ABSTRACT
To Wilfred Bion the unconscious constituted a seething cauldron because it was the quintessential seat of infinite, ineffable uncertainty, which he designated as O, his arbitrary, unsaturated sign for the Absolute Truth about Ultimate Reality. Part of the maternal or analytic sorting-out process consists of a transduction from the infinity and infinite sets of the Absolute Truth about Ultimate Reality downwards to finite, tolerable, personal—and, later, objective—meaning. Bion thus subtly revised the psychoanalytic concepts of first cause, hinted at but did not specify a truth drive, and relegated the libidinal drive and the aggressive drive, in a new conjunction with the epistemophilic drive, to the status of emotional links between self and objects: in other words, one knows an object by how one feels about it. Consequently, L, H, and K linkages join α-function in assigning categories to β-elements as they become α-elements.
