ABSTRACT
Bion undertook a rereading of the fundamental myths for the West – the myths of Oedipus, of the Garden of Eden, of Babel, and of the archaeological investigations at Ur – to illustrate that they all demonstrate the importance of “the prohibition of knowledge”. Like Freud, he establishes a parallel between the archaeologist and the psychoanalyst but insists on the “primitive disaster” with which the analyst has to deal. He was above all a clinician who elaborated a redefinition of the projective identification, of paranoid-schizoid and depressive mechanisms, of the part-object and of the mechanisms of linking, a radical upheaval of knowledge and of the theory of thinking starting from an undifferentiated “protomental apparatus”, learning from experience, while making a new use of the negative and achieving a supersession of morality that is indispensable for the formalisation of non-guilt-inducing interpretations.
