking has some essential truth in it one must expect that new ideas, the ones which have an impact to produce catastrophic change, would appear first in dream form, only later to find some verbal and and abstract representation. This is no more than to say that symbolic representations of ideas are most likely to be generated by borrowing formal elements from the outside world to portray internal world phenomena. These formal elements may implicitly include abstractions which lend themselves to analogical use in dream-life. Thus do artists and poets operate to perform their social function of giving communicable form to the new ideas nascent in the culture. To succeed in this function they must disturb us, frame questions in order to set the audience in motion to seek the answers, answers which, of course, mainly take the form of new readiness for new questions.

Psycho-analysis has come some considerable distance in defining the spectrum of emotional nuances which hold the meaning of our mental experiences. It would be a cogent view of our so-called theories that they are merely descriptive devices for outlining the structure of the variety of internal and external experiences which manifest themselves within us as emotion. But I would suggest that one whole area of emotion has as yet found no place in our body of theory because it has been assumed to stand merely in a quantitative relation. I am speaking of passions. If we adopt Bion's basic formulation of L, H and K, these passions would be ‘in love’, ‘in hate’ and ‘in awe’, each with its negative counterpart, ‘anti-in love’, ‘anti-in hate’ and ‘anti-in awe’. I think I am correct, certainly with regard to my own ideas, in stating that it has been assumed that passions were merely very intense emotions.

In this paper I wish to suggest another, and, I think, more interesting view, namely that passions represent states of turbulence arising from the paradoxical impact of one intense emotion on an