The same organizing forces that have created nature in all its forms, are responsible for the
structure of our soul, and likewise for our capacity to think.
[Werner Heisenberg, 1971].
This paper involves a detailed comparison between psychoanalyst W. R. Bion's theories about mental
development, and postmodern theoretical physicist David Bohm's theory of the implicate order in physics. The author relates the implicate order to some fundamental aspects of human
development as envisaged by Bion, including the relationship between the paranoid—schizoid and depressive positions, genesis
of psychic space and time, schizophrenic
thinking, psychoanalytic epistemology, and the
evolution of the.
thinking process. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the consistent theoretical isomorphy between these seemingly unrelated
—————————————
Dr. Godwin is Senior Clinical Associate at the Barrington Psychiatric Center and in private practice in Los Angeles.
Acknowledgment. The author is especially indebted to Robert Gruener M.D., Avedis Panajian, Ph.D., and Jon Tabakin, M.A., each of whom reviewed various versions of this paper and offered thoughtful
comments and much needed encouragement.
theorists, with the hope of forging a fertile interdisciplinary dialogue between physics and
psychoanalysis.
This paper explores the relationship between the order of the universe and that of the mind, through a detailed exposition of the theoretical isomorphism between the ideas of W. R. Bion in
psychoanalysis and those of David Bohm in subatomic physics. The purpose of the paper is to help forge an interdisciplinary dialogue in which modes of thought from these apparently divergent
fields might integrate and enrich one another, in contrast to our present state of affairs in which physics and psychology are basically irrelevant (if not antagonistic) to one another.
It is a fact that
psychoanalysis enunciated its most far-reaching assumptions about the nature of the mind when it knew the least about the mind. Clearly, when Freud set forth his
metapsychology, it was with the intention of making
psychoanalysis reflect the leading edge of scientific enquiry in his day. However,
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) was completed six years before Einstein's first papers initiating the quantum revolution, and it took another fifteen years after that for these ideas to be confirmed in the minds of even the most elite physicists. Due to its counterintuitive
nature, the ensuing revolution in epistemology and ontology has not yet trickled into the consensus
reality, and it is on the brink of prosaic to point out that the mechanistic—materialistic stance laid down explicitly by Newton in the seventeenth century remains pivotal to our tacit metaphysic
even today.
Psychoanalysis seems in many ways to remain embedded in this outmoded classical world view, with the result that its investigations have in the past been hampered
by its own preconceptions about the nature of the mind. For example, work with
borderline and psychotic individuals was slowed by the attempt to impose upon them a system derived from the observations of neurotics. For many years the mistaken assumption
was that it was the patient, not the theory, which was fundamentally wrong. In spite of the fact that
psychoanalysis has expanded from its initial view, the metapsychological underpinnings have not been altered in any explicit way.
What would
psychoanalysis look like if it did reflect the changes in our understanding of the universe? What are the implications for
psychoanalysis in such a change of world view? That is what this paper attempts to address, by way of comparison between the ideas of theoretical physicist David Bohm and psychoanalyst W.
R. Bion.
Since his ideas are bound to be somewhat unfamiliar, perhaps the best place to begin is with a brief summary of the theories of David Bohm. Subsequent to this I will, in considerably greater detail, demonstrate the similarity
with Bion.
Thinking the Unthinkable: The Implicate OrderQuantum physics consists primarily of a set of mathematical formalisms which are able to predict the likelihood of finding a certain subatomic particle in a given area. These equations are probabilistic; that is, they describe
aggregate events but reveal nothing about individual events. One of the bewildering abstrusities which arose for quantum theory was that these equations described a
reality which literally could not be pictured in the mind; for the first time in
history, science had produced a model of the universe which was beyond our ability to comprehend. Although the words
wave or particle are used, they are in no way to be confused with a real description of what might be going on; they are merely a “mental display of the meaning of the
mathematics” (Bohm and Peat,
1987, p. 7).
Finding this conceptual stalemate intolerable, Bohm believes that the ideas of quantum theory, if pursued as far as possible (instead of taken at face value), lead to a new order of the universe which
can be thought about. It is his model, then, for “thinking about the universe,” that is so similar to Bion's psychoanalytic model for “thinking
about thinking.”
Perhaps the most significant discovery of quantum physics is the disclosure of a fundamental realm of unbroken wholeness underlying our perceived world of apparent separateness and
fragmentation. Instead of analyzing the universe into parts and then trying additively to make a “whole” out of how they interact, Bohm therefore begins with this notion of an underlying,
undivided wholeness, and then attempts to show how amidst this wholeness there may exist the “relatively enduring subtotalities” available to our senses and scientific instruments.
Language becomes problematic at this point, because the deeply dualistic bias in its
subject–verb–object
structure presupposes a universe of individual parts in external relationship to one another. This outward order described by conventional
language is what Bohm refers to as the “explicate,” or “unfolded” order. But underlying this explicate order is the vast multidimensional sea of quantum potential which forms the constantly
unfolding common ground of the manifest universe. This prior and fundamental order of the universe Bohm calls the “implicate” (or enfolded) order. This order exists as “undivided flowing movement without borders” (Bohm,
1980, p. 172), and what may appear stable to our senses is simply a rapidly iterating succession of similar forms.
Quantum theory has shown that the concept of a separate, ultimate part of the universe simply cannot be maintained. Rather, the theory describes fields, or “uncertainty clouds” where the so-called particles represent more concentrated
areas in a vast sea of
energy; they are not “in” space, but “of” space. They are products of the whole activity of the universe. For this reason Bohm claims that the
primary movement of the universe is not from past to future, as naive common sense seems to indicate, but from implicate to explicate (and back to implicate), in a total, flowing movement.
The explicate is only a special case of the implicate; at each
moment, particles from throughout the universe temporarily “congeal” into relatively invariant patterns, and then “flow back” to the implicate. The real order of the universe, therefore, is not the explicate order,
but rather the invariant
transformations of the implicate which manifest locally in an explicate order.
Bohm does not therefore see change arising primarily as a result of conditions in the familiar sequential and manifest explicate order of linear time and euclidean space. There is no “horizontal” causation from surface event
to surface event, but rather, a more fluid type of “vertical” causality in which events are “projected” into the explicate, and then “reinjected” into the implicate. The implicate order is “generative,” in the sense that it concerns
“a deeper and more inward order out of which the manifest form of things can emerge creatively. Indeed, this order is fundamentally relevant both in nature and
consciousness” (Bohm and Peat,
1987, p. 151).
For reasons which will be explained in greater detail below, the supposedly separate entities at the quantum level seem to exert a direct, noncausal influence upon one another, irrespective of the distance involved. This is
because subatomic “particles” are merely an outward expression of the underlying (implicate) field which unites them. Unlike a mechanical model, in which all of the constituents are separate and externally related, “parts” in the implicate order may therefore
be said to be in “internal” relationship to one another.
The notion of an internally related order may again be difficult to comprehend due to the subtle force
language exerts in shaping our conceptions. However, visual models can overcome the
language problem. Imagine, for example, that when viewing clouds in the sky, one is not generally aware that what is available to the senses is actually a small “ripple” against the background
of a much more encompassing meteorological process. Subatomic particles are like this; they are merely local, observable manifestations of a
reality which is nonlocal and unmanifest.
Bohm frequently uses the analogy of a current in the ocean to illustrate his point. What makes the current stable is the movement of the entire ocean; at any instant, the current is never made up of the same
material, and yet, it does endure
and appear to have stability. It is clear that to abstract the current from its ocean matrix and to consider it as the ultimate
reality will generate much confusion and
paradox. The quantum theory incontrovertibly demonstrates that objects in space are merely a recurrent, stable order of unfoldment from the whole, in which a certain form undergoing regular
changes manifests again and again, but so rapidly that it appears to be in continuous
existence..
Another way to conceptualize an internally related order is by noting the differences between conventional photography and the newer technology of holography. In a conventional photograph, there is a one-to-one relationship
between an illuminated
object and the parts of that
object on the film. But the hologram has many bizarre properties quite different from this. When a beam of coherent light is directed at the holographic plate, it produces a three-dimensional
object which is indistinguishable from the
original object. Interestingly, it is possible to break the plate into bits, and each bit still somehow “contains” the information from the whole plate, and when illuminated, again produces
the whole image. This means that in some sense, each part of the plate can be said to contain information enfolded, or “implicated” from the whole plate. In addition, the holographic plate
may contain any number of images; merely by tilting the angle at which the laser hits the plate, one may explicate completely different images
contained in the plate. Bohm maintains that the underlying
reality implied by quantum physics is structured in just this manner, in which all parts implicate the whole.
Clearly, Bohm is well aware of the implications his theory has for the study of
consciousness. As he puts it:
“The general tenor of the implicate order implies that what happens in our own
consciousness and what happens in nature are not fundamentally different in form. Therefore thought and matter have a great similarity of order…”
(Bohm, 1982b, p. 100).
Comparison of the TheoriesBoth Bion and Bohm consider each
moment to be a translation, or unfolding, of a primordial and multidimensional
reality into the more familiar three-dimensions-plus-time modality. According to Bion
(1965),
“the material provided by the analytic session is significant for
being the patient's view (representation)
of certain facts which are the origin (O) of his reaction” (p.
15). “O” refers on an individual level to the “raw data” of the analytic experience, but also in a more general sense to the “unknowable ultimate
reality” of
existence, which displays its knowable qualities only in a
secondary sense. Importantly, O is not to be confused with conventional words like
unconscious, which delude us into
thinking we know what we are talking about simply because we have a word for it. Rather, the distinction Bion
(1965) makes “is not between
conscious and
unconscious, but between finite and
infinite” (p.
46). In other words, the domain
psychoanalysis investigates is the continually unfolding pattern between O (the implicate) and where the patient “gives expression to [read: explicates] the
transformation that has taken place”
(Bion, 1965).
Consider the similar manner in which the quantum physicist regards
reality. All that the physicist actually observes is the explicate—that is to say, manifest—outcome of a mathematical
transformation of an
infinite underlying vibratory
reality. Each
moment of time is a
projection from the total implicate order into a local explicate order, and “any describable event,
object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement” (Bohm,
1980, p. 49). This is an area which classical science simply cannot discern, as it is a realm of invariant
transformations rather than solid, three-dimensional entities. For both mind and matter, then, each
moment is an active
transformation, a “very rapid recurrence of similar forms, changing in a simple and regular way” (Bohm,
1980, p. 183).
Objects in the physical world endure not due to any separate
existence, but due to an invariant algebraic
transformation in the quantum-mechanical domain. For Bohm, the laws of quantum mechanics do not govern
reality from without, as if the universe were a huge conglomeration of explicate billiard balls. These equations deal primarily with “how an explicate order of space-time emerges from [the
implicate], rather than with movements of physical entities” (Bohm,
1986, p. 193) in the visible explicate order.
Again, note how similar this
conception is to Bion's novel ideas about psychoanalytic observation. We need not detail here how Freud, in his
desire to emulate science, was lead to a mechanistic model of the mind; suffice it to say that in his structural model, the
invariance is
contained not in the
transformation, but primarily in a sort of explicate and fixed tripartite
structure. Importantly, this model is based upon the visual
image of an explicate order, in which
conscious thought is simply the byplay of readily visualized forces. Bion, on the other hand, suggests that the analyst is dealing with a constantly evolving
reality (O) which tosses up the outward phenomena of shifting associations, under which is embedded an invariant
transformation operation. Just as the
infinite complexity of the physical universe may be reduced to a much more simple generative order of mathematical
transformations, so, likewise, the analysand's productions may be reduced to an invariant generative order which recurs and repeats under many guises. The invariant in the
transformation is sought for primarily in the patient's derivatives, that is, explicate communications in which are embedded hidden and repetitive themes. Crucially, just because the mind
may be reduced to a simple generative order, this does not mean that it is therefore deterministic in the conventional sense. Rather, as new developments in
chaos theory demonstrate, this underlying order is a nonlinear one which has many possible outcomes, thus giving the appearance of randomness to the casual observer.
Unfoldment, Display, ReinjectionNow according to Bohm
(1982a), “the explicate order of the world of experience unfolds and displays the implicate” (p. 196). This two-way relationship
between implicate and explicate is required for
evolution to take place:
The implicate order can be thought of as a ground beyond time, a totality out of which each
moment is projected out into the explicate order. For every
moment that is projected out into the explicate there would be another movement in which that
moment would be injected or “introjected” back into the implicate order.…
A form emerges or is creatively projected from the whole, then it influences the whole, or is “injected” back into it.… This whole process—forms ceaselessly emerging and then
being reabsorbed—accounts for the influence of past forms on present ones, and also allows for the emergence of new creative forms [Bohm,
1982b, p. 93].
The “display” is the unfolded, or manifest world, through which an outward order may be introduced. But most importantly, there is the second process of “reinjection” which has the capacity to modify the implicate.
Bohm's depiction of the
projection into the explicate order and the subsequent “introjection” back into the implicate is a fascinating analogue to the manner in which the build-up of the infant's
internal world is supposed to take place. The earliest
phase of symbiotic
development is marked by a seamless and continually oscillating process, in which mental contents are projected into the maternal
container and then taken back in:
“Activities with figures in the outside world modify the qualities of internal figures
… [and] play,
dreams,
phantasy,
masturbation and other types of auto-eroticism in turn
affect these internal figures and thus alter the
child's view of the world”” (Meltzer,
1973, p.
31). In this regard, Bion pointed out that it
was not merely a static
object which is introjected by the infant, but a process: the “functional
introject” of the
mother's alpha function interfacing with and translating the infant's experience into meaning and sense. With respect to an implicate—explicate model of the mind, we might think of
alpha function in the broadest sense to be simply the translating function grounded in and able to transform the implicate order into an explicate meaning which can be thought about.
Dissolution of the Thinker, Suspension of Memory and DesireSince the implicate order transcends explicate
language or conventional thought, both thinkers submit that a peculiar mode of
language and
being must be implemented to conceptualize or talk about it. Bohm has stated that “the dissolution of the thinker” is “the highest priority the seeker for truth can undertake” (Weber,
1982, p. 38). This is because, just as the physical universe of stars and galaxies is but a mere “ripple” on the surface of the holomovement, “thought,” or “intellect” is a static, constricted,
and limited form of
consciousness. Intellect is basically mechanical in its order of operation, dealing as it does with what is already known. Bohm contrasts this with what he terms “intelligence,” which has the capacity to “perceive a new order or a new
structure that is not just a modification of what is already known or present in
memory.… What is involved in this act is
perception through the mind of abstract orders and relationships” (Weber,
1982, p. 51).
It should be clear that intelligence is related to the continuous and
dynamic unfolding of the implicate order, while intellect is related to the apparently static explicate order. Bohm's theoretical interest lies in this
dynamic vortex implied by quantum physics, the “freshly minted
moment,” or “ever-moving and self-renewing present” (Weber,
1982, p. 37).
Bion
(1970) is very similar on this point, stating that
“The analyst has to become infinite by the suspension of
memory,
desire, understanding” (p.
46). This mode of
being is called
“faith,” and is engaged in literally in order for the analyst to achieve as complete a state of unknowing as possible.
Knowledge (K), which is explicate, must be continually renounced in favor of unsaturating the thought process, so as to make the creative discovery possible. One can see that Bion's “K” is
analogous to Bohm's “intellect,” since they both obscure
intuition of the
moment-to-moment breaking wave of implicate → explicate, or what Bion calls O → Tβ.
Evolution of the Implicate Order: Truth, Knowledge, and BeingAs stated, both the implicate and explicate orders are required in the process of mental
evolution. Bion's Tβ (the end product of the
transformation), like the explicate order, is required to represent O, but unless there are also the profoundly experiential
transformations in O,
evolution will only occur in K—which stimulates the omnipotent
fantasy of possessing
knowledge, and a sterile
evolution of the intellect bearing no relationship to the deeper self. As a general
principle, “Only interpretations which transform ‘knowing about something’ into ‘becoming that something’ (K → O) will produce change and mental growth” (Grinberg, Sor, and de Bianchedi,
1977, p. 80). The initiation and resolution of an intensely felt
transference, of course, represents a prototypal
transformation in O.
The problem with conventional “thought” or “intellect” is that it cannot, by definition, contain the
infinite variables within the implicate order. Nevertheless it ceaselessly endeavors to do just this, and thus always ends with incompleteness,
paradox, and contradiction. One might think of the effort to describe
the unconscious in terms of explicate
language as tantamount to describing a three-dimensional cone in terms of a two-dimensional plane; the plane can capture a circle, elipse, or point, but it simply cannot contain the cone.
However, the cone can contain an
infinite number of planes, which has interesting implications for the proliferation of psychoanalytic theories.
In this regard Bion is one of the few psychoanalysts who seems to have deeply taken to heart the vital epistemological concept of
complementarity derived from quantum physics. According to this
principle, “in the normal
language available to us for communicating the results of our experiments, it is possible to express the wholeness of nature only through a complementary mode of descriptions” (Holton,
1988, p. 102). The preeminent physicist Neils Bohr maintained that duality is an all-pervasive and irreducible
principle in nature, and that our descriptions cannot help but reflect “the circumstances under which [experimental] evidence is obtained” (quoted in Holton,
1988, p. 123). Therefore, “[c]larity does not reside in simplification and reduction to a single, directly comprehensible model, but in the exhaustive overlay of different descriptions that
incorporate apparently contradictory notions” (Holton,
1988, p. 102). Now if this is an inherent
principle in the physical world, how much more must it be so in the polyphonic world discovered by Freud; yet how difficult it has always been for theorists to realize this. Anyone can look at the explicate side of Freud's work and point out that in
many instances he was incorrect; but this is missing the point. The essential factor of Freud's theories is how much was implicated within them, and how much fruitful
insight continues to be generated by them. Viewed from the perspective of complementarity we would say that the
drive, ego, self, archetypal, and
object relational psychoanalytic theories are all partial, explicate, and complementary disclosures of a deeper
reality discovered by Freud which defies classical, Aristotelian description.
Because it is difficult to visualize a domain such as the mind with dimensions of more than three, Bion pointed out that we tend to rely upon mental models derived from the sensual (primarily visual), explicate world. This in
turn leads to the erroneous conclusion that explicate
knowledge can disclose the truth of our
being. One of the perils of this form of psychic cartography is that
contained within the map is a tacit infrastructure of ideas and concepts which tends to become self-confirming: thought is thus excised from its deeper source, and
becomes a self-generating and closed loop. With this approach the
unknown is foreclosed, and what may appear to be “discoveries” will in fact be merely verifications of one's hidden assumptions about
reality.
Bion elegantly clarified this situation by drawing the distinction between Truth (O, implicate) and
Knowledge (K, explicate):
“Psychoanalysis attempts to be a
transformation in O, not by our understanding of K, but rather via the experience of K. Thus,
knowledge itself does not permit
transformation in O, only experience does. K is important only in
being able, once accepted, to be used to facilitate experience itself, the only route to O” (Grotstein,
1985, p. 307).
Bion therefore minimized the importance of understanding, “because of his belief that understanding closed off the experience and therefore foreclosed the
transformation in O” (Grotstein,
1985, p. 307). In practice, the analyst must guard against premature closure (saturation) of the patient's disequilibrium by rapid understanding. It is possible to “innoculate” (Pearce,
1985, p. 104) our patients (and ourselves) with psychoanalytic
knowledge so as to prevent the disease of psychoanalytic experience. Just as psychologists everywhere have taken the radically subversive notion of
the unconscious and replaced it with all sorts of concepts which can be defensively “known,” Bohm asserts that physicists too have recoiled from the deeper implications of quantum theory and
replaced them with a series of sterile equations which can be known in the same limited way.
Conventional Thought Versus a Language of AchievementWhat then is the proper place of thought and
language? Obviously, explicate thought has a necessary place in the overall
cognition of man. Thought begins first of all with a creative
perception, which is always part of a more encompassing flow from which it has been abstracted. Says Bion
(1980):
“I regard
anything I
‘know’ as transitive theory—a
theory ‘on the way’ to
knowledge. It is merely a
‘resting place,’ a
‘pause’ where I can be temporarily free to be aware of my condition, however precarious that
position is” (p. 31).
Importantly, an enormous amount of
thinking must take place before the suspension of thought can lead to generative
insight and discovery. Without this preparation, suspension of thought will merely generate undisciplined observations and chaotic and inconsistent interpretations. But then there is the opposite
problem that with
training and preparation, our minds can become circular, saturated, and unable to perceive the truly novel.
This brings us directly to the problem of
language, of which both Bion and Bohm were acutely aware. Many individuals are put off by the cryptic “logico-deductive”
language developed by Bion (as represented by his “grid”), but this
language cuts to the heart of one of the most vital epistemological problems for
psychoanalysis. Bion noted that analysts were plagued with the same problems mathematicians would have been, if they needed the actual concrete objects present in order to carry out mathematical
operations; they could not see that 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of whether oranges or apples are
being used. Bion felt that many of the disagreements among analysts were due to their inability to “formulate an abstraction, to represent the
realization that existing theories purport to describe” (1963, p.
1). In other words, theorists too often observe a unique particular occasion, and then inductively leap to what are probably not general conditions. The general theory, then, is not nearly abstract enough to be applied in deductive fashion. For this reason,
Bion (1970) stated that
“it is clear that a
development is required that will help
psycho-analysis in a manner analogous to that which modern
mathematics has helped the
development of physics” (p.
63), and which could “represent the invariants of an ever changing situation … [and] combine flexibility with rigour” (p.
23).
Psychoanalysis began as an attempt to describe in fairly objective terms the dynamics of the mind. Freud's structural model is in fact a pseudo-objective description
of the workings of the mind, employing many readily visualized concepts. The problem is that once we have such an objective map, a situation arises wherein the unknown is defended against through the possession of
knowledge. We know, for example, that Freud conducted analysis in a manner that emphasized its educational aspects, relying on the patients' rational faculty to use the power of proper
knowledge to liberate themselves from irrational suffering.
But Bion's
conception is really quite different than this; his “language of achievement” is designed so as to combine a maximum of objective precision with an equal capacity to be informed by
subjective experience. The descriptive term beta element partakes of an objective mode in that it refers to psychic events which we observe in others and experience in ourselves on a daily basis. And yet it is subjective
in the sense that it is necessarily an empty category that may only be filled out and understood through experience. Unlike a strictly scientific concept like “id,” it cannot be given and defined just once. It acquires an objective status more or less according
to the degree to which it has been experienced subjectively. The two modes—objective and subjective—are in a continuous feedback relationship to one another. If the beta element were to become completely objectified—say equated only with instinctual
energy—it would cease to have the capacity to evolve as a living idea, to be a tool for the investigation of the unknown (the actual
object of inquiry in
psychoanalysis). For Bion the purpose of psychoanalytic
technique is to facilitate experiences that we call psychoanalytic; theory should be used to give dimension and depth to those experiences; interpretations to facilitate the
evolution of these experiences.
How then does this
conception accord with modern physics? The Stanford physicist Jean Charon
(1983), in discussing how scientists describe elementary particles, points out that
physicists in
principle can no longer describe the element in a totally objective fashion. Indeed, he states, quantum physicists
propound a specifically subjective wave (the
psi wave), which will not represent the physical
object itself, but rather all the information known at any
moment about it.…
It must be emphasized that a
psi wave carrying probability information is subjective. It cannot, and must not at any time, be considered as an objective phenomenon occurring in space and time where what we call matter is moving [p. 43].
Like the methodology implied by Bion, the physicist sets up experimental conditions to facilitate quantum events; theories are put forth so as to make it possible to think about those events; an unsaturated
language is employed so as to facilitate the
evolution of scientific
thinking.
Psychic Determinism Versus a Holographic OrderRecall that in Bohm's theory, linear or “horizontal”
cause-and-effect—which forms the basis of Western scientific epistemology—is only relevant in the manifest but limited
reality of the explicate:
Essentially, what is manifest is what can be held with the hand—something solid, tangible and visibly stable. The implicate order has its ground in the holomovement which is, as we have seen, vast, rich, and in a state of unending
unfoldment and enfoldment, with laws most of which are only vaguely known, and which may even be ultimately unknowable in their totality [Bohm,
1980, p. 185].
Like Bohm, Bion is at pains to point out that a naive
projection of strictly linear causality cannot apply to a theory of mental
transformations. Bion
(1967) demonstrated his awareness of such recent trends in physics and their bearing on
psychoanalysis when he wrote:
“The
‘causal link’ has apparent validity only with events associated closely in space and time.
The fallacious nature of reasoning based on the idea of ‘causes’ is clearly argued by Heisenberg
(1958) in terms which should evoke an understanding response in any psycho-analyst” (p. 163).
This is a crucial point for
psychoanalysis for a number of reasons. First of all, it helps resolve some fundamental problems regarding the relationship between the
conscious and
unconscious mind. In Freud's day, because the mechanistic view represented the cutting edge of philosophical inquiry, he made every effort to squeeze his observations into this paradigm. But
the terms he uses—overdetermination,
condensation,
displacement—are actually characteristics of the holographic nature of the implicate order.
The peculiar properties of the hologram provide the model for a resonant order of information in which everything is
internally related; the whole is somehow enfolded in each part of the hologram, and vice versa. Now with
overdetermination, for example, we see that a
symptom may contain within it many diverse meanings and causative factors, all of which converge onto a singular expression. In this case, the
symptom—a
fetish, say—is like the holographic plate, which, when tipped at a different angle, may at the same time both deny and affirm the fact of
castration. It is certainly well established that a particular
symbol—symptom (i.e., compulsive hand washing) may be a compromise so as to “contain” and express both sides of a
conflict. And in fact, the very ability of the mind to form symbols so readily may rest upon its holographic substrate, in which one
image can contain many ideas and images (condensation), or in which elements of a class in which one aspect is shared are
considered identical (displacement). In the explicate order, however, only one aspect of the holographic manifold is able to be expressed at a time.
Matte Blanco's
(1975) profound work on the symmetrical properties of the unrepressed
unconscious corresponds in many essential points to the notion of a holographic implicate order. For example, the actual infantile feeding situation adumbrates the more subtle “food” one later receives in analysis; for symmetrical
being, interpretations = maternal nourishment. This is a very elegant way of explaining precisely how and why the analyst necessarily takes on the properties of the original “breast”
in the here-and-now of the analytic situation; the property of “nurturant giving” holographically relates
mother and analyst.
Matte Blanco
(1975) cites a more typically multidimensional example of a holographic order in his description of a patient whose attraction toward a certain woman was found to contain the following components:
Attraction towards the woman and admiration of the condition
of womanhood;
Desire to penetrate the woman; Envy of the vulva and vagina;
Desire to enjoy the sexual pleasures that the vulva and vagina may give to the woman; Feeling that this would mean
castration…; Rejection of
castration; Clear
knowledge of the actual limitations of any individual woman;
Aggression towards the woman; Great pride in his penis [p. 111].
“All of this,” he goes on, “was felt simultaneously.” As one can see, a rather mundane expression is only the explicate side of a much deeper process of unfoldment from a holographic implicate order, in which many factors converge
and may be traced in a single
conscious end-product.
Similarly, much of the work of Robert Langs
(1979) lucidly formalizes the holographic properties of
unconscious communications within the therapeutic situation. His “me/not me interface,” for example, is a
communication from the patient in which “every aspect refers on one level to the patient himself, while on another level to the therapist or analyst” (p. 545). Or
“transversal communications,” which are associations from the patient which “simultaneously express, both
fantasy and
reality, transference and nontransference,
unconscious
perception and
distortion, truth and falsehood, self and
object” (p. 554).
One could cite hundreds of other clinical examples here taken at random from almost any psychoanalytic article: for instance, there is clearly a holographic element to human
sexuality, in that enfolded within even the mature adult sexual relationship are not only the typical oedipal strivings, but also all of the vicissitudes of the original mouth—breast
relationship. All of these various relationships are literally copresent and interpenetrating at a deeper, implicate level of the mind. The shifting and polysemous nature of the
dream
image demonstrates its holographic substrate, as does any transitional phenomenon—the intermediate
stage of awareness which contains both inner and external
reality.
Borderline pathology certainly betrays a holographic substrate, wherein one split-off aspect of the mind is felt to contain the entire
personality, or where libidinal drives contain aggressive ones. It is incorrect to think of this order of information as a sequential, or associational storage system. It only appears to be
serial after it has made the
transformation to an explicate, manifest order.
PS ↔ D = WAVE THEORY ↔ QUANTUM
The wave—particle complementarity is one of the best known paradoxes in modern physics, and one which by extension throws light upon the implicate—explicate order of the mind. In short, the wave is the prior
reality, which is nonlocal, and implicate; it does not exist in time and space per se, but unfolds into its particulate form. On the other hand, the particle is physical, localized
energy—it is “simply” located in the explicate order of time and space.
This localized, fixed
energy is a restricted way of looking at the non-localized or unrestricted
energy. Non-localized
energy is an unrestricted field of possibility from which the particle of matter manifests. For the particle to manifest, the field's open potential
“collapses” to that single expression of the particle; and no field is manifest. For the field to manifest, the particle must respond in its wave form, at which point it cannot exist in its localized way [Pearce,
1985, p. xv].
Bion uses the probabilistic—that is, nonlinear—language of quantum physics in describing certain mental phenomena, notably, the move from paranoid-schizoid
(PS) to depressive (D) positions, and the spontaneous emergence of a “selected fact” “PS, the particles, may be regarded as an uncertainty cloud. These elementary particles may be regarded
as closing on to one elementary particle,
object, or β-element” (1963, p.
42). In addition, in his A Key to a Memoir of the Future
(1980), he defines the PSxharrD simply as “wave theoryxharrquantum” (p. 67), suggesting that the paranoid—schizoid
position bears the same relationship to the
depressive position as the wave (which is implicate) does to the quantum (the particle, or explicate event).
One may extend Bion's analogy as follows: PS = wave, or field, and D = the particle into which the field has collapsed. One may think of the primordial mental field to be constituted of what Bion describes as the primitive “thoughts
without a thinker,” which exist prior to the
personality which can “think” them. The particle represents an alpha element which has integrated the field into a coherent and meaningful experience. Thus
thinking is the active synthesis of thoughts from a domain which is
infinite in its possibility.
It is the
mother's alpha function that first converts the infant's primordial experience into a “localized,” explicate meaning that can be manipulated, or thought about; for example, transforming
the fear of death into hunger, or an aching void into the
desire to be held. Likewise, one of the jobs of the therapist is, through his or her “reverie,” to give content and
substance to the patient's theretofore unformulated dread which has thrived on the periphery of articulation, or to divest “a given situation of the characteristics of an
infinite set” (Matte Blanco,
1975, p. 18). Ideally, the
transference itself represents in pure form a pointlike collapse of many
unconscious elements onto the
image of the analyst. Before the consolidation of the
transference, these elements express themselves in a multitude of indeterminate “symptoms” which cannot be thought about,
and seem to have a life of their own.
Matte Blanco
(1975) explains that underneath any particular, explicate event lies an inexhaustible implicate
reality:
“There is a mysterious union between the
concrete, explicit meaning of an emotion and the
infinite possible meanings of that same emotion which are implicitly expressed in the concrete meaning.…
It is like a pouring of an infinite set into a limited group of relations: a
‘quantum’” (p. 299).
For example, anger toward the analyst (which is explicate) may be explored and discovered to be almost
infinite in its implicate meaning. As one moves more deeply into
the unconscious, anger may represent such primordial fantasies as devouring the maternal
breast or defending against
castration. Thus, the move from PS to D (in the
moment to
moment onto-logical rather than developmental sense) may be understood as a general movement of implicate to explicate.
Higher Dimensional Space and TimeBoth Bion and Bohm have written extensively on the generation of space, and come to similar conclusions. For example, they agree that three-dimensional euclidean space is not a given, but rather, a special limiting case of a
far more extensive n-dimensional space. According to Bohm
(1982a), if one follows the idea of three-dimensional space into quantum physics, there emerges “a much more subtle multi-dimensional order, which eventually dissolves into a vast ocean of
energy. The order of space is therefore the ground on which anything can exist or
take place in the
material world, and it is also the ground on which anything can be known or experienced in the mind” (p. 213).
Space and time can no longer be thought of merely as a priori categories (à la Kant), but rather matrices through which the universe has created the conditions for its further
evolution. In the postmodern
conception, space and time are not simply derivatives of
position and motion, but arise from a deeper process of unfoldment from the implicate order.
It is crucial to note that in the new physics, space is not to be thought of as mere homogeneous “emptiness.” It has qualities which condition the matter within
it, such as curvature, singularities (black holes), and worm holes into possible other dimensions. In fact, there is only space, with the relatively minute areas of greater density represented by matter; therefore, space is not that which separates objects
(as previously assumed), but that which unites them.
Analogously, mental space can no longer be thought of as some kind of an
ideal void; that is, merely a place for id, ego,
superego, and other objects to exist. It is now generally understood, particularly with respect to more serious structural defects, that
“[t]he infant's psychological contents can be understood only in
relation to the psychological matrix within which those contents exist” (Ogden,
1986, p. 180). And importantly, our apparently self-evident categories of three-dimensional space and unidirectional time, in no way mirror the actual
structure of the world; they are constructs, albeit necessary ones, which facilitate the
evolution of thought.
In Transformations
(1965), Bion wrote about his concept of mental space and its bearing upon the
development of
thinking. He describes “transformations in hallucinosis” as a mode of mental functioning which takes place “in an area
of infinite dimensions that cannot act as a
container” (Grinberg et al.,
1977, p. 89), and as “an immensity so great that it cannot be represented even by astronomical space” (Bion,
1970, p.
12). It is “so vast compared with any
realization of three-dimensional
space that the patient's capacity for emotion is felt to be lost because emotion itself is felt to drain away and be lost in the immensity” (Bion,
1970, p.
12).
Implied in Bion's
thinking is that this qualitatively different kind of mental space is the prior condition of the human
being, and that a developmental process is required in order for this space to be able to evolve. This process involves finding a
container—the
mother with
reverie—to both tolerate and transform what will otherwise remain an uncontainable and concrete “nameless dread.” In short, it involves
projection into a suitable
container of lesser dimension. Grinberg et al.
(1977) summarize Bion as follows:
“The
development of a non-psychotic concept of space and time stems from the establishment of a constant conjunction of facts of experience in
relation to the
presence and
absence of the
object.… This leads to growth conceived as
evolution” (p. 95). If this containment and
transformation does not occur:
[It may] result in a defective “skin boundary frontier” manifested by a subjective sense of a porous skin surface such that impulses are felt to “leak” out or others may see into a self experienced as transparent. When
development goes awry in this period, the individual turns to “hard” objects, and people and things are experienced as plugs to patch the porously experienced skin
container [Brown,
1984, p. 407].
Central to the possibility of forming a healthy relationship with the
breast-container is the ability to tolerate the
frustration inherent in the
realization that one does not have omnipotent control over the source of life, comfort, and meaning. Bion's analysis of schizophrenics led him to the understanding that the inability to tolerate
frustration was paramount in these individuals, who tend to experience the absent
breast as the active
presence of a bad persecuting
breast, which must then in turn be annihilated with destructive, envious attacks. These “attacks
on
linking” thus foreclose the “potential space” (where reflective thought might occur) between
impulse and
action. Grotstein
(1978) concurs that: “The
development of the awareness and toleration of the
‘gap,’ the space in distance and time between the going and coming of the
primary
object, constitutes the
‘baptism’ of space” (p.
56).
While this may appear complicated, it is a ubiquitous phenomenon in dealing with schizophrenic patients. One patient the writer was seeing—a thirty-seven-year-old, chronic schizophrenic male—began the session by saying that
his parents were no longer going to visit him as often as they had been, because his
mother had suffered a stroke. He worried that he was running out of money (his parents would give him money when they visited), and that he would not be able to buy cigarettes, and that he
liked cigarettes very much. As his voice became more agitated, he proceeded to claim that his parents were “basically lonely people who needed to be put into the electric chair.” When an attempt was made to call his
attention to his anger and disappointment, he became angered and indignant at the therapist for supposing that the patient had in fact experienced any
frustration; that is, for challenging his
omnipotence. This sequence demonstrates the inability of the psychotic mind to tolerate (or even represent) the
absence of the
need-satisfying object, the
annihilation of the link between the personalities, the explosive
projection of the greedy and unfulfilled (but
guilt-producing)
desire, and the maintenance of a meaningless
omnipotence.
In comparing Bion's formulations with Bohm's, it is immediately apparent that Bion's domain of “infinite dimensions” is analogous to Bohm's n-dimensional implicate
order. Both lie beyond any ability to be “realized,” save through poetic
metaphor, psychotic
regression, or mystical union. The fundamental
dynamic of both mind and cosmos is the relationship between these two orders of space. While it is the most basic
conflict in man, it also, as previously stated, sets up a
dynamic which creates the possibility for
evolution. Within this recursive interplay,
our minds constantly generate tentative formulations with the purpose of giving dimensions and depth to our
existence. But the operational word here is again
generate, and a mind has effectively died when thought becomes saturated with a rigid and final “solution.”
Time and the Implicate OrderBion's account of the genesis of unidirectional time is also analogous to Bohm's. In describing the psychotic dispersal following an attack on
linking, Bion wrote,
“The factors that reduce the
breast to a point, reduce time to now. Time is denuded of past and future. The
‘now’ is subjected to attacks similar to those delivered against space”
(1965, p.
55).
The “attack on time” leads to a very peculiar, recondite phenomenon which Bion nevertheless feels is essential in dealing with the schizophrenic patient. He writes that as a consequence of the explosive “psychotic dispersion”:
What may then appear to the observer as thoughts, visual images, and verbalizations must be regarded by him as debris, remnants or scraps of imitated
speech and histrionic synthetic emotion, floating in a space so vast that its confines, temporal as well as spatial, are without definition.
The events of an analysis, spread out over what to the analyst are many years, are (to the patient)
but the fragments of a moment dispersed in space [1970, p.
13; emphasis added].
Here Bion has touched upon a profound notion, which appears to be the psychological equivalent to Bell's theorem in physics—an idea central to Bohm—s
thinking. Bell's theorem is the most prominent
interpretation of what is known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment in quantum physics, and is considered by many quantum physicists to be of extreme significance in its recasting
of some basic assumptions concerning the fine space-time
structure of the universe.
Bell's theorem asserts that any atomic particles that were once contiguous, if separated, remain somehow in instantaneous contact with one another—no matter how great the distance between them. This is technically called “nonlocality”
or “action at a distance,” and is one of the principal characteristics of the implicate order. “The two-particle system is an indivisible whole, even if the particles are separated by a great
distance.… These connections are not signals in the Einsteinian sense; they transcend our conventional notions of information transfer” (Capra,
1982, p. 87). This internal relationship seems to confirm Bohm's notion of an implicate order in which all parts of our universe are in instantaneous contact with one another, outside the field
of time.
Bohm
(1980) has devised a thought experiment which can help us to understand both the EPR and Bion's psychotic dispersal. First, consider a standard rectangular fish tank
containing a fish. There are two video cameras viewing the tank through sides that are at right angles to one another. The resulting images are projected on to two separate television screens
in another room. If a person now views those screens without
knowledge of the fish tank, he will see what appears to be two separate fish. It will become immediately clear that there is some connection between the two fish, for as one moves, so does the other. The scientific
impulse is to look for some kind of causal connection between them. What will probably not occur to the person, as Bohm points out, is that the images on the two screens are actually two-dimensional
projections of a three-dimensional
reality; while they appear separate, they are in fact unified at a higher dimension. This is precisely how Bohm understands EPR: the two three-dimensional particles are not separate from each other, but may be regarded as three-dimensional projections
of a six-dimensional
reality, which is implicate.
To extend the
metaphor into
psychoanalysis, we might say that the actual fish in Bohm's illustration stands for Bion's O. The two fish images are Tβ. The psychotic mind has dispersed
the actual fish (representing a frustrating experience) far and wide. (Actually, we would need far more than two screens to contain the psychotic dispersal.) As a substitute for containment, the psychotic mind annihilates
not only the frustrating experience but the capacity to experience. Some of the bits are dispatched into the body, some into the
environment, and others into fragmented
speech. The
separation of these bits in “time” is actually a measure of how far they have been dispersed in mental space.
Again, what may appear to be a rather esoteric and egg-headed formalism has immediate clinical relevance when dealing with the psychotic part of the mind. Says Bion
(1970):
[The] analysis may be regarded as one
moment in time stretched out so it becomes a line or surface spread out over a period of years—an extremely thin membrane of a
moment. Regarded thus, the total analysis can be seen as a
transformation in which an intense catastrophic emotional explosion O has occurred (elements of
personality, link, and second
personality having been instantaneously expelled to vast distances from their point of origin and from each other) [p.
14].
One patient the writer was seeing, a schizophrenic woman with a fixed delusional paranoid system, was dominated by the
fantasy that three “machines” which were “a billion miles away” in outer space were connected to the various erogenous zones of her body, and keeping her alive. The reason these machines were
so far away was to keep them safe from her extremely sadistic and persecutory
superego, personified by her “Nazi stepfather piling up nude dead bodies.” Her life revolved around the elaboration of this
containing
fantasy, particularly at night, when there was less
structure to her
existence. Any time the therapist made an attempt to correlate her fantasies with any real-life experience, her mind would “explode” again, sending the machines even further into space. It was as if her
entire
existence really was the “thin membrane of a
moment” in which her good objects are about to be devoured, leaving her utterly helpless. This explains how each
moment of time becomes such a calamitous novelty for the psychotic mind: everything has been violently separated from everything else, and the causal thread in time is lost.
Likewise, Matte Blanco
(1975) finds the concept of an implicate, higher dimensional space-time matrix to be an indispensable notion in working with the psychotic mind, as well as with
dreams:
The
contiguity and well-ordered succession of wakeful life gives way to an
interpenetration of the various elements of the dream, a sort of mutual getting inside one another. In terms of three-dimensional space this appears chaotic, but if we consider the question in terms of a space of dimensions higher than three, it is no
longer so. We must suppose that various
dream-thoughts happen simultaneously in
the unconscious [Matte Blanco,
1975, p. 417; emphasis added].
In fact, “the dreamer ‘sees’ a multiple-dimensional world with eyes which are made to see only a three-dimensional world” (p. 418). In other words, the
dream is made up of the higher dimensional “fish,” but the
conscious mind reads out the
dream as if it were a well-ordered succession of explicate images. Obviously, the opposite is also true; that is, in our normal waking life, the higher dimensional
reality is constantly manifesting itself, such as in the
transference, which is in
reality, one mode of
being getting “inside” or “around” another.
Here Bion's axiom of suspending
memory and desire becomes relevant. Only by intuiting O can it be understood that elements in the explicate order may actually be contiguous in a higher dimension, and conversely, that due to “attacks on Unking,” associations which directly follow one
another may bear little relationship to one another. Intuiting the “original fish” is analogous to grasping the “transformation in O.”
ConclusionIn this paper, I have attempted to explicate a hidden relationship between physics and
psychoanalysis by demonstrating the striking theoretical isomorphism between W. R. Bion and David Bohm. In fact, there has always been an
unconscious (and sometimes
conscious) theoretical recursivity between
psychoanalysis and science, and there remains a persistent tendency to project our tacit understanding of physical
reality onto the otherwise amorphous mind. However, in recent years, both physics and
psychoanalysis have evolved beyond any view of
reality within the grasp of common
intuition, and it is therefore fruitful to forge new linguistic and conceptual structures with which to access the unknown and to generate deeper insights into our experience.
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Capra, F. (1982), The Turning Point. New York: Simon & Schuster.
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