If we are capable of conceiving of mental time in Bion's terms we will be able to reach O, psychic reality -- as a-sensorial a state as possible. I wish to examine Bion's ‘scientific psychoanalysis' in which ‘scientific' refers to an act of faith, i.e. deliberate suspension of memory and desire, both of which result from sense impressions. We can achieve this by anchoring ourselves to present reality, the here and now, beginning sessions with our minds as close as possible to a tabula rasa – which cannot be totally achieved, as Bion reminds us, since so much has taken place between our birth and the present. The hope is that by doing this the psychoanalyst can unleash thoughts, actions and feelings the analysand is unaware of and therefore cannot control. If the analysand is aware, he/she can decide – unconsciously – whether or not to change (W.Bion, A Memori of the Future , II).

Bion's visionary drama is peopled by the unexpressed, time paradoxes, archaic, retarded, embryonic and senile, pre-natal and post-natal voices -- biographical fragments from infancy or adulthood which come into conflict with each other in unexpressed dialogue: impersonal symbols of time (Furio Di Paola, 1995). This is a fair description of Bion's trilogy A Memoir of the Future : Dreams , Presenting the Past and The Dawn of Oblivion . It is the essence of Bion's thought and a cross-section of what can take place in a session as he intends it.

Given our predilection for the rational in today's world, unordinary states of consciousness are looked upon with diffidence, suspicion and at times outright fear since they release the irrational – .therefore uncontrollable – aspects of human nature (Virginia Salles, 2003). These states can be released by a wide variety of stimuli: drumming, tribal dances, whirling (as in whirling dervishes), hallucinatory plants, different kinds of breathing exercises (pranayama) and LSD. It is not difficult to see why Bion's idea of a state free from memory, desire or comprehension was misinterpreted and feared in the 1970's and became one of the many scandals surrounding his work (Dino Riccio and colleagues, 1997). Of all his techniques, it was the most discussed and the most controversial in the psychiatric establishment.

Neuro-physiological research has demonstrated that partial or total sensory deprivation and repetition can take people outside of psychological time, releasing infinite personal or collective memories – a state in which they are unaware of surrounding space. According to Sonia Neves Langlands, Bion was also a thinker on complexity, characterized by non-reductionism, non-determinism, non-equilibrium and non-linearity. This also helps explain why he has been so misunderstood: the circular or spiralling nature of his concepts, the idea that an individual gains understanding through the understanding of others. He speaks of construction in psychoanalysis, not reconstruction of the analysand's history, but in terms of creative interaction; he speaks of transfert, but not in the sense of repetition of something that has already existed, as in Freud, but in the sense of transience, something being experienced for the first time (Sonia Neves Langlands).

Time , in the sense of ‘mental time', appears in all of Bion's theorizing – starting from ‘dream-like memory' (memory of psychic reality, the ability to forget and suspend desire and understanding) essential to the analyst in order to arouse those parts of the psyche unrelated to sensual experience in an attempt to reach O. Bion may trace mental time back to our “fish-like origins”. Could attaining O have to do with receiving echoes of messages sent by our gills to our consciousness? (Bion, The Dawn of Oblivion ).

It is clear that Scientific Psychoanalysis is based on advanced psychoanalytic methods ( Cogitations ) aimed at interpreting reality and consciousness. Bion is highly sceptical of a logical theory that can explain the results of psychoanalysis. He believes that ‘logical' and ‘illogical' should be allowed to co-exist until ‘evolution' resolves the dissonance between them. ( Cogitations ).

The basis of Bion's work – the core of his theory – is that the psychoanalyst's main purpose must be to search for the truth! And this truth has to do with psychic reality – whose internal time differs from external time, and this internal time must always be kept in mind during a session. Thus we can understand Bion's paradoxical propositions, such as that for an analysand years of analysis may be a split second dispersed in space, or that the distance in time between one proposition and another is akin to the distance between various elements in a space where all elements co-exist at once; or when he asserts that analysis can be thought of as a period of time flattened into a line or a thin surface made up of a moment.

As I have said, Bion believes that psychoanalysts must concentrate on non-sensual phenomena, which are related to what is commonly thought of as mental or spiritual experience. We must ignore sensual experience since it is formalized in memory. Analysands communicate information they consider to be important on the basis of their own criteria, and analysts must limit themselves to interpretations based on K (an almost mathematical symbol signifying knowledge), not L (love) or H (hate).

Thinking about time in Bion's terms means thinking about irrational time, an act of faith that enables us to attain dream-like memory (without memory or desire or understanding, constant conjunction, the selected fact, in unison with O) i.e., re-establishing ourselves in god (the Mother) and the evolution of god (without form, the infinite, the ineffable, the non-existent) in order to reach ultimate reality, absolute truth, the thing in itself! But we must first practice eliminating the lie that precludes this unison in O. In order for this to happen the psychoanalyst must be outside rational, linear time and observe what is taking place at the particular moment, without remembering the past or imagining the future! Bion believes that the only way to achieve this is to live in the present, to stop the flow of time! It seems that if we can achieve this we can come into contact with pure emotion, the unconscious, separate from superior elaboration (thought, reasoning and consciousness). In this way we can come into contact with our emotions at birth!

For this to happen we must suppress or partially suppress some of the alfa functions of our personality: paying attention, noticing and remembering, verbal thought. Do we need to re-evaluate or go back to ideograms – already seen at birth or new? By inhibiting our capacity to think, and therefore to remember and desire, are we taken back to the moment when we took our first breath? We have to disconnect ourselves from social and cultural interaction, from convention, from logic and metaphor. Is this the equivalent of unnamed fear, of psychic breakdown? Consequently in O we become a source of our own semantic interpretations and can only draw from our own unconscious forces . Are we forced to draw from emotions not governed by logical thought? I insert this question mark not so much in reference to thought as expressed by a rational mind but as a symbol. Beyond this symbol, according to Bion, there may be ways of thinking not yet totally recognized as such. (W.Bion, The Dawn of Oblivion , Introduction).

Claudio Neri also emphasizes the need for an act of faith in order to reach O. He considers F (faith) a factor in the psychic function of the analyst who must sustain a desperate anaysand who is without resources until such time as the desire to live is awakened. Neri reminds us that faith is accompanied by two particular kinds of feelings – addressed by Freud in Massenpsychologie un Ich-Anlyse (1921) and Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1928). The first is idealization: in faith something higher is at stake, something noble and extraordinary. The second is illusion: a mental state that preserves faith, keeping any sort of reality check at bay. I believe that not dealing with reality could imply perceiving the passage of time as faster or slower than it actually is. We know that time perception is closely related to the functions and physiology of the brain. We also know that Bion supposes that the mind and personality have physical counterparts in the central nervous system, (Bion, Memory of the Future – Dreams , chap. 38 ) and recommends we study the relationship between the body and the mind (personality or psyche) ( Cogitations). Edelman, Penrose and Searle are convinced there is a connection between mental and cerebral states. I believe Bion's act of faith is tantamount to what Brahmans or ascetics practice: fixing thought between two words (Could fixing on a selected fact be equivalent to our concept of container/contained, temporal/a-temporal, symmetry/a-symmetry?) or on a fixed point (ideogram?) in space. Brahman is reality, awareness. In Sanskrit it is defined as sat , cit , ananda, i.e. absence, pure thought or consciousness, happiness. Perhaps O corresponds to the fourth state of consciousness, that which follows deep sleep, as defined by Sankara, a Hindu master who lived around the middle of the 8 th century. This is a stage in which there is memory of the void of the mental scene being experienced at the moment. It could be defined as lucid deep sleep – i.e. absence of representations. This state presupposes stripping away all intent from our finite consciousness, abandoning original extroversion that always strives for our good and fears we will be harmed – a state of being outside of ourselves (M. Hulin, 1996). I hypothesize that dream-like memory is what Sankara defines as inner vigilant experience. Bion theorizes a multi-dimensional mental space the extension and characteristics of which are not not-thought-of or un-thinkable (Bion, Cogitations), and that ‘dream-like' memory is situated in this space, and the consequent experience of being in O. He proposes that we exercise our minds to remain fixed on the present moment, which will lead to the annulment of memory, desire, even comprehension and healing in order to experience whatever the encounter has in store, delving into the deepest recesses of ourselves and the other (at-one-ment) – O (L. Caldironi and M. Giampà, 2000). All this involves primitive stimuli and feelings in the analyst and in the analysand and sharpens emotions -- love, hatred and terror – to the point where they are almost unbearable. Bion's idea of space and time has to do with how long we can resist being separated from our mother's breast. During a session there is a psychoanalytic space-time dimension relating to mental phenomena that surpasses corporal reality, enabling communication at the subconscious level. This is what living in the present means, as opposed to a present frozen by sadistic and envious attacks which destroy past and future. The present during a session is characterized by moments of synthesis and constant conjunction with the chosen fact, enabling integration of previously dispersed elements, unleashing spontaneous memory, which Bion believes resides in psychic – not sensorial – reality.

According to Olga Belmonte Lara de Nieves and Elsa del Valle Echegaray (2004) this spontaneous memory is a conjunction observed in the oscillation between the schizo-paranoid and the depressive positions and in the flow of content into container. Nevertheless they consider Bion's space-time concept to be somewhat ambiguous since, though he always insists on its mental-emotional origins, at times he argues that there is a difference between mental time and objective, real space and time.

Paulo Cesar Sandler (2002) believes that people develop a “sense of reality” when they can tolerate a known object and an unknown one becoming one and the same. They do not deny the truth – as the idealist does – nor do they split it – as does the realist. A sense of truth enables us to be in what I believe to be the fundamental psychoanalytic position: the capacity to tolerate paradoxes without jumping in immediately to resolve them.

So just as Einstein felt it was more correct to speak in terms of space-time -- in that these two elements (spatial and chronological) are inseparable, so Bion feels it is correct to speak of space-time in a session.

The word ‘time' (‘Zeit' in German, ‘tempo' in Italian) basically means an irreversible succession of instants, minutes, hours, days, etc. The psychic life of an individual unfolds over time. All mental and comportmental acts – from the simplest to the most organized and complex – are located in a point along the chronological path of an individual's life. We take our Western concept of time from the Greek philosophers (programmed time), from Plato, who considers time “the moving image of eternity that proceeds according to numbers”. Aristotle considers it “the numbering of movement according to before and after”, and he is very explicit when he states that since in the nature of things only the soul, or the intellect therein, has the capacity to number, time could not exist without it (U. Galimberti, 2006) . Parmenide argues that the true essence of reality is eternal: where present, past and future co-exist: O.

Henri Bergson more closely reflects Bion's thought when he states that time can be thought of only in temporal, not spatial, terms. In order to understand the extent to which Bion's concept of time is influenced by Western philosophy -- the Greek philosophers and mystics – I suggest the work of Paulo Cesar Sandler (2002, 2006), and to what extent it is influenced by Indian philosophy, the work of Mario Giampà (2003).

I think it is important to note that in Indian philosophy the counterpart of Bion's ‘knowledge' is metaphysics' – that which is beyond nature (Renè Guénon).

Could ‘scientific psychoanalysis' be the equivalent of metaphysics in Eastern philosophy?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belmonte Lara de Nieves, Olga, del Valle Echegaray Elsa, Paradojas del Tempo Bion Deleuze – Alicia en el pais de las maravillas, Editorial Dunken, Buenos Aires, 2004.

Bion, Wilfred R., Attention and Interpretation. A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-analysis and Groups , Tavistock Publications, London , 1970.

Bion, Wilfred R., Cogitations , the estate of W.R. Bion, by arrangement with Mark Patterson and Francesca Bion. Italian translation by Partheope Bion Talamo and Silvio A Merciai, published by Armando, 1996, Rome .

Bion, Wilfred R., A Memory of the Future – the Dream , Italian translation by Partheope Bion Talamo and Gianni Nebiosi, 1993.

Bion, Wilfred R., A Memory of the Future – The Dawn of Oblivion , published by the Roland Harris Educational Trust, 1979. Italian translation by Francesca Lussana and Pierandrea Lussana. Cortina, 2007.

Calderoni, Luca, Giampà, Mario, La memoria come sogno, ‘Dream-like Memory' , http://www.psychomedia.it/neuro-amp/straord/b12-giampa.htm .

Di Paola, Furio, Il tempo della mente – saggio sul pensiero di Wilfred Bion , Ripatransone (AP) Editions, 1995.

Galimberti, Umberto, Dizionario di Psicologia , Utet, Turin, 2006.

Giampà, Mario, Bion e il pensiero filosofica indiano , Attualità in Psicologia , trimestrale in studi ed esperienze in psicologia, psichiatria e neuropsichiatria. Edizioni Universitarie Romane, vol. 19 – n. 3-4, 2004, Rome.

Guénon, Renè, La metafisica Orientale, Studi iniziatici , Naples, undated.

Hulin, Michel, Sankara e il Vedanta, Il pensiero Indiano , Vol. VII, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma, 1996.

Langlands Neves Sonia, Materia vivente e sistemi pensanti – pensiero e processo psicoterapeutico a partire dall'opera di Bion, Manuscript.

Neri, Claudio, Quali funzioni svolgono la fede e la fiducia nella seduta e nel lavoro analitico? Delivered at the Centro di Psicoanalisi Romano, March 19, 2004. Manuscript.

Riccio, Dino and colleagues. L'ultimo Bion a confronto con l'ultimo Freud sulle antinomie fondanti l'esistenza umana (nostre “cogitations”) , conference on Bion, Turin, 1997. Manuscript.

Safra, Gilberto, Fundamentos teologicos das teorias psicanalitica: Winnicott e o cristianismo, Bion e o hinduismo, IDE, n° 35, Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanàlise de Sao Paulo, Brasil, 2002.

Salles, Virginia, Le potenzialità terapeutiche degli stati non ordinari di coscienza, parte prima , Giornale Storico di Psicologia Dinamica, n° 54, Di Renzo publishers, 2003.

Sandler, Paulo C., O desassossego de Russell, as irrelevancias de Dirac , IDE n° 35, June, 2002.

Zimerman, David E., Bion da teoria à pratica, uma leitura didattica , Artmed Editora S.A., Porto Alegre, Brasil, 2004.

Mario Giampà is Psychoanalist of the Psychoanalytical Italian Association; Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association

Mail

mariogiampa@tiscali.it

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