To write a book about transformations is a preposterous undertaking, akin to writing about the nature of life on earth. One would begin writing and never finish since the transformations occurring during the process of writing would require additional chapters to address the unanticipated new developments. In a sense, the author would have embarked on a quixotic mission chasing the infinite. This book is about the topic of transformations in psychoanalysis; although this is a considerably narrower focus, anyone who has studied our field soon learns the immensity of scope within the purview of our profession. Indeed, psychoanalysis has always been about transformations, but what do we mean when we say something has undergone a "transformation?" There are many definitions of the word transformation and it is a widely used noun with unique meanings depending on the context: various fields of study such as Linguistics, Biology, etc., have highly specific usages. The general definition listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is "a marked change in form, nature or appearance" and, more specifically, "a metamorphosis during the life cycle of an animal." The meaning in Physics is given as "the induced or spontaneous change of one element into another by a nuclear process." Though there is no official definition of "transformation" in psychoanalysis, it seems to me that these three definitions come closest to what an analyst means when he uses this word.
When Freud (1933) stated “where id was, there ego shall be,” in essence he described “a marked change in form, nature or appearance.” Similarly, when we speak of a child as father to the man we are referencing “a metamorphosis during the life cycle of an animal” and, furthermore, when the analyst experiences a sudden and surprising association to a patient’s material we may say he is experiencing an “induced or spontaneous change of one element into another.” Bion (1965) was the first to propose a very specific psychoanalytic definition of transformation that is derived from the clinician’s observations of the evolution of an emotional experience that arises and then is developed over the course of an individual analytic session. He asks us to be mindful of the metamorphosis of an affect from its unanticipated appearance in the session and through its evolution as the analyst and analysand, by means of their spontaneous associations, “transform” the emotional experience into a narrative. I believe that what is unique to Bion’s contribution is his stance toward those associations: he does not search these to uncover the hidden unconscious meanings, but rather his focus is on the free associations as the transformative process by which meaning is created.
Recently I was reading a biography of Basho (Reichhold, 2013), the great Japanese poet who originated haiku, which the author stated “capture[s] both the momentary and the eternal in a small poem” (p. 9) and it struck me that the same may be said about an individual psychoanalytic session. A single clinical hour is a snapshot of a moment together uniquely shared by a particular analyst with a particular patient, colored by the shadings of affects that enliven the hour, which in turn are generated by the unconscious communications between their respective minds; each psyche populated by the unique demographics of their personal representational worlds (Brown, 1996). Thus, the “snapshot” aspect of the session also opens to experiences that border on the eternal and I believe that we can say the same about an analytic hour that Freud (1900) said about a dream:
There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.
(p. 525)
But what is the session’s navel which in Freud’s view about a dream may be approached but never fully grasped? Following Bion (1965), it is an unknown emotional experience from which the associations of the patient and analyst emanate; furthermore, each association in itself is a link in the process of transformation that occurs within each member of the analytic dyad. That is to say that the analyst and patient are equally affected by the ambient emotion of the session but that each partner transforms it through his own storehouse of personal experiences and internal objects. Bion (1965) distinguishes between the process of transformation and a representation which is the endpoint of that process. In my view, a free association in the patient or the analyst is a point in the transformational process that yields a representation of the shared emotional experience alive in the clinical hour at a particular moment. When the patient and analyst are actively engaged in an analytic encounter, what we call an analytic process, their minds are generating mutual associations that aim to represent, and give meaning to, the here-and-now emotional atmosphere. The respective associations of analysand and analyst draw from an undercurrent of projective and introjective processes and activation of areas in each that resonate with the emotional experience being transformed; thereby creating a complex skein, “a tangle of [waking] 1 dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled,” but about which the analyst may offer an approximated guess, i.e., an interpretation.
This book rests on five basic concepts that underpin most or all of the chapters. I will review each of these briefly in the following paragraphs and these concepts will be further developed in the various chapters. In my previous (2011a) book, Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious: An Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian Perspectives, I related Thomas Friedman’s (2005) publication, The World Is Flat, which captured the interconnectedness of the world made smaller by globalization and the internet, to intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. It struck me that Friedman’s discussion of the inescapable impact of nations on each other paralleled the realization in analysis of the inevitable psychic interdigitation between analyst and analysand. In his most recent (2016) work, Thank You for Being Late, Friedman goes beyond the “flat world” and addresses the sense in Europe and North America that our world is accelerating rapidly, leaving many people feeling that it has already spun out of control. A potent combination of ever-advancing technology, financial markets on a hair trigger and the quickening effects of climate change are frighteningly unsettling.
I put “accelerating rapidly” in italics to denote the first underlying assumption for this book in order to accentuate the incredible speed with which the mind transforms emotional experience into meaningful representations. In my clinical work, I have been increasingly impressed with the alacrity that new associations are created and may appear in a surprising flash of reverie, an unexpected spontaneous interpretation, a quip or joke, the appearance of a long-forgotten memory or a night dream that brings further meaning to something left unfinished in the remains of the day’s session. All of this happens unconsciously and presents the analyst with a valuable ally if he or she can train oneself to attend to these experiences which often seem “irrelevant” or mental jetsam. However, in my view these phenomena are the products of our “unconscious psychological work” (Ogden, 2009, 2010), which are produced spontaneously and in a microsecond.
A second foundational principle of this book is the notion of unconscious work and the speed with which it is achieved. This concept itself links with unconscious phantasy, dream work, alpha function, free association and reverie; processes that do their “work” within the blink of an eye. Theodor Reik (1927, 1934; Chapter 5) was a pioneer in advocating the analyst have his mind receptively open to “surprise,” a product of our unconscious work. Later, in the early 1950s, Kleinian analysts inspired by the work of Paula Heimann (1950) 2 promoted the use of countertransference as an “instrument of research” into the patient’s unconscious. 3 North American analysts, beginning in the 1970s through their studies of enactments (Jacobs, 1986, 1999) and intersubjectivity, highlighted the role of the analyst’s unconscious in co-constructing joint narratives, though these approaches did not attend to the detailed and instantaneous unconscious work always at play beneath these more conscious phenomena. I hope that the readers of this volume will come away with an appreciation of the ubiquity of these processes: the nature of unconscious work in the analyst and analysand that gives meaning to emotions operative in the session, the speed with which this occurs and the therapeutic utility of learning to use these phenomena in one’s clinical work.
A third guiding principle in this book is the concept of intersubjectivity and the related perspective of intersubjective field theory, both of which comprise a broad area of study that has been written about extensively from various points of view. In my (2011) book on this topic I emphasized the unconscious processes that underpinned intersubjective manifestations: unconscious to unconscious communication fostered by mutual projective and introjective identifications between analyst and patient that serve to bring meaning to emotional experiences evoked by their therapeutic encounter. In this present study, I advance these ideas further by expanding on the concept of unconscious work as the spontaneous production of symbols and metaphors that transform and represent the emotions active in the session. Since these occurrences unfold spontaneously in the session, the analyst must train himself to attend to reveries, random thoughts, etc., and learn to use these “messengers” as an instrument of his or her clinical technique. Intersubjective field theory that combines the notion of the unconscious intersubjective connection between the analyst and analysand with a study of the emotional field that arises from that interconnection. The concept of an analytic field denotes the creation of a third psychic presence from the unconscious intersection between the minds of patient and analyst, like a child born to two parents who, though carrying the lineage of each parent, is its own psychic agency that has a subsequent impact upon the parents.
Furthermore, a fourth fundamental principle inherent in what I have been saying is the centrality of affect. Where classical analysts placed greatest importance on listening for drive derivatives as revealed when reading between the lines of the patient’s associations, many contemporary analysts follow the twists and turns of emotional experience in the session. 4 I find focusing on the evoked affects of the session and how these are given meaning by the analyst and patient through their respective transformations of those emotions in the immediacy of the clinical hour to be an additional way of approaching the clinical data separate from the classical technique of ferreting meaning from the patient’s associations. Bion (1965) stated this difference when he said:
For a greater part of its [psychoanalysis] history it has been assumed that a psycho-analytic interpretation has as its function the rendering conscious of that which is unconscious ... [and that] The differentiation I wish to introduce is not between conscious and unconscious, but between finite and infinite.
(p. 46)
Finally, a fifth guiding premise is the importance of the process of dreaming, whether awake or asleep. Freud’s (1900) comprehensive study of dreams and the process of dreaming addressed night dreams and in many respects this colossal work was the core for much of his later writings. Similarly, Bion (1962b, 1992) formulated the notion that the processes of dreams described by Freud also operated constantly, whether we were awake or asleep, and this theory was a primary kernel from which many of his subsequent contributions developed.
A patient began a session by saying he had seen his old lover on the street and was pleased to no longer experience the deep agony that pained him after their break-up. His mood took a nostalgic turn as he mournfully spoke of her irresistible beauty and sculpted body: even at her age, no longer young, her body is perfection for him. He remembered how peaceful he felt being with her during their good moments. He pinched the tips of his fingers together, brought them to his lips and then quickly pulled them away in an audible kiss as though saluting her magnificence. I think of his recent life-threatening illness and say that her youthful perfection must have felt like it helped to repair his frightening brush with death, like a fountain of youth. He goes on to tell me of her allure, that no one could resist her. Suddenly I find myself in a reverie, thinking of a scene from the movie, Interview with the Vampire, in which Christian Slater, a reporter who interviews Brad Pitt’s vampire, begs to be turned into a vampire after hearing about the cruel beauty of that world to which he has now been seductively drawn.
I associated my reverie with the analysand’s longing and, knowing that he enjoyed the cinema, said that as he was speaking a scene from the film Interview with the Vampire came to mind, which I think was my mind’s way of depicting something about the pining he felt in the moment, and I shared it with him. He quickly talked about how he enjoys his time alone though he also values and needs intimacy, but the romance with his girlfriend came with a very high price tag. He went on to elaborate his longing and his thoughts then turned to seeing his favorite nephew who was coming to town the next day; he’s like a son. However, his thoughts soon returned to his ex-lover and the painful intimacy between them. I thought of the word “sublime,” which in Romantic period art was viewed as a mixture of awe, beauty and terror, and said that he was telling me he felt helplessly drawn to the mixture of awesome beauty alongside terror that she evoked in him. My comment elicited many more associations from the patient about the mixture of awe and fear of his former paramour and it was at this point that I felt we had made emotional contact, which I did not especially feel during the earlier part of the session.
The reader will note that this session is presented shorn of history, age of the patient, details about his lover, review of the analytic relationship, which transferences are active, etc., and instead consider it in its raw form. The idea here is for the analyst to start each session, as both Freud (1912) and Bion (1965, 1967b) have suggested, with a clear mind free of any particular agenda in order to achieve a state of mind that is maximally receptive (Brown, 2016a, Chapter 5) to communications from the analysand and/or from within the clinician. I think this may be what Basho was getting at when he wrote:
old pond:
a frog jumps into
the sound of water
(1681–1682)
An “old pond” may be seen as the stilled listening surface of the analyst’s mind awaiting a “frog” thought, emanating from within himself or from the patient, to impact that surface; or, perhaps, how repetitive “old pond” material requires the emergence of something new, a “splash” or unexpected shock to animate a stagnant surface. 5 I experienced such a surprise when the Interview with the Vampire reverie crossed my mind: until that point much of what the patient had to say was dynamically accurate, reflecting important insights gained during the analysis, but now deployed repetitively as an infertile “old pond.” Why did this particular reverie spring to mind at this moment or, put another way, what emotions were being transformed by this reverie? It is unusual for me to reference vampires since they carry little interest to me: there are many other films I might have unconsciously employed instead, such as Black Widow about a woman in serial marriages to wealthy husbands who “mysteriously” die.
On reflection, my unconscious could not have come up with a more accurate representation of what the patient and I had been lulled into ignoring by his paeans to his former lover. The analysand began the session announcing that he was pleased to have seen his ex-girlfriend and was not overly upset; however, his longing for, and idealization of, her body upended his calm. I found his pining for her both charming and sad: after his initial comment about feeling free of her, he was drawn back into the familiar orbit of worshipping her beauty. Feeling somewhat frustrated, I tried to cajole him out of this ensorcelled state by interpreting its defensive purpose – that he immersed himself in this blissful state, a “fountain of youth,” to defend against his recent serious illness. (I might have been more empathic instead and tuned into his longing, but it felt familiarly repetitive and so I turned to the defense interpretation.) Suddenly the Interview with the Vampire reverie floated into my mind and I thought it was my unconscious transformation of his longing and the toll it took on his present life, so I shared the scene of Christian Slater begging to be made a vampire. My patient instantly replied that that intimacy “came with a very high price tag,” which introduced a new element, i.e., the emotional cost of his continued immersion in his idealizing phantasy.
I suspect that the phrase, “came with a high price tag,” registered unconsciously with me and initiated a transformational process that eventuated in the word “sublime” coming to mind. At that time, I was working on Chapter 7 in this book on the sublime in J. M. W. Turner’s paintings, a theme in much Romantic period art that captures the amalgam of terror and beauty in nature. Thus, the analysand’s phrase, “high price tag,” was like a day residue that instigated my unconscious work to produce the word “sublime” as a reverie. I then offered an interpretation that underscored his being captivated by her dangerous beauty, which had the very positive effect of the patient recognizing and intensely feeling his profound fear of the woman that he also held in awe. In retrospect, it seems that the emotional navel of this session had to do with the analysand’s deep longing for, and terrible fear of, his girlfriend that was kept forcibly at bay by the idealization of his lover. Slowly this realization first came to my mind in the Interview with the Vampire reverie that introduced the notion of longing and my interpretation addressed his desire for some irresistibly macabre beauty. However, his mention of the “high price tag” of being with her initiated a transformational process in me that created the word “sublime,” which referred to her beauty but also introduced his profound fear of his girlfriend. My “unconscious psychological work” (Ogden, 2009, 2010) gave representation to the fear component of the analysand’s experience and furthered the process of transformation from my first interpretation that emphasized his longing; thus deepening our shared appreciation of the emotions that seemed to be at the heart of this session.
In his last paper, James Grotstein (2014) spoke of the ancient Greek concept of flux, which holds that the only thing that is constant is change and that the change itself may be imperceptible. As Heraclitus, a leader of that school of thought, famously said, “ No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The same may be said about psychoanalysis – ever evolving as a body of knowledge and clinical practice – and so too the clinical hour. It is in this spirit that I suggest the following model of the psychoanalytic process that develops between the analyst and patient as an overarching theory for this book; that analytic treatment involves
the active here-and-now process of continuous transformations of affects arising in the intersubjective field to create new meaning, which is achieved through a perpetual, unconscious, joint process of dreaming and Nachträglichkeit (après-coup), made possible through the linked alpha functions of patient and analyst – all of which is enabled by, and depends upon, a stable analytic setting/frame.
I realize this is quite a mouthful of psychoanalytic theory, dense and tightly woven, and one of my aims in this book is to unpack this assertion in the book’s chapters. But first, how are these factors evidenced in the clinical vignette above?
“The active here-and-now process of continuous transformations of affects arising in the intersubjective field to create new meaning ...” This material from the clinical hour focuses exclusively on what is happening in the immediacy of the encounter between my patient and me and my emphasis is on the unconscious dimensions of this engagement. Addressing what is occurring in the moment is not a new perspective and has been central to clinical practice in most analytic approaches. Even classical analysts who emphasize an infantile neurosis as the source of the transference, find that the repetition of the transference neurosis makes its appearance as “not an event of the past, but as a present day force” (Freud, 1914, p. 151). Klein and her followers have underscored the value of interpreting in the here-and-now (Steiner, 2017) and making linkages to the past (Spillius, 2007), but also offer a model of transference that is based upon the externalization of the analysand’s internal world into the therapeutic relationship that configures the transference and countertransference active in the present. Technical innovations by contemporary Ego Psychologists (Busch, 2011; Gray, 1996), what they term close process monitoring, focus on showing the workings of defensive maneuvers to patients as these arise in the session. Betty Joseph (1985), too, has aptly demonstrated her skill in “showing” the patient how his or her pathology is being played out at a particular point in the clinical hour.
I am suggesting another component to working in the here-and-now which views the therapeutic couple as engaged in actively transforming emotional experience that is unknown (unconscious) to both of them because the affects are repressed and/or unrepresented. The patient began the session by speaking mournfully about his former lover, but this was familiar territory as he saluted her beauty. I felt there were affects that this repetitive talk kept at bay, thus I consciously searched my memory to connect his thoughts with something more “significant” and suggested that fantasies about her on this day were like a “fountain of youth” that served to quell his recent serious health scare. While this interpretation was surely correct on a dynamic level, it did not reach him emotionally. In contrast to my deliberative effort in crafting the fountain of youth interpretation, the Interview with the Vampire reverie appeared unbidden and signaled that my unconscious was at work to represent the affect of longing (Christian Slater longing to be turned into a vampire). Later in the session, cued by the patient’s saying that the romance came with “very high price tag,” a one word reverie, “sublime,” came to mind, which broadened the unconscious terrain in which my analysand and I were traveling. It was through this ping-ponging of unconscious communications that the patient and I progressively transformed the previously unknown emotions permeating the session into an understanding that he struggled with longing for his former girlfriend and his terror of her.
“... which is achieved through a perpetual, unconscious, joint process of dreaming and Nachträglichkeit (après-coup)...” However, it was Ogden’s (2004a, 2005) and Ferro’s (2002b) emphasis on the relevance of Bion’s theory of dreaming/reverie formation to generating these elements of the field that moved our understanding forward of how these “thirdness-es” arose between analyst and analysand. Ferro, more than other authors, applied Bion’s (1965) theory of transformations to help the clinician appreciate the moment-to-moment shifts of how emotional experience in the session was actively and unconsciously being worked on to create reveries, i.e., waking dream thoughts. Finally, in this very brief review, both Cassorla (2005, 2008) and I (Brown, 2011a, 2015b) have carefully explored the process of mutual dreaming in the analyst and patient by which the shared unconscious phantasy of the couple (analytic third) is formed and then subsequently transformed within the analytic field. This process of shared and interactive dreaming in the formation of representations in statu nascendi in the session is a central background concept for this book. In my opinion, Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit is a special type of dreaming by which a (usually) past traumatic experience lays fallow – split off or dissociated – in the mind and awaits a mind capable of dreaming to give it representation. 6
We can see this constant process of mutual dreaming at work in the session above: when my patient talked about his near helplessness in the presence of his paramour’s allure and how my unconscious represented that emotion with the Interview with the Vampire reverie which I shared with him as a sort of interpretive comment. His response was to think about the “high price tag” emotional cost of being with his girlfriend which brought the concept of the “sublime” to my mind and my conscious association to beauty and terror. I was able to dream/represent an experience which had remained unknown to both of us; that he was truly terrified of this woman and it was through a mutual unconscious process that the recognition of his terror was achieved.
Until the word “sublime” spontaneously came to me, the emotional depth and strength of his fear had not been sufficiently appreciated. This process is yet another bedrock concept in this book.
“... made possible through the linked alpha functions of patient and analyst ...” The concept of mutual dreaming by the analyst and patient depends upon the rapid mutual unconscious communications between their linked alpha functions. In another publication, I (Brown, 2012; Chapter 2) refer to alpha function as the “engine of transformations” and in an optimally functioning analytic process the analyst and analysand dream/transform the ambient emotions of the intersubjective field; what Cassorla (2008) terms “dreams for two.” The subject of dreaming is discussed more extensively as follows.
“... all of which is enabled by, and depends upon, a stable analytic setting/ frame. ” The analytic setting has been discussed by many analysts from Freud to Klein to Winnicott, Bleger and Andre Green, just to name a few contributors. The setting (or frame) refers to the physical aspects of one’s office and other practical qualities such as fees, appointment times, vacations and other absences, etc. But beginning with Winnicott (1955) we have focused on the deep unconscious significance the analytic frame carries for both the analyst and analysand. Bleger (1967/2013; Chapter 6), in particular, has addressed the ways in which the stable frame holds in abeyance the more primitive anxieties that the analytic couple are not ready to face and that disruptions to that setting/frame can “release” these disorganizing anxieties. Thus, an unstable or destabilized setting may lead to a sudden influx of primitive emotions that threaten to overrun the analytic process.
I have been describing a process by which unnamed (repressed or unrepresented) emotional experience is gradually transformed from a purely affective state to one that is conceptual in nature and how this transformation is achieved through a complex intersubjective operation. In my (2011a) previous book, Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious: An Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian Perspectives, I offered a theory of intersubjectivity that emphasized its unconscious aspects. Briefly put, I built on Freud’s (1912) famous metaphor of the telephone as a model for unconscious communication and suggested that Freud’s (1894) notion of projection elaborated by Klein’s (1946) concept of projective identification, Bion’s (1959) proposal of communicative projective identification together with Ferenczi’s (1909) contribution of introjection, could account for how one unconscious communicated with another (Freud, 1915a). Further, I asserted that Bion’s theory of alpha function could explain how unconscious experiences in the analyst or patient were both encoded and decoded by the sending and receiving unconscious.
In addition, this transformational process is akin to, and enabled by, Bion’s (1962b, 1992) elaboration of Freud’s (1900) theory of dreaming. Freud introduced the term dream-work to describe how the unconscious wish, pressuring for expression in consciousness yet barred by the censor, was disguised in order to allow a partial expression in consciousness. It was dream-work which offered a representation of the censored wish by creating a symbol 7that could later be decoded to reach the unconscious wish contained within it. Bion did not take issue with Freud’s dream theory but instead expanded upon it by broadening Freud’s dream-work to include the notion that we are always dreaming, while awake and asleep (this is discussed in much greater depth in Chapter 2). Bion’s elaboration of dream-work evolved to his promulgating alpha function as the structure responsible for representing raw emotional experience as “thinkable thoughts” that were suitable for unconscious communication. Reveries, in this model, are the transformational products of the unprocessed affective experience in the here-and-now of the clinical hour and are living phenomena born from the communicating alpha functions of the analyst and patient actively engaged in unconsciously giving representation to their shared emotional experience.
This book is divided into 12 chapters (including this Introduction) in which the concepts described earlier are further elaborated and discussed in greater detail from a variety of different perspectives. I am aware that to explore the topics outlined in this Introduction would require several volumes since the collective chapters touch on much of the body of psychoanalytic thinking and practice; however, my focus is on the various processes of transformation that are addressed in the individual chapters. Most chapters include extensive clinical material to illustrate the theoretical points and ground the concepts in clinical practice. Chapter 2, “Transformational aspects of countertransference,” traces the concept of countertransference from Freud’s writings through the present and follows the transformation of this concept over nearly 100 years of psychoanalytic thinking. The discussion begins with Freud’s early observations about “countertransference” and follows how subsequent generations of analysts viewed and clinically applied the analyst’s emotional responses. This overview concludes with a discussion of concepts of intersubjectivity, field theory and other contemporary theories. This chapter also sets the stage for subsequent chapters that deepen our understanding of the emotional engagement between analyst and patient.
Chapter 3, “Bion’s discovery of alpha function: The engine of transformations,” examines the development of alpha function, which I consider among Bion’s most important contributions. I explore how Bion’s “discov-ery” resulted from the intersection of several tributaries in his life: his war experiences in World War I, his expansion of Freud’s theory of dreaming, clinical work with psychotic patients and his marriage to Francesca Bion. Chapter 4, “Bion’s Transformations and clinical practice,” is a close reading of his third major book that focuses on the clinical implications of this difficult work. Interestingly, he hardly mentions his two previous books, Learning from Experience and Elements of Psychoanalysis, in Transformations; Chapter 3, therefore, is necessary and foundational for fully understanding Chapter 4.
Chapter 5, “The analyst’s receptivity: Evolution of the concept and its clinical application,” is a somewhat whimsical exploration of the analyst’s receptivity, a central clinical concept that has not received much attention in the literature. I present a clinical vignette which I bring to three imagined “supervisions” with Freud, Theodor Reik and Bion to illustrate their clinical views on this subject, highlighting the evolution of the concept of the analyst’s receptivity across the years as revealed in their consultations with me. Chapter 6, “Ruptures in the analytic setting and disturbances in the transformational field of dreams,” investigates Bleger’s (1967/2013) classic paper on the subject of the analytic setting and discusses current views on this subject. I also discuss the analysis of the patient in Chapter 5 (“analyst’s receptivity”) through the lens of attacks on the analytic setting. Additional clinical material is given regarding the analysand’s propensity to disrupt the analytic setting by abruptly ending the analysis. Thus, Chapters 5 and 6 together offer a “binocular view” of different aspects of the analytic process with the same analysand.
Chapter 7, “The unbearable glare of living: The Sublime, Bion’s theory of ‘O’ and J. M. W. Turner, ‘Painter of Light’,” is a short biographical study of the British landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, through the lens of Bion’s theory of “O,” which is the ineffable origin of that which is transformed. In addition to the usual attention to the subject’s family, etc., I also suggest that a motive in many of his paintings seemed to be an attempt to explore the essence of light itself, which held great meaning in his personal life and his work. In Chapter 8, “Three unconscious pathways to representing the analyst’s experience: Reverie, countertransference dreams and joke-work,” I explore three means of representing the unconscious experience of the analyst in the clinical hour and propose a common process by which each of these transformations is created. Extensive clinical material from the analysis of a man is given to illustrate the spontaneous appearance of a reverie, countertransference dream and a joke in my mind and how these phenomena were used technically to foster the treatment.
Chapters 9, “From ashes to ashes: The heroic struggle of an autistic boy trying to be born and stay alive,” and 10, “The capacity to tell a joke: Reflections from work with Asperger’s children,” explore the concept of “autistic transformations” in analytic work with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. These transformations are characterized by a flattening out of emotional experience, a sense of a black hole where a self ought to be and a relative absence of understanding metaphor, including a blunted or absent sense of humor. Both chapters are anchored by extensive clinical material to illustrate autistic transformations and in Chapter 10 I describe my young patient’s growing ability to comprehend and tell a joke as a pathway to greater cognitive and interpersonal flexibility. In Chapter 11, “‘Notes on memory and desire’: Implications for working through,” I raise the question of how can we understand the process of working through if we practice analysis with an emphasis on the here-and-now and “without memory and desire.” This approach seems at odds with the usual analytic perspective of the slow, step-by-step working through. Clinical material from the long analysis of a young man from latency into late adolescence is offered to illustrate changes that occur on the immediate and more long-range levels. In the final Chapter, “Conclusion: On Freud’s “the question of a Weltanschauung” – a world of perpetual transformation?”, some of the main themes of the book are reviewed in the light of the question “whether the ideas and concepts adumbrated here, as well as their clinical applications, suggest a new Weltanschauung for psychoanalysis; a world view that emphasizes constant change, evolution and growth.”
1 I inserted “waking” in reference to Bion’s (1962b) notion of “waking dream thought,” also known as “reverie.”
2 Her first analyst was Theodor Reik.
3 Heinrich Racker (1951) simultaneously in Buenos Aires advocated much the same stance, though Heimann’s and his work were unknown to each other.
4 Contemporary French (Green, LaPlanche, Miller, etc.) analysts have proposed a “return to Freud” and have reinterpreted drive theory in creative directions; however, these developments are being the scope of this book.
5 I assume that the reader may also have his or her own interpretations of Basho’s haiku.
6 This mind capable of dreaming may be another person or, perhaps, a part of the patient’s mind in which the capacity for dreaming has not yet matured. This may be the case with Freud’s (1918) “Wolfman” who experienced a trauma at 18 months that exceeded his representational capacity, but which he was able to literally dream at four and a half years old; ostensibly because his ego capacities had further developed.
7 A process also referred to as figurability by many authors, e.g., Green (1999), Botella and Botella (2005).