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The “revision” of Freud's “Three Essays on Sexuality” undertaken in Sexual States of Mind now requires some revision itself, in the light of subsequent digestion and implementation of Bion's work, some of which was reported in Studies in Extended Metapsychology and The Apprehension of Beauty (with Meg Harris Williams). But also the present explorations of the projective phenomenology of intrusive identification extends Melanie Klein's model of the mind, and requires special application to the perversions and addictions. The revision of Freud proposed in Sexual States was primarily a structural revision, taking into account splitting of self and objects, narcissistic identifications, struggle for control of the organ of consciousness (attention) and the war between creative and destructive tendencies seen, however, more at the level of self than of ego balancing life and death instincts.
This volume is devoted to this exploration of the projective phenomena accompanying intrusive identification, but they need a specific integration with Bion's theory of thinking with reference to the perversions and addictions. The aspect of his theory which is most significant for this purpose, and without which the idea of aesthetic conflict and its place in development and in the analytic process would not be possible, is Bion's new theory of affects, L (love), H (hate) and K (knowledge) as the emotional links of human relationships. Although it is ambiguous in his work, until, I think, A Memoir of the Future, this theory of plus and minus LHK completely shifts any idea of evil or destructiveness out of the realm of instinct, and therefore of constitution, genetics. Instead the emotionality, which is the heart of the matter of the life of the mind, of intimate and passionate relationships, and therefore of the growth of the personality (as distinct from the refinement of the adaptational carapace) is seen as struggling for expression in the face of an aversion to the turbulence (c