Reflections on death and mourning in relation to Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend

Both Bion and Jung indicate in their theories of oscillating cycles of coniunctio/mortificatio and Ps<-->D that the toleration of psychic states of disintegration is both dangerous and essential to new development and that change is resisted and feared. Our fear of growth and development is described by Jung in the mortificatio phase of the coniunctio cycles where movement can be forward towards coniunctio or backwards into disiunctio and by Bion in his delineation of a grid, with its negative grid, where the normal direction of growth may be permanently reversed. Both highlight the inevitability of elements destructive to thought being present in the psyche and the need to know these forces. This paper relates their ideas to the difficult processes of mourning explored by Dickens in his novel Our Mutual Friend.     

The logic of turmoil: some epistemological and clinical considerations on emotional experience and the infinite

The idea of the infinite has its origins in the very beginnings of western philosophy and was developed significantly by modern philosophers such as Galileo and Leibniz. Freud discovered the Unconscious which does not respect the laws of classical logic, flouting its fundamental principle of non-contradiction. This opened the way to a new epistemology in which classical logic coexists with an aberrant logic of infinite affects. Matte Blanco reorganized this Freudian revolution in logic and introduced the concept of bi-logic, which is an intermingling of symmetric and Aristotelic logics. The authors explore some epistemological and clinical aspects of the functioning of the deep unconscious where the emergence of infinity threatens to overwhelm the containing function of thought, connecting this topic to some of Bion's propositions. They then suggest that bodily experiences can be considered a prime source of the logic of turmoil, and link a psychoanalytic consideration of the infinite to the mind-body relation. Emotional catastrophe is seen both as a defect-a breakdown of the unfolding function which translates unconscious material into conscious experience-and as the consequence of affective bodily pressures. These pressures function in turn as symmetrizing or infinitizing operators. Two clinical vignettes are presented to exemplify the hypotheses.