ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion speaks about tropisms in his posthumous book Cogitations, and in his published work he only refers to this hypothesis under the name of narcissism and socialism as two opposite poles of mental functioning that coexist. The hypothesis of tropism is related to the investigation of the characteristics of the primitive mind, and its evolution from a primitive form of communication, realistic projective identification and the environmental circumstances that it meets. The chapter discusses mental growth regarding the development of potentialities, through the transformation of primitive proto-emotional, pre-natal aspects, and examines this subject from the perspective of tropisms. The counterpart of the nourishing breast is a breast whose function of being receptive to primitive communications and providing meaning is fundamental for the process of humanization and mental growth. This is the context in which the description of a catastrophic anxiety arises, possibly the most fundamental state of helplessness of the human being: the fear of an impending catastrophe.
