actions, silences and verbal formulations are being used to

(1973). International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 54:115-119 On Negative Capability A Critical Review of W. R. Bion's Attention and Interpretation1 André Green Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. JOHN KEATS (Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817) Trying to find out where the title of this book came from, I suddently realized that reading it could not conjure within me the feeling that its content directly dealt with any of the key-words supposed to represent the substance of the work. This led me to think that here again I was faced with one of those instances where the author, while trying to emulate and apply his model's theories, had come up with a container (the title) incapable of housing its content; the substance of the book, as in the case of analytic experience, could not be encompassed within the analyst's consulting room. Actually, the word 'attention' is not even mentioned in the index and as to the term 'interpretation', what it referred to in the book reminded me, had I had half a mind to forget about it, of the author's warning against the exaggerated importance and to go as far as the author, against the lack of value in the act of interpreting of the idea that it is necessarily relatedto the interpreter's knowledge, experience and personality (p. 105). In fact, the person responsible for the interpretation (my own position vis-à-vis this book I had to comment upon) must do away with the feeling of kinship he might be tempted to establish between himself and the object of his interpretation. To achieve this, he must free himself from his illusory possessions (assets as well as liabilities) in order to meet with a more open frame of mind what he will be faced with as intrinsically unknown. I had to shake off the feeling of how limited I was to give an account of this book in so far as it deals with matters I am not familiar with in the realms of mathematics, mysticism or Kant's philosophy to comply with the wish of the author, who expects that the reader will not so much have some knowledge transmitted to him, but rather that he will be affected by his reading. I was then beginning to understand more clearly the reference to the word 'attention', according to the meaning Freud and Bion give it as a function helping: 'periodically to search the outer world in order that its data might be already familiar if an urgent need should arise' (Freud, 1911p. 220). Nevertheless, Freud adds: 'Its activity meets the sense impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance.' I then saw the object of the book as aimed not to passive reading but as meeting the reader half way. Attention was not what was in the book, it was the book itself and that is the reason why the word did not appear in the index. Yet I find it necessary to point out a difference between Freud's and Bion's uses of this function. Freud's aim is a preventive one, familiarity having to be assured in case an urgent need should arise. Bion's aim is more a provocative one, intended as it

were to encourage a rushed meeting with what is unknown in both parties facing each other, to create the conditions of urgent need rather than to insure against the possible advent of the expectation of a happening. Attention is no doubt a complex process which links two receptive aspects: expectation and prospecting (probe). Yet I think that if one wanted to pinpoint one of the differences between what the author tried to define in his previous books (e.g. 1963pp. 18 19) and what he maintains in this new work on attention, it would be the way this process falls into its own trap: the Translated by Jacqueline Knobil Copyright André Green 1 Attention and Interpretation: A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups. By W. R. Bion. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Pp. 136. - 115 - inquiring function vanishes in the meeting with the object in so far as what is about to happen is a state of at-one-ness. In its essence, this state is unstable, unsuitable for direct knowledge and bound to change. All that can be said of this metaphorical moment which suspends the inquiring function is that it can only be expressed in terms of being. Yet no knowledge arises from it, because it is itself the point at which knowledge can start. This knowledge will re-emerge through the subsequent transformations of this state which, as such, evades being grasped through knowledge, since it deals with two unknown factors that the meeting brings together, unknown and probably impossible to know. The meeting itself is therefore not the point of origin of knowledge but will lead to it through the process of transformations that it will engender. This and this only will be accounted for in the interpretation. In his Elements of Psychoanalysis, Bion had already pointed out that attention was akin to preconception (pp. 18 19). Preconception is a state of expectancy rather than aspiration. Expectancy of an experience is expectancy of an object which is necessary for the fulfilment of the experience. The value of this assumption is that it implies, on the one hand, a kind of forecast of the manifestation of the object and, on the other hand, that the expectancy entails an unknown factor. Of the experience as it happened, it will be possible to say whether it comes close to (or is far from) the expected realization but never that the one cannot be distinguished from the other, because the expectancy includes an irreducible part of an unknown quality. One could say that the realization itself brings this unknown factor to the fore as an after-effect, in so far as the realization never coincides with the apprehension one has of it and that the superimposition of the realization on to the apprehension is such that this apprehension can only be a thing of the mind and cannot be accessible through the senses. This apprehension is not an act of cognition, since it is from the sentient

characteristics which the realization will bring forward that the realm of the cognizable springs. One should note at this point that if Bion openly refers himself to Kant's philosophy, Freud himself had upheld a similar view in his 'Project'. Previous to the formulation of attention as it appears in 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning', Freud's definition of it is close to Bion's: Attention then consists in establishing the psychical state of expectation even for those perceptions which do not coincide in part with wishful cathexes (Freud, 1895p. 360). The essential difference relates here to a state of expectancy which affects the recurrence of certain perceptive complexes, the state of aspiration having already been related to its past realization (the wish), whereas for Bion it seems that preconception comes, so to speak, before any realization. Nevertheless, in Freud as in Bion, there is one common distinction which brings them quite close to each other. In the 'Project', Freud points out several times that it is necessary to distinguish within the ego a permanent and constant fraction which unites the nucleus of the ego and the constant perceptual component by opposition to the inconstant perceptual component and to the changing investments of the ego. In the neurophysiological language of his time he records in terms of neurones the constant component to the thing and the changing component to its attributes or in short its predicates (1895pp. 323, 328, 331). Further in the text, Freud points out that the perceptive complexes are 'dissected into an unassimilable component (the thing) and one known to the ego from its own experiences (attribute, activity) what we call understanding' (p. 366). For the state of the thing, it is essential to be non-understood (p. 383). Bion gives a new meaning to these Freudian propositions. That which for Freud was unassimilable or not understood has become in Bion's own theoretical system that which can only be thought but not known. Whereas the author, in his previous works, seemed mostly interested in the study of the realization allowing the melting between preconception and realization (which for Freud corresponds to the variable component: attributes, activities, predicates), in this book the emphasis is more on the 'thing in itself'. At the beginning of the book he asks his reader to distinguish between that with which psychoanalytic experience presents us with (and that we tend to mistake for the ultimate reality of the patient) and the way in which this ultimate reality appears: Psychoanalysts should determine whether they are talking of means of communications including verbal formulation, as thingsin-themselves or whether they are talking of other things in themselves which the communication elements, gestures, - 116 - actions, silences and verbal formulations are being used to

represent (p. 5). The analytic space is filled with objects and it is via objects that we are led to conceive that there is a space to receive them. The senses cannot have access to this space, whereas they are necessary for us to have access to objects. 'Sensualization' of objects tends to close in as well as restrict this space, but on the other hand compels us to wonder out of which space the sensualization of objects was made possible. Sensualization of objects was implemented through the experiences of realization but the space involved also encompasses any experience of non-realization which can only be thought. Bion writes: 'I am thus postulating mental space as a thing in itself that is unknowable, but that can be represented by thoughts' (p. 11). This 'beyond the scope of knowledge' idea is essential not because it represents a limit to knowledge or because it leads us to take refuge in fundamental obscurity, but because it is the starting point of what there will be to know. If, from the beginning, we assign a place to an object we are in contact with through immediate knowledge whatever reservations we might establish as to the mode of knowledge, saying, for instance, that it is cathected before it is perceived we prematurely fill this object with some content which perhaps prevents us from following the sequence of states that will take place in our contact with the object. It is as essential for the assumptions of preconception as for that of the thing in itself that we keep an open mind as to the perspectives of transformation. In other words, it is important for the constant psychic component to appear as non-saturated so that we can follow the sequence of events that will lead us to the knowledge of the particular modes of saturation of the general form. From what we are able to know through the realizations which accomplish themselves by saturation, we will be able to evaluate how we came to accept the experience of going from the infinite to the finite, the non-formal to the formal, the unlimited to the limited. At one point or another, any preconception can be subjected to the impossibility of finding its realization. The development of thought depends on this non-realization, which engenders a form of limitation similar to that due to realization through the senses, but which in this case creates a counterpart of sensual experience in as much as it is associated with language. Yet language does not eliminate frustration; on the contrary, communication is impossible without frustration. It is an indication of tolerance towards frustration. Tolerance of frustration does not mean that one does not react, or reacts positively to it. On the contrary, it is a tolerance of what is happening (sadness, disappointment, resentment) in the sense of a mental phenomenon, i.e. in the sense of a lack of the thing which tolerates its state as a no-thing and its development into a state of thought. In this respect, hallucination appears as an anti-thought. It is not a means of representing but rather a state when the thing cannot be in a state of no-thing and

when it is impossible to distinguish through hallucination between the thing which is present and the thing which is absent. In this case, one could say that saturation precedes any form of realization and suppresses the expectancy of preconception, short-circuiting it, as it were. The formulation of these fundamental assumptions leads Bion to recommend a complete change of the analyst's attitude. This is probably the most striking contribution of his book. In fact, psychoanalysis rests on an act of faith. Yet this faith is specific in the fact that it does not imply a positively revealed truth whose content is definite. The act of faith constitutes the foundation from which any psychic production becomes reachable, outside its contingency. Bion uses the symbol 0 for this. 'I shall use the sign 0 to denote that which is the ultimate reality represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing in itself' (p. 26). At this extreme point, we do not have access via knowledge, we cannot even identify ourselves in any way whatsoever to what we must surmise as a hypothesis, without having any idea of it. All that belongs to the category of knowledge comes to us from 0 through that which evolves. That is the reason why the analyst can only be this 0 to be able to identify with the transformation products of this 0 and henceforth to interpret them. To meet this situation of being the starting point, he must deliver and free himself from any memory, any desire and any understanding by actively eschewing these attitudes. All knowledge is a loss of truth. The atmosphere of frustration in which Freud thought analysis must be carried on has a counterpart in the analyst who must disengage himself from his patient so as to be more able to meet him at his initial point: 'the exercises of discarding memory and desire must be seen as preparatory - 117 - to a state of mind where 0 can evolve' (p. 33). The experience of at-one-ment is this sharing out of which some thing can be 'become'. Memory and desire connive with possessiveness and sensuous greed. But confusion stems from the fact that the experience of at-one-ment looks like possessiveness and sensuous greed. In fact, this state is already the result of one of the aspects of separation from at-onement. On this point, it seems to me that Bion's position markedly diverges from the Kleinian School as if he intended to stress implicitly that Kleinian authors mistake, in their initial pre-suppositions, already transformed propositions with what made their transformation possible. This might be the result of a theory basing itself exclusively on object relationships. On the other hand, one may raise the question of Bion's closeness to some of Winnicott's theories. It might be interesting to compare the experience of at-one-ment and what Bion puts under the heading of 0 with what Freud calls absolute primary narcissism which as a state can never be met as such but which constitutes the starting point of the investments of the self and of the object. One can also wonder

whether, since the publication of Elements of Psychoanalysis (the emphasis in this book was mostly on the elements in as much as they constituted an extension to the realms of the senses, of myth and of passion, p. 11), the development of the author's thought has led him to support a point of view further and further away from these propositions, as, for example, when he now states that 'the central phenomena of psychoanalysis have no background in sense data' (p. 57). For the issue is to avoid the situation of false security that can be offered to the analyst by resorting to memory and desire in as much as they have a function of saturation which should be used to avoid the opening of unsaturation. This very state of unsaturation will help grasp in a better way the patient's constellations and the constant conjunctions imprinted on his psychic structure. In order to do so, the analyst must reach a sort of artificial blindness so as to strive to grasp the unknown in himself and in the patient. An important part of the book deals with the problem of communication, of relationship between meaning and expression in terms of relationships between container and content. Speech tries to contain emotion. It has to fight against other forms of expression which are not present in the communication as a visual imagery gesture or motion, which are absent in the transmitted meaning. The relationships between container and content can be defined according to three modalities: commensal, symbiotic or parasitic. The author's precise formulations deserve to be quoted for he expresses them better than anybody could in his place. By commensal, I mean a relationship in which two objects share a third to the advantage of all three. By symbiotic, I understand a relationship in which one depends on another to mutual advantage. By parasitic, I mean to represent a relationship in which one depends on another to produce the third, which is destructive of all three (p. 95). One should note the presence of two or three parameters in these situations. These communication problems are also approached in the study of the lie. For the liar, facts independent from thought cannot exist. Thought is always necessary to a lie, the one is inseparable from the other. But as far as truth is concerned, it does not require any formulation because it does not need to be thought of by the mind. It does not require a particular thinker, it is self-sufficient. Stressing in any way the thinker's individuality makes truth a subordinate of this individuality, which is impossible. Truth is silence, mindlessness. Sleep without dreams, death. We have left for the end the chapters in which Bion applies his conceptions to group analysis. Here, the author's language is even less direct than usual. This is probably a consequence of his elusive personality and also of the fact that this section deals with the modes of the psychoanalysts' relationships vis-à-vis each other in a field of their activity where they are not psychoanalysts and do not

behave as such, although the relationships involve psychoanalysis. I felt that the meanderings of the author's thought followed a path which, from my point of view, required more light, not because the formulations were debatable but because their scope for the future of psychoanalysis appears to me quite considerable. It seems quite right, as far as I am concerned, that the author should stress, as he does, the uneasiness present among psychoanalysts' groups because of the fact that the structuration of the groups led to a communication breach among individuals between what they live as the divine part of their person and the mystic (or genius), this engendering hatred within the group. The - 118 - relationships between the new mystic the creator of new ideas and the group are highly ambivalent. Even though the function of the group is to help bring forth a new genius to bloom, the group tries in fact to 'contain' it by directing its creative destructive power towards managerial tasks. Without any doubt, the psychoanalytic groups will put up quite a show of resistance before they recognize themselves in Bion's descriptions. Group institutionalization had the effect of containing the element of mystic revelation which is the foundation of its creative and destructive strength. Some will perhaps be shocked by the use of mystic. It seems to me that it should be understood as what corresponds to this state of ultimate truth, not in as much as it reveals it but in the sense that it might be likely to locate the point from which meaningful observable changes happen. Finally, I want to insist on this 'negative capability' (that Bion borrows from Keats) which heralds his realm of pure research. Language exchanges between the analyst and the analysand must open the road to a language which will not just be a prelude to action, but its substitute. A language in which a man 'is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason' (Keats). Basically, the analytic function is to lessen the persecution of thought by itself and on to itself by reaching a state unencumbered by memory, desire and understanding. This is reminiscent of the practices of oriental wisdom which are so popular nowadays. In the turmoil that our present world witnesses, it is certainly a tempting solution. Yet it makes one wonder whether this is the path that psychoanalysis should follow. In a certain way, Bion's book reminds one of the end of a game. But perhaps it is, to use the author's terminology, a question of vertex. REFERENCES BION, W. R. 1963 Elements of Psycho-Analysis London: Heinemann. [ ] FREUD, S. 1895 Project for a scientific psychology S.E. 1 [ ] FREUD, S. 1911 Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning S.E. 12 [ ]

- 119 - Green, A. (1973). On Negative Capability A Critical Review of W. R. Bion's Attention and Interpretation1. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 54:115-119