The aesthetic development: Bion, Meltzer and the poetic spirit of psychoanalysis

by Meg Harris Williams

Sao Paulo, August 2008

There are three main senses in which psychoanalysis can be said to have acquired an aesthetic dimension. These are: the psychoanalytic model of the mind; the nature of the psychoanalytic encounter as an aesthetic process; and the evolution of psychoanalysis itself as an art-science. These things are of course interdependent, but it is also useful to note their distinctness. I shall be mainly concerned here with the aesthetic qualities of the psychoanalytic process - something which Bion and Meltzer increasingly emphasized, and which they hoped could be defined with more precision and vividness with the help of poetry and poetic philosophy.

To Bion’s emphasis on the nature of psychoanalytic observation and the observer-observed, Meltzer has added the psychoanalytic method as aesthetic object – the fundamental object of observation. Our aesthetic responses in all areas are founded on the original, primordial knowledge attained by the infant’s first perception of the beauty of the world as seen in the mother or breast-as-combined object: “In the beginning was the breast and the breast was the world” (Meltzer 1986, p. 204). So the goal of the psychoanalytic encounter becomes that of restoring or reshaping any points of thwarted or stunted growth (Money-Kyrle’s “misconceptions”), not through direct action on the part of the analyst but rather, by facilitating renewed contact with the mind-feeding roots of the psychoanalytic method as aesthetic object. Thwarted development, mental illness, dis- and un-integration, can all be seen in a new light: that of emotional failure to maintain this aesthetic contact. The focus switches from the minute variations of psychopathology to the mysterious complexities of aesthetic reciprocity, which regulates the individual’s ethical development in a way analogous to poetic “inspiration”. This is the “psychoanalytic spirit” that Bion says he hopes will “endure for hundreds of years” (1997, p. 34).

Meltzer saw the embryonic science as pursuing its own internal logical development, rather like the “natural history” of the psychoanalytic process itself (1967). This internal inevitability of evolution is in fact, he says, his “faith” (1978, I:27). Not only do aesthetic features and preoccupations play an increasingly prominent role, they do in fact become logically necessary to sustain the psychoanalytic development (1978, I: 3-4). To describe the evolution of its “logically necessary propositions”, he borrowed a metaphor from Freud of winding a garland of flowers about a wire (1978, I: 4). The wire is the poetic spirit of “becoming” and it leads, in the Bion-Meltzer model of development, to the domain of aesthetics, which Meltzer saw as constituting the ultimate category of Bion’s Grid for categorising the development of thoughts. In his exposition of the logical advance of psychoanalysis, the method and the model of the mind interdigitate and adjust themselves step by step to the Platonic Idea of Psychoanalysis.

To suggest therefore that psychoanalysis is entering an ‘aesthetic’ phase of development, or rather of conceptualising its own ontology, is to be concerned with such things as how containers for meaning (symbols) become shaped; with the subtleties of ‘conversations between internal objects’ (Meltzer) as a form of aesthetic response; and with the spiritual problems of relating to the aesthetic object in mediating our contact with the Platonic realm of ideas. In Meltzer’s view, artist and scientist were never separated in Bion’s mind - by contrast with Freud. (1985, p. 523). The only thing that changed in Bion’s account of psychoanalytic evolution was his use of metaphor, which increasingly aligned itself to the world of art and fiction. He compares this evolution to the way that algebraic geometry lay ‘implicit’ in Euclidean geometry: ‘that implicit truth was a kind of sleeping beauty waiting to be rescued… the truth hadn’t altered, it had become explicit.’ (2005, p. 92). Like Meltzer, Bion focuses on Melanie Klein’s ‘implicit’ thinking that existed in her practice rather than her theory, awaiting a more formal articulation. This again relates directly to the need to consider more closely the nature of psychoanalysis as an art form, with a capacity for generating unconscious meanings not only about its individual participants but also about itself as an evolutionary science. Such meanings may only become formulable ‘centuries later’.

The idea of the method being an art form started almost tentatively, since its clinical use was not particularly evident. ‘What sort of artists can we be?’ asked Bion (1980, p.73). He said the domain of modern psychoanalysis is ‘much wider than that known to classical analysis’ (1974, I: 39). The original model of single-vertex science was inadequate and indeed did not properly describe the method that Freud had developed (Meltzer 1978). Meltzer calls this ‘Promethean science’, an omnipotent approach. It went with the idea of ‘cure’ which in its straightforward sense was realised to be a chimera; Bion compared it to the song of the Sirens, which placed the end as more important than the means, and when the end was reached, it actually turned out to be nothing but a pile of old bones.

An ‘aesthetic’ model which is in line with artistic and poetic ideas of creativity, assumes a more complex and dramatic field of mental operation, and has a constructive relationship with descriptive - rather than explanatory - science. It is based on tolerating contrary emotions of love and hate, establishing tensions between different cognitive perspectives, and seeking for congruences. These emotional and cognitive tensions create a space ‘scintillating with meaning’ (Meltzer). Bion defines this mental space as ‘scientific space, or religious space, or aesthetic space’ (Bion 1974, I: 39).

The three vertices of science, art and religion represent necessary orientations towards knowledge, and they all need to be deployed simultaneously in order for symbols to form that contain the meaning of emotional experiences. Bion says they need to be held in a tension that is not too slack (which would mean there was no dialogue) – and not too tense (which would mean they were too confrontational to interpenetrate across the caesura that joins or divides them). The scientific vertex represents observation of the outside of the object and its external qualities – it is a mode of projective communication, though not of the intrusive sort (unless it is employed omnipotently). The artistic vertex allows the voice from the interior of the object to speak out, and is received in an introjective way. While the religious vertex relates to the Unknown and Unknowability of the object, and hence to the future shape which the mind may take after it has ingested its emotional experience and undergone a type of catastrophic change, however small or insignificant this may appear to a detached observer. Bion asks:

How is a proper balance to be achieved between a scientific vertex, which could be said to be devoted to truth or the facts, and a religious vertex, which could equally be said to be devoted to truth? (Bion 1974, I: 95-6)

The answer to achieving this ‘proper balance’ is by means of the artistic vertex and its capacity to create ‘lifelike’ symbolic structures that hold meaning for processing. The artistic vertex can moderate between the religious and the scientific, which throughout the centuries have frequently been considered to be enemies.

The essential features of an art form are: a symbolic structure that can hold a meaning otherwise inexpressible; and a capacity to arouse empathy or identification in the reader or viewer. These correspond to the two reasons Meltzer thought psychoanalysis would survive: firstly, because it helped with symbol formation; and secondly, because of the transference-countertransference interaction that constituted a new method for doing so. It is ‘A new method as old as religion and art… but more poorly implemented than the arts which have developed their craft for several millennia’ (Meltzer 1980, p. 474). The method itself is the ‘aesthetic object’ in the Meltzerian view. Through ‘scrutiny of the countertransference’ it facilitates the emergence of symbols, by finding a convergence or reciprocity between analyst and analysand – the ‘participating pair’ as Bion calls them.

When Bion spoke in Transformations of ‘the configuration which can be recognised as common to all developmental processes whether religious, aesthetic, scientific or psychoanalytical’, and of its progression from the ‘void and formless infinite’ to a ‘saturated’ and ‘finite’ formulation (1965, p. 170), he was seeking to impress the fact that there is a basic unit of integrated, mind-feeding knowledge. This is what has traditionally been termed a symbol.

What kind of a thing is a symbol and how is it different from a sign? This is a distinction that both Bion and Meltzer keep drawing to our attention, though not always using those particular words. The problem is how to define and indeed perceive a mental event - something that belongs to a non-sensuous domain. A sign-language on its own is not capable of doing this, because it is just a language-game, employing words as if they were ‘counters’ as Coleridge said; this does not deal with the problem of how the experience can become imaginable in the first place. Bion says:

The realizations with which a psychoanalyst deals cannot be seen or touched; anxiety has no shape or colour, smell or sound. For convenience, I propose to use the term ‘intuit’ as a parallel in the psychoanalyst’s domain to the physician’s use of ‘see’, ‘touch’, ‘smell’ and ‘hear’. (Bion 1970, p. 7).

When he speaks of ‘realizations’ he makes clear that these intuited feelings are not words nor can they immediately be put into words, even though psychoanalysis is pre-eminently a verbal medium; and this is the heart of the problem – how to use words symbolically rather than just as a sign-language. Symbols are the sensuous product of non-sensuous intuition – whether in art forms, creative relationships, or psychoanalysis.

Awareness of the distinction between signs and symbols is important for creating the kind of ambience in the consulting room which can begin to scintillate with meaning. This scintillation derives from the possibility of receiving a new idea and is in essence a response to the psychoanalytic method as aesthetic object. The words used in psychoanalysis have to somehow convey awareness of an ultra-sensuous reality beyond their everyday, concrete, referential significance. They have to expand out of being two-dimensional statements that just impose a particular interpretative framework on a phenomenon, and instead, use interpretation in a flexible, complex way. Meltzer describes this, in the psychoanalytic context, as “modulating temperature and distance” – so that symbols can arise from the spiritual core of the emotional phenomenon itself.

The same problem has been discussed for many years in the context of literary and art criticism, where it has long been recognised that interpretation is an inadequate mode of response to the aesthetic object, and that a deeper congruence needs to be found between objective form and subjective appreciation. The art critic Adrian Stokes, with whom Meltzer wrote a dialogue on the ‘Social basis of art’, wrote of getting ‘in touch with a process that seems to be happening on our looking, a process to which we are joined as if to an alternation of part-objects’ (1965, p. 26). He described this projective-introjective dialogue as ‘envelopment and incorporation’. The projective movements are communicative, questing ones, not omnipotent ones designed to control the object. It is a search for symbolic congruence, in relation to the aesthetic object, that corresponds in analysis to the minute adjustments of transference and countertransference.[i]

The nature of symbols has been investigated by philosophers of aesthetics such as Susanne Langer, Whitehead and Cassirer, all of whom influenced Meltzer’s thinking. Symbol-making, says Langer, is ‘an act essential to thought, and prior to it’, and as such is ‘the keynote of all humanistic problems’ (1942, pp. 41, 25). Symbols could of course take various forms – as in the earliest forms of art – and speech itself grew out of ‘song and dance’ in a family context as it does with young children. In the Whitehead-Langer view of ‘presentational form’, language is simply one of the various manifestations of man as a symbol-making animal. This is why Bion and Meltzer both emphasize the impact of non-verbal elements on the countertransference, however minute and difficult to observe; they stress factors such as music, posture and resonance, and Bion says that he noticed his interpretations took on a more ‘lifelike’ quality as he became attuned to the non-verbal.

Before Whitehead and Wittgenstein, symbols had been investigated by the German Romantic philosophers, who first coined the terms ‘symbol’ and ‘aesthetic’, and this was taken up and developed by the English Romantic poets, whom Bion described as ‘the first psychoanalysts’. The great poets, he says, wrote poetry because it was the most ‘serious’ way of writing: it provided the most sophisticated access to unconscious thinking. He envisaged thinking as a ‘slow lumbering conscious’ trying to catch up with an ‘active, flexible and speedy unconscious’ (1977, p. 25). Artistic awareness, in Bion’s picture, is well practised in finding a way in through the spaces or holes in existing knowledge. It can escape the vigilance of conscious control and commonsense and capture an aspect of the truth. So in the mind of any individual, and also in the historical evolution of a culture, the poetic faculty will get there quicker and with greater complexity than the scientific faculties of categorization and generalization.

Langer and the twentieth century philosophers followed in the tradition of the poet-philosophers, and now, even the ‘analytic philosophers’ are taking an interest in the primacy of aesthetic experience as a means of complex cognition. The poetic-philosophical tradition has clarified the distinction between the limited two-dimensional discourse of propositions, and the imaginatively expanded language of verbal, visual and musical analogy, where the meaning depends in part on the non-lexical aspects of the language – which they called ‘presentational form’. Sign-systems, they say, stimulate action; whereas symbolic forms are conducive to contemplation. Bion calls this personal, evolving, symbolic language in the psychoanalytic situation the ‘language of achievement’. The achievement is, essentially, communication between the two participating minds or rather –as Meltzer says – between their internal objects. The container is not the mind of the analyst alone but rather, it is formed by ‘fitting together’ the analyst’s attention and the patient’s co-operativeness (Meltzer 1986, p. 208).

This is really the crux of the matter – that in the aesthetic view of the process, it is conducted by ‘conversations between internal objects’ and this creates an expanded mentality within the consulting room, a mentality that can make contact with a reality beyond the sum of the existing knowledge of these two people, and that Bion calls ‘intersection with O’. The supreme cognitive value of symbols, Langer explains, is that they can ‘transcend the past experience of their creator’ (1953, p. 390). The great art-symbols are not bound to their time and culture – which is why, as Bion says, they have ‘durability’. They are not even bound to the personal knowledge or experience of the artist, since creativity is by nature exploratory, and depends on non-narcissistic identification processes. This finds a precise equivalent in the psychoanalytic situation in the attention the analyst must pay to scrutinising the countertransference. Only through non-narcissistic identification with the process as aesthetic object can he learn something he did not know already. And in the Bion-Meltzer view, the analyst knows – and must know - nothing at the start of each session. It is a type of ignorance which is, however, very different from contempt for previous experience. In fact it is only previous experience – scientific knowledge - that allows the ignorance of poetic expectation to be tolerated. As Keats put it, the wings of poetry need to be ‘fledged’ by philosophy.

In the psychoanalytic setting, therefore, the most significant feature of the symbol is its capacity to contain the apprehension of a meaning beyond the existing knowledge not only of the analysand but also of the analyst. This relates to the Platonic orientation that has become intimately espoused by post-Kleinian thinking in its most advanced form. Money-Kyrle describes it as ‘realism’ rather than as idealism, since it views psychic reality as something that exists: not something to be invented or played with or tested, but something to strive towards knowing (1978, p. 418). It transcends the existing bounds of the self. Bion writes: ‘In any object resides the unknowable, ultimate reality’ (1970, p. 187). In the psychoanalytic session it is necessary, he says, to ‘set up a framework of tensions’ to contain the ‘central feature’ and to seek for ‘oneness with O’. Meltzer elaborates further on the tension between the inside and outside of the object, which stimulates respectively the scientific and the artistic ways of knowing. Through a projective-introjective intermeshing of these vertices there comes an ‘intersection with O’, a state of evolution.

Symbols, as Langer and Coleridge point out, come into being in order to present in sensuous form these messages from the realms of the unknown – the ‘shadow of the future cast before’ as Bion put it, quoting Shelley. They come from the internal objects who are, Meltzer says, ethically the most advanced part of the mind (1992, p. 59). Meaning is received, not constructed: what can be constructed - worked on through artistic technique - is the container. Money-Kyrle explains how the Platonic type of coming-to-knowledge (‘recognition’) entails introjecting a function of the object as well as its detoxifying ‘answer’ to the specific emotional problem – the ‘containing self is reincorporated’ (1978, p. 432). In symbol-formation it is the learning experience that is introjected, not just the thing learnt.

The great art-symbols illuminate not only our inner world, but also our own mainly unconscious, everyday attempts to form symbols that enable us to think about our emotional experiences. Symbols are formed through engaging with the poetic spirit that underlies any humanistic enterprise such as psychoanalysis. In the Bion-Meltzer view these attempts begin and dissolve continuously and constitute ‘dream-life’, whether asleep or awake, conscious or unconscious – such divisions are unimportant. And occasionally, a significant symbol manages to take shape, leaving the mind slightly disoriented - as Keats put it in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Fled is that music – do I wake or sleep?’

The basic type of symbol is of course the dream, as it is in all art forms. But it is not the patient’s dream alone that is the focus of the session: rather, it is the dream that is evolved between the two participants by means of the counter-transference - the conversation between internal objects. This frees the analyst from the temptation to respond parentally (as Melzer puts it) and allows him to respond analytically. As in literary criticism, the situation is subjective but not solipsistic: it is a subjective response to a reality ‘beyond’ the receiver or receivers of the thoughts.

So this artistic aspect of psychoanalysis – namely, introjecting a function of the object - is what gives it the chance to be of enduring benefit to the patient. As Bion points out, it is also a fringe benefit for the analyst and his personal education. If the analyst does not submit his own mind for restructuring, the process will not be effective. In a sign-language such as that of single-vertex science, this particular educational aspect is lacking, and will result in analyses that may be interminable but are not durable. The ‘sleeping beauty’ is still asleep, undiscovered amongst the brambles of jargon and two-dimensional interpretations. It has not infused its poetic spirit of ‘becoming’ into the developmental process. In other words, it has not made links with the religious vertex of experience – the vertex that as Bion says, relates to our capacity to deal with the Unknown.

This vertex that Bion illustrates by means of the ‘sleeping beauty’ represents our contact with the ‘fundamental underlying reality’ of an emotional situation. It is the source of the symbols that are generated in response to the turbulence that occurs at the meeting of minds of the participants. Bion writes:

The Platonic theory of Forms and the Christian dogma of the Incarnation imply absolute essence which I wish to postulate as a universal quality of phenomena such as “panic”, “fear”, “love”…. I use O to represent this central feature of every situation that the psychoanalyst has to meet. With this he must be at one; with the evolution of this he must identify so that he can formulate it in an interpretation. (Bion 1970, p. 89)

When he summarises the Odyssey as a tale about a “heroic liar” who was ‘saved from everlasting night” by his dog, he is making a condensed comment on his own fascination with the question of faith and its role in the gaining of wisdom. It is the internal dog in the mind that makes the difference between storytelling as lies, and storytelling as truth. It locates the pain at the point of growth of the thought – at the threshold of a “homecoming”. The dog’s patience, devouring its bodily substance as it lies on the dung-heap, images the beggar-like humility that will enable Odysseus to take possession of his old home infused with a new mentality. For as Bion puts it, the individual becomes aware that thoughts are present in his mind through “religious awe”, which may be given a variety of different names – incarnation, godhead, Krishna, mystic experience, inspiration etc. But whatever the name it happens to be called, ‘the source of emission of the received or evolved thoughts is felt as external, God-given’ (1992, pp. 304-5.

By contrast with sign-languages, a symbolic language is only achievable through the kind of faith that depends on internal objects to govern the formation of the symbol and present the new idea to the infant mind. The aesthetic object that is the psychoanalytic process presents it to both analyst and analysand. As Meltzer puts it: ‘Thinking for oneself means thinking with the internal object’ (1988, p. 71); for ‘The integrated internal object learns in advance of the self and is almost certainly the fountainhead of creative thought and imagination’ (1992, p. 59). This is ‘not simply a matter of containment or protection or comfort or pleasure and so on. It’s a question of an object that can perform this particular function, that creates the symbols through which dreaming and thinking can proceed’ (1995a; also 1983, p. 38). As William Blake said: ‘We can do nothing of ourselves – everything is done by fairy hands’. As Rimbaud succinctly expressed it: ‘I don’t think; I am thought’. It is the same as Socrates seeing himself as a midwife to ideas.

‘How can we become able to tolerate it?’ Bion asks – meaning: how can we tolerate this process of thinking, of being thought? Because it is not the unpleasant content of the thoughts but the difficulty of thinking itself, and making contact with its hidden beauty, that is intolerable. So intolerable in fact, that it has an aura of cruelty. Bion and Meltzer speak of the ‘cruelty’ entailed in helping the symbol of the emotional experience to emerge. Meltzer compares symbol-formation to netting wild birds, and adds:

There’s something cruel about the way in which it surrounds the emotional experiences and captures them. (‘Thought Disorders’ 1995a)

But, he continues, it is not so cruel if you consider that the patient is not being asked to suffer ‘alone’, because what is actually happening is that the analyst is reconnecting the patient with the ‘saints and angels of psychic reality’. This is the ‘heavenly company’ of objects in common. As Money-Kyrle said, along with the symbol, he introjects a function of the object.

It is perhaps an essential feature of the religious vertex with its requirement of faith in the internal object to carry the infant self into the next phase of existence. The analyst is as much subjected to ‘fear of change’ as the patient – but who or what is being cruel?

In his autobiographical books Bion wonders about the Great Cat Ra raining shells on the hut in which he is cowering – is it cruelty or clumsiness, deliberate or casual? For cruelty is in fact a very precise psychological weapon, which does no physical damage but delineates the exact place in the mind where the meaning is trying to emerge. As John Donne wrote:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend. (Holy Sonnets no. 14)

‘Stick to the fighting line’ advised Bion (2005, p. 95). Even in an emotional storm ‘the troops will not run away, but will begin to stand fast’ (1980, p.78). The capacity to ‘stick’ or ‘suffer’ is crucial to symbol-formation in the Bion-Meltzer model of thinking, in which each growth-point entails a catastrophic change in the existing structure of the mind.

As Bion says the analyst can do harm by omnipotently trying to ‘be helpful’ (1991, p. 434), as distinct from enabling suffering or ‘pain-talk’. Suffering is something reciprocally painful for the analyst; whereas doing good is self-satisfying, but deprives both parties of the potential operation of faith. This follows in fact from the recognition that in the aesthetic conflict, it is the present not the absent object that causes pain, owing to being unknown and unpossessable. In such a situation the analyst needs to acquire an aesthetic attitude (Meltzer 1967, pp. 79, 84). The advantage of the aesthetic attitude is that it strengthens the mind, or the two minds, in preparation for receiving the idea of the emotional situation.

The aesthetic perspective, therefore, is a function of psychoanalytic faith and it entails a special, artistic language of achievement, in which autonomous symbols created through the setting itself become the dominant form of discourse, rather than the sign-language of psychoanalytic jargon or interpretation. This faith in the process has something to do with acknowledging one’s ‘ancestors’ as Bion puts it. Bion and Meltzer agree that we are unlikely to discover any new ideas, and in any case, those serious thinkers – the poets and ‘religious people’ – have already been there. If we acknowledge this fact, we are actually more likely to have ideas that we can call ‘our own’, in the sense that they are genuinely experienced, in a live situation such as that in the consulting room, and they constitute a real link with the hidden beautiful spirit - the Muse, or aesthetic object. For the aesthetic realm of Ideas is ‘one’s own home even if previously lived in by somebody else’ (Meltzer 1986, p. 67). Whether or not they come with a ‘label’ attached (Bion 1997), they then become one’s own, provided their ‘ancestors’ are internally acknowledged. Such ideas are experienced ‘on the pulses’ as Keats would say. They mean that both the analyst, and the process he is overseeing, are in an evolutionary state, responsive to internal objects, and better able to tolerate reality.

As with all art forms, the end product cannot be known before the journey itself is undertaken. This would not be tolerable in a situation in which the analyst was supposed to ‘know about’ the patient’s condition and, by implication, to ‘cure’ it. This is the Siren-song that leads to the heap of old bones (Bion 1985). But there has to be a vehicle, a boat, which can navigate these tempestuous seas, and that boat is the dream-symbol. Meltzer said that reading dreams was the only talent he had discovered in himself – but it was a valuable talent. Psychoanalysis is privileged to have access to the dream-lives of other minds and to be in a position to help improve the quality of people’s dreaming. Both Bion and Meltzer were highly conscious of this sense of privilege. Ultimately this is perhaps the only realistic definition of the psychoanalytic purpose. It is not an insignificant task. Through the psychoanalytic method, old ideas can be rediscovered in a new context of helping ‘rescue the lost children of the personality’ as Meltzer describes it (1983, p.98). As Keats said, humanity can be saved by its dreams (The Fall of Hyperion).

Meg Harris Williams

http://www.artlit.info

Forthcoming book: The Aesthetic Development: Bion, Meltzer and the Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis. Karnac, 2009

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