(i) The contribution of poetry to the post Kleinian model of the mind (paper read at Synopsis: Both Bion and
Meltzer were great admirers of the English poets, and the post-Kleinian model of the mind is essentially an aesthetic
one. This talk focuses on the way the
poet’s romance with his Muse has contributed to their aesthetic extension of
Melanie Klein’s discovery of the combined internal object. In particular this relates to the concepts
of catastrophic change and of the aesthetic conflict, and to the nature of
the psychoanalytic `reverie’ (Bion) or
`counter-transference dream’ (Meltzer). Literature, poetry and drama have always been held in high esteem by psychoanalysts, and many psychoanalysts have been far more analytical in their reasons for valuing particular works than have either Bion or Meltzer. But there is a change of gear in the post K model, which gives poetic literature a new type of importance. This is connected with the idea of `becoming’ an analyst as distinct from `being’ one which really means `being labelled’ as one. Bion commented wryly on his early attempts to `be’ a Kleinian analyst and how, despite his certainty that he was using Mrs Klein’s concepts correctly, `none of the good results that I anticipated occurred.’ The poetry of the method was both more elusive, and more significant, than the straightforward – apparently scientific - application of theory. The great poets of the past have always been intensely interested with what it means to be a real poet, as distinct from a false or vain poet, a lookalike like Spenser’s Duessa. They are concerned with what Hamlet calls `the difference between is and seems’: with shedding the narcissistic condition that produces imitative verse, and entering into the inspired condition of service to the Muse. The narcissistic condition produces poetry that may appear pleasing on a superficial view, but like the flowery meadow of the Sirens, appears on closer inspection to be nothing but a shore strewn with bones. `Instruct me, for thou know’st’, Milton asked his Muse, pleading not to be left wandering amongst the lies on this field of Error, knowing that he would be lost as a poet if the verse that flowed from his pen were `all mine, not hers who brings it nightly to my ear’. What do we mean by the poetry of
psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalytic method? In the postKleinian
model of mental growth, ideas come into being as a result of undergoing the
aesthetic conflict stirred by the recognition of the ambiguity of the
internal object. The object is Mrs
Klein’s combined object with its awesome and disturbing qualities - its
beauty and terror, its inducement of both aspiration and of suspicion of
abandonment. The
nipple-within-the-breast gives, and also takes away. They keyword is `turbulence’. If the temptation to negativity is
resisted, catastrophic change occurs and brings, as Bion
says, `death to the existing state of mind’.
This is the `death’ traditionally imaged in poetry and poetic drama,
being the culminating phase of a conflict’s resolution, the growth-point of a
thought. `Nothing is here for tears’ as The postKleinian concentration on the state of mind of the analyst is the result of the increased awareness of the aesthetic qualities of the psychoanalytic experience itself. This is pre-eminent, and the jargon of the model is secondary. In emulation of the poets, Bion and Meltzer realised the job of the psychoanalyst was to focus on the aesthetics of his task. This would allow meaning to emerge of itself, not superimposed by preconceived interpretations – Bion’s `satanic jargonieur’ with his flowery field of lies. As Keats said, `the creative must create itself’. Bion’s philosophical stance of maternal reverie, in which the thinker is
guided by an infant-and-mother internal constellation, is reformulated by
Meltzer as the analyst’s `counter-transference dream’. It emulates the poets’ quest for
inspiration by the Muse. The
references to poetry made by Meltzer and Bion are
acts of homage, not acts of colonisation that attempt to recruit poets within
the psychoanalytic canon - `stabling’ as Meltzer calls it. They do not regard poetry merely as
psychoanalytic material. It is not
material, it is art. Art is beautifully
constructed. That means, it tells
more than its superficial story: through the deep grammar of its beautiful
construction it also tells the story of its own processes of inspiration. Earlier psychoanalytic views could not
accommodate this concept. It was
foreign to what was expected from a scientific approach. Neither Bion nor
Meltzer attempt to analyse poetry in detail; they are averse to reductionism,
and prefer not to interfere with the reverberations of the deep chords which
such classic works can strike in our own minds. When Bion
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’. When Meltzer quotes a
single line from a sonnet by So it is not just the content of poetry that is relevant – its succinct way of expressing the spectrum of human emotions, their conflict and resolution; it is also the nature of poetry: its method of observing and capturing the drama between self and internal object/s. The drama embodied in poetry is in essence the process of symbol-formation, something which Bion insisted was `ineffable’ – not the symbol but the process, like the countertransference itself. Meltzer however believes that it is not ineffable, merely that it is not paraphraseable. It cannot be told but it can be shown. Poetry shows us this process of coming-to-know; it is dramatised within the poem as the poet’s inspiration by the Muse. This is what makes the difference between the flowers of poetry and the dried bones of egotism. We can follow the poet in his revelation. The struggle and hazards of seeking inspiration, or preparing the mind to receive inspiration, may be seen as the core subject of all the great poetry and drama of the past – and undoubtedly of the present also, though it is too soon for us to be able to judge which works will become classic; as Dr Johnson said, only time can tell. The first step in symbol-making - or to be more accurate, symbol-evolution – is observation. Internal observation - of the shadows on the wall of the Cave. One of the last things Don wrote was a note designed, he said, to `make precise’ the meaning of observation: The state of observation is essentially a resting state. It is also a state of heightened vigilance. I compare it with waiting in the dark for the deer grazing at night, seen by their flashing white tails. This nocturnal vigilance is on the alert for movement of the quarry, part-object minimal movements that with patience can be seen to form a pattern of incipient meaning “cast before”. This catching of the incipient meaning cast before is a function of receptive imagination – open to the possible, unconcerned with probability. (The Vale of Soulmaking p. 102) It is the state Keats termed negative capability, the formulation so much admired by Bion. Keats and Milton use the word `darkling’ in their poetry, a word which suggests the infiltration of tiny flashes of light like musical notes. `The wakeful bird sings darkling’ says Milton of the nightingale that `voluntary moves harmonious numbers’ and `tunes her nocturnal note’. While Keats in his ode `To a Nightingale’ writes: Darkling, I listen… And describes how the song finds a way to
his heart in the way that glimpses of light seem to be blown by the breeze
from heaven `through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’. It has to be blown in through gaps because
he himself `cannot see’. So there is
nothing new in Meltzer’s vision; but, being imbued with poetry, it makes the
beginning of the session come alive in the way that poetry does. The pattern of meaning `cast before’ is a
reference to Shelley’s definition of the poets as conveyors of a hitherto `unapprehended inspiration’ that casts the `gigantic
shadow of futurity upon the present’ – a thrilling passage on which Bion founded his Memoir of the Future. So, while it may seem paradoxical to describe this countertransference readiness to apprehend the unknown as both a `resting state’ and as a hunt, alert for `quarry’, this is precisely how the poets describe it. (Indeed it is interesting how frequent is the metaphor of a hunt.) On the verge of his great creative breakthrough of spring 1819 Keats described himself as `straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness’ and imagined himself being observed by `superior beings’ just as wild animals are themselves observed by humans: Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive, attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?’ The state preparatory to poetry-writing is like the beginning of a psychoanalytic session. The poet is both a deer and a `superior’ animal, observing and observed, hunter and hunted, in a type of binocular vision. The mind has `attitudes’ it can fall into beyond conscious control – suggesting a life of its own, ready for turbulence, for slipping and tossing amongst clouds of unknowing. It is the result of a paradoxical `resting’ state in which mental footholds are relaxed. Bion saw the blackness not as Keats’s `embalmed darkness’ but as a void with alarmingly flashing stars – pointers to the ineffable, beyond the Crab Nebula of consciousness. He saw himself as `hunting’ for that `ferocious animal Absolute Truth’ amongst the galaxies of the universe rather than for deer-tails which might indicate the patterning of the herd. But these I think are differences of character rather than of essential vision. This hunt for
symbol-formation is, we could say, a modern conservationist type of hunting –
with the internal camera rather than the bow or shotgun. Yet it still has that primitive element of
necessity, though it is for mental rather than for bodily food. Keats saw `So fail not thou, who thee implores; For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream. Yet In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus’ moment of inspiration comes when he embraces his own blindness, reinforcing his previous lack of vision by putting out his eyes, in line with the will of the gods. During the period of turbulence, when he is coming to knowledge of his `birth’, Oedipus feels he is being hunted all over Cithaeron – the mother-mountain of his infancy – by an ambiguous and possibly destructive Fate (Tyche, translated Chance or Fortune). Ultimately he accepts, and embraces, the correspondence of the male and female components of his object, when he says: `Apollo ordained it – but I did it!’ He brings himself in line with this combined object. For the process of inspiration is an active-passive one. The poet’s essential achievement is to allow himself to have been used by his Muse in the service of insight – brushed by the tail of that ferocious animal Absolute Truth. For the truth is that the truth bites. To continue the metaphor of the binocular-vision hunt…(and to develop the implications of Klein’s combined object) Meltzer has said that there is `something cruel’ in the very process of symbol-formation (BJP, vol21no3p.434). He writes, it `captures the wild birds of meaning’. The inevitable pain associated with the birth of a thought occurs at the point of growth where there is, as it were, a ring round the symbol, a sense of its ultimate containing shape and thus a premonition of the inevitability of its impact on the personality. It is `becoming O’, as Bion would put it. Meltzer, more comprehensibly, has used the example of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to describe this process of symbol closure: The process of condensation operates on the myth of the emotional experience in the same manner as a set of chessmen stand in symbolic relation to Gawain and the Green Knight…as the condensation proceeds, and finally results in a highly condensed symbol, the meaning is now “contained”. Thus a symbol may be said to be “close to the bone” of mental pain, for it pinpoints the zone of conflict. Again it is only the briefest of
references to the poem, but that is itself a condensation: the entire weight
of the symbolic significance of the poem lies behind it. The story is about Gawain’s
temptation in the enchanted castle of the Green Knight and his Lady – figures
of supernatural strength and sexuality.
Their intentions toward him are ambiguous and so is his reaction: the
nature of his reciprocity with the Lady, and then with the Knight, is the key
to his learning experience. All this
is played out against a background of a three-days’
hunt, whose imagery spills into the situation inside the castle. When he leaves, Gawain is bound by his pact
to accept a blow to the neck from the Knight’s axe. Ultimately he receives
not a literal death-blow but a minor wound, a nick at the nape of his neck,
sufficient to draw blood but not to inflict lasting damage. It is death to his infantile belief in the
Lady’s favouritism, though at the same time it reaffirms her protective and
erotic indulgence. The stroke of the axe becomes a metaphor for the moment of
knowledge: he is struck by his realisation of the combinedness
of the combined object. The poet
stresses the precision of the blow to the neck, though delivered with a giant
axe-head a metre across. In this way
the violence loses its destructiveness and becomes instead a type of extreme
caress, pushing his mind into the next phase of adolescence. One of As always with poetry, this is a message
that comes across through the language, the poetic structure. It is the story of its deep grammar, not of
its paraphraseable plot. Each individual telling of a wellknown fable or myth has its own individual
meaning. Before he begins, the poet
knows the story but not the meaning.
You can see the poet discovering as he goes along the meaning of his
story as it unfolds. As This hidden music tells the story of symbolic
reciprocity – the reciprocity between self and object, poet and Muse, the
objects of the patient and the objects of the analyst; and the way this
echoes the male-female reciprocity of the combined internal object. Shakespeare in his dramatisation of the
death of Cleopatra delineates a stage in the evolution of his own Muse, and a
new combination of male and female components within his object. After the death of For it is not the fact of death but the manner of death that gives it its meaning. Cleopatra’s original queenliness was egotistical and feminist; this has to die so her new queenliness can be instated. This entails a sense of responsibility towards womanhood, both past and future – queens and milkmaids. For a long time it seems impossible that Caesar, the infantile narcissist, could ever come to understand the regality of the combined, Roman-Ptolemaic god. But when he is presented with the pageant of Cleopatra’s death, the play-within-a-play, he is surprised; and his surprise brings out the poetry up to now stifled within him by his own smooth political patter (`he words me, girls, he words me’ as Cleopatra said). For when Cleopatra said `husband, I come’, she became a mother. She put a stop to the boyish manufacture of lies streaming from Caesar the wordster, and put herself in a position to preside over a host of new potential children and child-thoughts. Now Caesar’s first poetic words show that in spite of himself, he has learned something of Cleopatra as Muse and as combined object: She looks like sleep, As
she would catch another In her strong toil of grace. The ambiguous asp-bite that `hurts but is
desired’ is a celebration of internalised masculinity; at the same time it
celebrates the serpentine ambiguities of the Egyptian world which made This brings us to the question of ending. Poetry is much concerned with endings. The rhythmical nature of verse with its caesuras and cadences ensures that there is not just one ending, but a succession of endings, before we arrive at the `weaning’ of poet from Muse that occurs after the final presentation of the symbol for that particular emotional experience. Byron’s definition of poetry was the sense of `a former world and a future’: a symbol implies both past and future, not in the sense of dependence on memory and desire, but in the sense of taking part in a wider pattern of development. The process of mental growth is rhythmic, one step at a time as in Bion’s Grid, and each new step depends on the successful resolution of the previous one. Yet not even the smallest step is automatic. The poets knew that inspiration could not be presumed upon. It has to be earned each poetic journey, each analytic session. In order for the learning process to be alive, the deep grammar of `presentational form’ (Susanne Langer’s term) has to be tapped into each time. Presentational form has an inner music, a logicality that structures the abstract process of mental growth. It was the poets who taught Bion and Meltzer that psychoanalysis too could be a presentational form: that is, an artistic symbolmaking activity, not simply an academic categorising activity. The final stage in the evolution of the symbol is the return to what Keats calls `the sole self’. Both Keats and Milton use the word `forlorn’ which describes beautifully the emotional state after the symbol has been formed and the emotional conflict contained. After aesthetic reciprocity has served its function, forlornness is necessary to the final overview of the learning experience. Rounding the container requires detachment. It is the caesura between one `step of imagination’ and the next, re-establishing the boundary between self and object in preparation for the next turbulent event. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self. As Keats writes after the intensity of
the experience with the Nightingale.
Strangely it is a word which Shakespeare never uses, though he evokes
the same feeling, when Prospero is left alone by Ariel at the end of The
Tempest, and pleads with the audience for a wind to sail him home – home
to As a result of Bion and Meltzer’s revaluation of their experience with Mrs Klein, the poetic concept of inspiration has found its equivalent in the counter-dreamer hunting for quarry, and the relation between poet and Muse has its equivalent in the aesthetic ambiguity evoked by the combined object in its ever-evolving state. As Keats said, in the garden of poetry, the gardener `breeding flowers will never breed the same’. All the symbols bred by dreaming are idiosyncratic and belong to that particular moment in development of both self and object. The ending of one phase already contains the germs of the next conflict on the horizon. The nightingale sings in the next valley-glade, embalmed in the shadow of the future cast before. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ (ii) Objects in common (a personal story) (based on a talk at the Tavistock Centre
memorial conference, November 2005) In his 1973 paper on `Routine v. Inspired
Interpretation’ Don speaks of the post-analytic or weaning-stage `adventure’
of the analyst/analysand relationship, `pushing
beyond therapy into the unknown of character development for both’. He says the richness of the combined object
is `directly related to the richness of this comradeship’ and it replaces the
pedagogic relationship. In 1970, after
the end of my analysis, Don wrote me a letter saying that he was about to
`commence his literary education under my guidance’. At that time he was well read in aesthetic
and linguistic philosophy and had always (since childhood) had a passion for
art, but had never been a reader of literature and poetry, and in a sense I
read the poets for him by writing my experience of them. He began with Sir Gawain, the first
work I studied at university; and some eighteen years later he used this poem
to describe the process of symbol-formation.
In this way The emotional meaning of poetry and all
types of poetic writing resides not in what is said but in the way it
is said - in poetic diction and symbolic structure. Expressiveness is everything. I discussed with Don the nature of `close
reading’ as it had been taught to me at school by an inspired teacher, Joie
Macaulay (in the tradition of I.A. Richards) – close reading of poetic
language being the way to access the `deep grammar’ of poetry, the emotional
meaning that lies between the lines of didactic sequence. As in art, the iconographic features of subject and content play their part in holding our attention in poetry also, but they do not hold the meaning of the work. Owing to the complexity of the poetic mind and its almost inevitable splitting, it can happen that the meaning contained in the symbolic structure is very different from what the superficial story leads us to expect. As a man of his time the poet may present a contemporary meaning, with a contemporary morality; but as a `hierophant of an unapprehended inspiration’ he can discover through his use of poetic language a meaning that is new to himself and to everyone else - as we can see in the split within Milton, or in the contrast between Oedipus as hero and the Oedipus complex. Shelley’s `hierophant’ is not speaking for himself, but for his internal objects casting their shadow in advance, heralding a new idea. The objects are the most advanced part of an individual’s mind, and as Don says, ethics are an emanation of the objects. By this means the self can progress in self-knowledge - the regular and inherently logical `stepping of the imagination towards a truth’ (Keats). From at least the time of writing his book on The Process Don considered the practice of psychoanalysis to be a symbolic form – that is, an artistic activity that functions by symbol-formation. A symbol (not in the Freudian sense but in the philosophical sense, as in Susanne Langer) is a container for meaning, and as Coleridge said, a `truth cannot be known except through a symbol.’ A symbol cannot be known until it is described, yet cannot be described till it is known, as Don puts it in his 1981 paper on `Money-Kyrle’s concept of misconception’. In that paper he says that it was `the experience of listening to mother-baby observation seminars in the last few years that has so impressed on me the inadequacy of the psychoanalytic model to describe the nuances and complexities of that primal relationship… we must find some way of noticing and describing these processes – but which comes first, the noticing or the describing?’ These nuances are the `mysterious compositional qualities’ of the psychoanalytic process, that orient the mouth of the self to the nipple-in-the-breast, the `O of the co-ordinate geometry of the mind’. The nuances contain the meaning of the mother-baby, self-and-objects relationship. Money-Kyrle’s model is an aesthetic one, probably the first in Kleinian theory. Don always stressed Bion’s point that it is the `links’ that are important in creative thinking. He had been familiar with Money-Kyrle’s model for some time before it became really woven into his thinking, and this seemed to happen in tandem with the baby observations during which he learned from my mother how to notice the mother-baby reciprocity that is the key to personality development and the model underlying psychoanalytic work – something experienced with Mrs Klein but not fully `described’ by her theoretical model. At one point in those observation seminars, when Don is insisting on the cultural repetitiveness of the family situation, my mother contradicts with: `Infants don’t only learn from their mothers – mothers also learn from their infants. That is what breaks the cultural mould.’ This is the beginning of the idea of reciprocity that is formulated in The Apprehension of Beauty. In the 1973 paper Don still had a
hierarchical view of pedagogy: the parent teaches the child, the analyst teaches
the patient, and is responsible for containing his anxieties. The following year he became fond of a
phrase by the Renaissance writer Joshua Sylvester: `that teaching others, I
myself may learn’ (though he cited it as by
This is how the process of `primary learning’ is described in the 1976 paper on the `Child in the Family in the Community’ (commissioned by Beri Hayward for the UN). Don wrote this with my mother, who had pioneered a schools counselling service in the late 1960’s together with my father Roland Harris (a poet and teacher who died in 1969). It was after imbibing this combined-object influence that Don became a great teacher himself. In that paper `primary learning’ is when `something is learned of the modes of thought’ employed by the teacher in the process of resolving the problem, not just the facts or results of the academic subject. My father had had analysis with Bion during the period leading up to Bion’s departure for California – which Don described as exchanging a `watery’ medium for a `gaseous’ one – and, according to my mother, greatly influenced Bion in terms of encouraging him to take the plunge into the more poetic autobiographical works of his final years. Bion had formulated `learning from experience’ many years before and, like Don’s Psychoanalytic Process, it conveyed a vision that never essentially changed; but it required enrichment, of a real not theoretical kind – by a personal drama of self and objects, based on introjecting the principles of poetic teaching. Gradually the search for `objects in common, beyond the self’ came to predominate in Don’s model, not only in relation to the end of analysis (weaning and death of the breast), but as underpinning the entire process of analysis. Weaning is not the only catastrophic change; each step forward in the process of primary learning entails a catastrophic change. By the time of Studies in Extended Metapsychology in 1986 Don was describing the symbolic container in psychoanalysis as a result of the `fitting together’ of the analyst’s attention and the patient’s co-operation. The symbol that contains the meaning of the new idea (the psychoanalytic situation at that moment) is not purely the patient’s dream (the truth of his emotional situation) nor is it purely the analyst’s interpretation, but rather, something formed between patient and analyst at the moment of communication. It is formed not by the `self’ of either, but by their internal objects. This was his clinical experience – he knew it and yet was still searching for a model to properly describe it. My first book, Inspiration in Milton and Keats (1982) was, he said, about a problem that has its parallel in psychoanalysis – namely, is the Muse (or internal object) merely a figure of speech, or an internal reality? After that he encouraged me to do some reading in the philosophy of aesthetics: he was interested in Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Langer, Stokes, Kierkegaard, and of course Plato. Don’s intellectual struggles with Bion coalesced with his gradually changing view of `primary learning’ as inculcated by my mother, with his introjection of Money-Kyrle’s aesthetic view, with his own clinical experience and the evolution of his own teaching methods, and with his interest in the poets’ struggles with inspiration by their Muse, to form the aesthetic model of psychoanalytic experience that is finally formulated in The Apprehension of Beauty (1988). He asked me to write a critique of Hamlet to illustrate the aesthetic conflict. The differentiation between `mystery’ and `secrecy’ that emerged reinforced the distinction Don was focussing on at that period between the two modes of projective identification - communicative and intrusive. It became clearer how the `secrecy’ mode, which displays itself in superficially clever but deeply dessicated mental gymnastics (like the Sirens’ pile of bones, the detritus of war), was a retreat from the turbulence of the aesthetic conflict that arises from the ambiguity of the object. Turbulence is created by the present object, not the absent object - particularly in its `combined’ nature which intensifies again (after infancy) in adolescence. The poetry of Hamlet evoked the poignancy of that adolescent struggle; Don was astonished by Shakespeare’s virtuosity and said `did all that come out of one man?’ To complete the picture, Don then wrote The Claustrum to clarify and categorise the nature of lies-in-the-soul. He asked me for an essay on Macbeth by way of illustration, and was not satisfied with my first attempt, saying that he wanted it to demonstrate specifically the attack on thinking that takes place in the Claustrum – so I rewrote it. From The Apprehension of Beauty onwards
Don was adamant that it is under the aegis of the `mystery’ of the combined
object that symbol-formation takes place.
This is the realm of real thinking, and it is essentially passive,
like Don’s culminating picture of the psychoanalytic situation (in his `Note on observation’) is steeped in poetic references and in that sense not original, yet because these come via introjection not imitation they infuse his picture with life – the vitality of potential symbolmaking – and partake of the poetic tradition. Don and Bion both point out that a new idea is never new, it is simply new in its context: it is a particular mental constellation, arising from a particular conjunction of `links’ which means, essentially, an enrichment of internal objects. It is Keats’s `wreathed trellis of a working brain’. The `note’ shows how the poets have modified Don’s language: instead of talking about `compounding the data of an emotional experience’ with the aid of a `selected fact’ (Bion/Poincare), he is talking about deer’s-tails flashing in the dark. The realms of mechanisation have been exchanged for the realms of spirituality. It is the kind of observation that evokes `a process that happens on our looking’. But the poets have also modified his view
of pedagogy. Don liked The music of internal objects is the psychoanalytic poetry. It is poetry because it is a symbolic container for meaning, conveying the thought-processes of the poet through its idiosyncratic use of language. Inspiration has to be modelled, not just talked about. What makes any type of creative writing `live’ is the reality of its coming-to-knowledge under the aegis of internal objects – not the memory of past or absent objects, but the presence of objects at the moment of formulation. This process resides permanently in the precise order of words, just as it does in the precise order of notes in music; it is trapped like a fly in amber. Years later, as we read, we can still see it happening, as in performance – how the Muse `inspires easy/ my unpremeditated verse’. If we respond truthfully to this, it shows in our response. Poetry demands a response of primary (introjective) learning, to match the poet’s way of learning from the Muse. The psychoanalytic situation is analogous, but its nuances or music are not contained solely in words; it has a symbolic form of its own in which the process of learning is contained. Our `primary learning’ derives from identification with this process, more than from our understanding of its results. It begins with a resting state; then gradually a pattern takes shape; but the shape cannot be confined in an interpretation; it is contained in the reciprocity of the transference-countertransference - the `mysterious compositional qualities’ rather than the `iconographic aspects’ of the psychoanalytic picture. This is what makes it transmissible, inspiring, `generative’ as Bion says (at the end of the Memoir). It engenders primary learning in the `hungry generations’ to come (Keats), whether this be in one’s own mind or in the minds of others. Primary learning is truthful, by nature; it contains the history of its own coming into being – the transformation of the previous state of mind, and the germ of the state of mind which is yet to come. It is the difference between `knowing’ and `knowing about’. It is the difference between `is’ and `seems’. |