Psychoanalytic transformations1

The author describes how Bion took Freud's conception of dreams as a form of thought and used it as the basis of his theory of transformations. Bion developed an expanded theory of ‘dream thought’, understood as a process of selection and transformation of sensory and emotional experiences. In this theory, the work of analysis is in turn conceived as a process not only of deciphering symbols, of revealing already existing unconscious meanings, but also of symbol production‐of a process for generating thoughts and conferring meaning on experiences that have never been conscious and never been repressed because they have never been ‘thought’. Analysis, in its specific operational sense, becomes a system of transformation whereby unconscious somatopsychic processes acquire the conditions for representability and become capable of translation into thoughts, words and interpretations. The rules of transformation applied by the patient in his representations and those applied by the analyst in his interpretations have the same importance for the analytic process as those described by Freud for the process of dreaming. The author discusses the broad categories of transformation adduced by Bion (rigid motion, projective, and in hallucinosis) and introduces some further distinctions within them.     

BORGES IN MY OFFICE: THE ANALYSIS OF A MAN DWELLING OUTSIDE OF TIME

This article weaves together two threads: the intricacies of the analysis of a difficult‐to‐reach yet extraordinary patient and the literary works of Jorge Luis Borges, which played a significant role in the analysis as a source of inspiration, enriching the analyst's reverie and opening up new psychic spaces. The authors demonstrate the analyst's recourse to several of Borges's stories in order to enrich his own inner world and to better understand the analysand. Some of these stories are briefly presented through the analyst's dialogue with them, and there is a discussion of their function in facilitating the process of working through issues of time, memory, mortality, and identity, contributing to the enhancement of the patient's ability to come face to face with the unwanted, split‐off parts of his self and of reality.     

Restorying the self,restoring place: Healing through grief in everyday places

In this paper, I think with ecological memoirs about emotion and healing within places and in relationship to place. I argue that by staying with and exploring painful emotions, instead of palliating them, healing transformations become possible for individuals, societies and places. I engage in dialogue with two books: Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge and Linda Hogan's The Woman Who Watches Over the World. Similarly to processes advocated by narrative counsellors, in each of these memoirs the author works through her grief by restorying her self. In both books, the act of restorying the self is only made possible through a concurrent restorying of place. By focusing on the stories people tell about healing, this paper moves away from the dichotomization of therapeutic and non-therapeutic – or even anti-therapeutic – landscapes towards an understanding of how people and places can be healed. I suggest that academics can contribute to healing of and in place through empathically bearing witness to the stories people tell and by the circulating and amplifying alternative narratives of transformation.     

Assessment of Children's Fantasies With the Make a Picture Story: Validity and Norms

One purpose of this study was to examine the validity of the Make A Picture Story (MAPS) for assessment of children's fantasies. Children from a university laboratory school who were exhibiting good adjustment comprised our first sample. The second sample was composed of children from special education classes who were experiencing behavioral and/or academic difficulties. Children told stories to seven MAPS backgrounds. Stories created by special education children contained more dysphoric and fanciful fantasies than did nonproblem children's stories. Behavior disordered children had more aggressive fantasies in their stories than did nonproblem and learning disabled children. Another purpose of this study was to provide norms for children's choice of figures, number of figures used, moving and adding figures, story length, and choice of backgrounds. These norms should facilitate clinicians' interpretations of children's responses to the MAPS.     

The seventh servant: The implications of a truth drive in Bions theory of 'O'

Drawing upon Bion's published works on the subjects of truth, dreaming, alpha‐function and transformations in ‘O’, the author independently postulates that there exists a ‘truth instinctual drive’ that subserves a truth principle, the latter of which is associated with the reality principle. Further, he suggests, following Bion's postulation, that ‘alpha‐function’ and dreaming/phantasying constitute unconscious thinking processes and that they mediate the activity of this ‘truth drive’ (quest, pulsion), which the author hypothesizes constitutes another aspect of a larger entity that also includes the epistemophilic component drive. It purportedly seeks and transmits as well as includes what Bion (1965, pp. 147‐9) calls ‘O’, the ‘Absolute Truth, Ultimate Reality, O’ (also associated with infi nity, noumena or things‐in‐themselves, and ‘godhead’) (1970, p. 26). It is further hypothesized that the truth drive functions in collaboration with an ‘unconscious consciousness’ that is associated with the faculty of ‘attention’, which is also known as ‘intuition’. It is responsive to internal psychical reality and constitutes Bion's ‘seventh servant’. O, the ultimate landscape of psychoanalysis, has many dimensions, but the one that seems to interest Bion is that of the emotional experience of the analysand's and the analyst's ‘evolving O’ respectively (1970, p. 52) during the analytic session. The author thus hypothesizes that a sense of truth presents itself to the subject as a quest for truth which has the quality and force of an instinctual drive and constitutes the counterpart to the epistemophilic drive. This ‘truth quest’ or ‘drive’ is hypothesized to be the source of the generation of the emotional truth of one's ongoing experiences, both conscious and unconscious. It is proposed that emotions are beacons of truth in regard to the acceptance of reality. The concepts of an emotional truth drive and a truth principle would help us understand why analysands are able to accept analysts’ interpretations that favor the operation of the reality principle over the pleasure principle—because of what is postulated as their overriding adaptive need for truth. Ultimately, it would seem that Bion's legacy of truth aims at integrating fi nite man with infi nite man.     

Transformations in dreaming and characters in the psychoanalytic field1,2

Having reviewed certain similarities and differences between the various psychoanalytic models (historical reconstruction/development of the container and of the mind's metabolic and transformational function; the significance to be attributed to dream‐type material; reality gradients of narrations; tolerability of truth/lies as polar opposites; and the form in which characters are understood in a psychoanalytic session), the author uses clinical material to demonstrate his conception of a session as a virtual reality in which the central operation is transformation in dreaming (de‐construction, de‐concretization, and re‐dreaming), accompanied in particular by the development of this attitude in both patient and analyst as an antidote to the operations of transformation in hallucinosis that bear witness to the failure of the functions of meaning generation. The theoretical roots of this model are traced in the concept of the field and its developments as a constantly expanding oneiric holographic field; in the developments of Bion's ideas (waking dream thought and its derivatives, and the patient as signaller of the movements of the field); and in the contributions of narratology (narrative transformations and the transformations of characters and screenplays). Stress is also laid on the transition from a psychoanalysis directed predominantly towards contents to a psychoanalysis that emphasizes the development of the instruments for dreaming, feeling, and thinking. An extensive case history and a session reported in its entirety are presented so as to convey a living impression of the ongoing process, in the consulting room, of the unsaturated co‐construction of an emotional reality in the throes of continuous transformation. The author also describes the technical implications of this model in terms of forms of interpretation, the countertransference, reveries, and, in particular, how the analyst listens to the patient's communications. The paper ends with an exploration of the concepts of grasping (in the sense of clinging to the known) and casting (in relation to what is as yet undefined but seeking representation and transformation) as a further oscillation of the minds of the analyst and the patient in addition to those familiar from classical psychoanalysis.     

The Self‐System in Integral Counseling

The authors introduce the integral model of the self‐system and, using that model, describe the dynamics of healthy growth and the development of psychogenic pathology. Self‐identification is described as “sliding” in nature, and stage theories for self‐related lines are outlined to help clinicians understand the characteristics of each stage the self may slide into. The authors outline K. Wilber's (2000a) metaphor of ladder, climber, and view to describe both healthy development and the development of pathology. Constructs of translation and transformation are described in the context of ladder, climber, view, and the authors conclude by summarizing clinical approaches to problems in translation.     

The more things change…: Metamorphoses and conceptual structure

Given that mythmakers must construct stories that are comprehensible to their audience, it is reasonable to expect stories to be conceptually natural even when their topics deal with the supernatural. Thus, as stories are adapted to human conceptual structure, they should reflect characteristics of that structure. An examination of the types of magical transformations in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Grimms' Fairy Tales suggests that this is the case. It was possible to predict the patterns of transformations on the basis of structural properties of ontological knowledge, which is knowledge of the basic categories of existence (e.g., conscious beings, animals, plants, events). Other characteristics of the transformations seem to reflect the conceptual distinction between animates and inanimates as well as the relative prototypicality of various taxonomic classes of animals. It appears that aspects of conceptual structure can constrain patterns of thinking even during “the willing suspension of disbelief.”     

The Cocreation of Fantasy and the Transformation of Psychic Structure

This author argues that therapeutic action in child psychoanalytic psychotherapy rests with the creation and transformation of fantasy through play, which in turn shifts psychic structure. The paper details the treatment of an eight-year-old girl whose mother's inability to playfully participate in the inner world of her child interfered with the child's development of a fantasy life. The author suggests that the introduction of objective reality (i.e., interpretations that link the child's play with the real world) potentially impinges on and interferes with the transformational processes of fantasy. Developing the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy does not take place through a forced accommodation to reality, but rather through the expansion of fantasy and a widening of the realm of the imagination. The elaboration of fantasy in concert with a parent or analyst is what builds the child's capacity to differentiate reality from fantasy.     

Family influences on dysfunctional thinking in anxious children

Anxious children are found to interpret ambiguous stories in a negative way. The current study attempted to examine the possible influence of parental fear and parental interpretation bias on the maintenance of such an interpretation bias. Children varying in level of anxiety (n=25) and their parents, filled in a questionnaire to measure their own fears, and gave their interpretations concerning nine ambiguous stories, relevant for childhood ‘interactional’ anxieties: social anxiety, separation anxiety, and generalized anxiety. Then, parents were asked to talk with their children about three of the stories. After the family discussion the children had to give their final interpretations. Results indicated that parents' self‐reported fear level and interpretation bias were associated with children's interpretation bias before the family discussion. However, no evidence was found for the idea that parents maintain or enhance the interpretation bias of their children. That is, irrespective of parental fear and parental interpretation bias, children interpreted the ambiguous stories as less negative after discussing them with their parents. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Theory of Transformations and Autistic States Autistic Transformations: A Proposal1

This work integrates two areas of thinking: one in which the author develops considerationsregardingobservationmethodsofmentalphenomenainpsychoanalysis according to Bion's theory of transformations; the other in which she is concerned with the investigation of primitive mental states‐protomental states‐more specifi cally, the autistic states of neurotic patients, described by Tustin. Some ideas on the ‘philosophical’ position underlying transformations theory are elaborated, particularly emphasizing the idea that the same phenomenon in psychoanalysis may be considered from different perspectives, as long as it is situated within the theoretical reference frame to which it belongs. The author considers the idea that this method of phenomenon observation is part of a wider context of general human knowledge, in which uncertainty and relativity of concepts are the main components. By adopting transformations theory as a perspective of phenomena observation that pervades the analytical meeting, the author questions whether it is possible to include other groups of transformation of emotional experiences in this theory, which shows particular phenomena with specifi c qualities, distinct from those emphasized by Bion. She hypothesizes that autistic phenomena present in neurotic patients, characterizing autistic states, may be considered and detached, making up a particular group of transformation of emotional experience, which analysts often face in their daily practice. She names this group ‘autistic transformations’.     

Making Sense of Divergent Interpretations of Conflict and Developing an Interpretive Understanding of Mind

Our goals in this study were to develop a measure of children's understanding of divergent interpretations of conflict and relate that measure to children's more general interpretive understanding of mind (Carpendale & Chandler, 1996). Eighty-nine children between 4 and 9 years of age heard 4 conflict stories in which fault was ambiguous. Children overwhelmingly suggested that antagonists would blame each other and adequately justified those judgments. However, children under 7 years did not believe that it made sense for antagonists to disagree, and children were better able to explain why mutual blame made sense as they grew older. Children's judgments of the legitimacy of and explanations for divergent conflict interpretations were correlated with similar measures assessing their understanding of the general interpretive quality of mind. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of everyday interaction for the gradual acquisition of interpretive understanding.     

Cohabitation and the negative therapeutic reaction

Borderline and psychotic patients especially, but not exclusively, show genuine motivation towards achieving insight and change and then suddenly behave as if these have never been desired. When this shift occurs after a helpful interpretation it can be thought of as a negative therapeutic reaction. Patients can feel taken over by perceptions which drive them to think and behave in ways they later disagree with. These observations have led the author, along with colleagues at the Willesden Centre for Psychological Treatment, to recognise a situation of internal cohabitation of two autonomous minds in the one body which is a development of but not identical to Bion's concepts of psychotic and non-psychotic personalities. Some of the psychoanalytic literature on the different modes of mental functioning are reviewed and problems of appropriate conceptualisations are discussed. Clinical examples are presented to illustrate that differentiating the genuine negative therapeutic reaction from reactions to poor interpretations is facilitated and leads to further understanding of the patient's psychotic personality if the psychotherapist can hold in mind both the patient's and the therapist's psychotic and non-psychotic personalities.     

Mythological Underpinnings of Feminine Development

In the manner of Oedipus Rex, the myth of Myrrha—a story about a daughter's initiation of sex with her father—promises to divulge insights about feminine development. Given parallels between these two myths, the author asks why Jung identified Electra rather than Myrrha as the feminine counterpart to Oedipus, and revisits Freud's and Jung's differing interpretations of the incest theme in personality development. To break open the metaphor of Myrrha's incest, the author analyzes a similar account of incest in the Old Testament story of Lot and his wife and finds that they share a theme of female bitterness related to wounding of the mother and its arresting effect on the daughter's maturation. The article then considers the Demeter-Persephone myth, a tale not of incest but rape in Persephone's initiation into womanhood. In contrast to Myrrha, Persephone's development unfolds with strong maternal support tempered by the opposing claims on her by the masculine. The article draws these stories together to illuminate the archetypal forces that drive feminine development as well as the human affairs that resist and complicate them. The article concludes with a case study of a client whose developmental “stuckness” follows the contours of the Myrrha myth.     

Tactics and empathy: Defences against projective identification

In this paper the author argues that interpretations made when the analyst has not done the emotional work of recognising and bearing what kind of object she has become in the patient's psychic reality will be experienced as empty tactics – even lies – rather than interpretations of integrity. However, interpreting from a position of bearing the truth of the patient's perception will be technically difficult and indicate turmoil as the analyst struggles to take in the patient's view of her. If the analyst avoids integrating her own picture of herself with the patient's picture (despite giving voice to the patient's picture) the split inside the analyst will be felt and intensify the patient's need to split. Vignettes demonstrate how the analyst, believing she is trying to understand, may become a projective‐identification‐refusing object and the issue of the analyst's disclosure of her countertransference is examined. Ultimately, the author argues, a capacity to receive and bear projective identification requires empathy with both patient and analyst‐as‐patient's object, engaged in a process about which both are ambivalent.     

J. S. Mill on Coolie Labour and Voluntary Slavery

This article discusses John Stuart Mill's voluntary slavery argument in On Liberty. The author shows that standard interpretations of the argument rely on the assumption that part of Mill's objection to voluntary slavery is the permanent nature of the decision. However, in correspondence, Mill also objects to voluntary ‘coolie’ labour contracts, which he regards as a form of slavery. This produces difficulties for standard interpretations of the voluntary slavery argument. Finally, the author provides a revised interpretation of Mill's argument to solve this problem.     

Victims,Their Stories,and Our Rights

Diana Meyers argues that breaking the silence of victims and attending to their stories are necessary steps towards realizing human rights. Yet using highly personal victims' stories to promote human rights raises significant moral concerns, hence Meyers suggests that before victims' stories can be accessed and used, it is morally imperative that requirements of informed consent and non‐retraumatization are secured. This article argues that while Meyers' proviso is important, and necessary, it may not be sufficient. First, one potential problem with seeking to secure “informed consent” is that one has to ask for the consent, and in the act of asking one is potentially retraumatizing the victim. Secondly, the assumption that victims have ownership right over their stories, which is a key premise in Meyers's argument, is much more problematic than may appear.     

Children's Understanding of Lies in Elementary School Years

The author examined whether children's understanding of lies exhibits developmental trends in the elementary school years. Four story contexts were presented to 51 first-grade students, 44 fourth-grade students, and 58 adults. These stories represented combinations of a protagonist's intention (truthful or deceptive) and the truth of the protagonist's message (true or false). The results showed that adults judged whether these messages were lies by considering the protagonist's intentions. By contrast, approximately 30% of first-grade students and some fourth-grade students did not consider intentions in making judgments, although they appropriately predicted the outcomes of the messages. These results suggest that children in the early elementary school years have a conception of lies different from that of adults, and their conception of lies becomes more sophisticated after middle childhood.     

Kant on Informed Pure Judgments of Taste

Two dominant interpretations of Kant's notion of adherent beauty, the conjunctive view and the incorporation view, provide an account of how to form informed aesthetic assessments concerning artworks. According to both accounts, judgments of perfection play a crucial role in making informed, although impure, judgments of taste. These accounts only examine aesthetic responses to objects that meet or fail to meet the expectations we have regarding what they ought to be. I demonstrate that Kant's works of genius do not fall within either of these categories. The distinguishing features of these works, namely, originality and exemplarity, become unrecognizable on these interpretations because originality and exemplarity lie in the work's ability to exceed one's expectations concerning its form and content. They contribute to artistic beauty through alternative transformation methods distinct from that of abstraction, namely, concept expansion and repudiation. These additional accounts of transformation lead to a rather surprising outcome: works of genius turn out to be paradigm cases where one can and indeed ought to form informed pure judgments of taste.