6. The Problem of Violence

When Bion, in his pre-psycho-analytical work as a psychiatrist, first drew the distinction between the mental apparatus and what he called the ‘protomental apparatus’ (Experiences in Groups), he laid down the groundwork for the differentiation between those operations which involve meaning (and the formation of symbols for representing meaning), and those which merely involve signs and their manipulation by logical operations. Signs are indicators of information; but meaning must find its representation in symbols in order that the emotionality of human relationships may be thought about and evolved. States of mind may be communicated by primitive means such as projective or perhaps also adhesive identifications, but these transmissions have not of themselves the capacity for growth and evolution in complexity, sophistication, generalization or abstraction. Mathematics and logic are the sciences of signs and information; psychology and philosophy are the sciences of meaning and symbols. To seek to bridge them, worse still to confuse them, indicates a failure to grasp the central fact, that they relate to different worlds: the outside world, and the inner world of psychic reality.

This spatial view of mental life, so central to the Kleinian tradition, in its concreteness carries implications of different worlds, with differing premises, differing laws. For instance the world of projective identification, inside an internal or external object, is a world without the fourth dimension of time; past and future have only the meaning of ‘out’, in the sense of ‘when I was out’ or ‘when I will be out’. You might say that the world of projective identification has tenses, but not time as a measurable dimension of reality. On the other hand, the difference between the emotional meaning of time in psychic reality and therefore with respect to the significance it has for intimate human relationships, and time's factual measurement in the physical world, is of the greatest importa