ABSTRACT

The negative is one of the central concepts in psychoanalytic thought: “unconscious”, “negation”, “denial”, “disavowal”, “negative hallucination”, “counter-transference”, etc., are variations of the negative as a concept. In Anglo-Saxon clinical practice, the negative appears in “the negative aspect of relationships” (Winnicott) and in “attacks on linking”, “destruction of the apparatus for thinking” (Bion), etc. It also explains the distinction Bion makes between “nothing” and “no-thing” or “no-breast” to illustrate the absence of satisfaction at the origin of the sense of frustration, of “not-understanding” or of “mis-understanding”, which can lead the patient to “reverse the perspective” and to seek to destroy the analyst’s analytic capacity. He then regards the analyst as a bad object with the sole aim of “enviously denigrating a good object”. The absence of good alpha function amplifies the production of toxic beta elements which, because they are “not there” (i.e. absent) as alpha elements, become superegoic, persecuting and destructive “bizarre objects”.

Finally, the negative can also be found, in Bion’s work, in the lie, an indispensable aspect of the language for representing the principle of contradiction in thought.