ABSTRACT
It is thanks to transformations (painting, notes, words, etc.) that representations of reality can find their place in the “internal world” of individuals. After Freud, who had established a differentiation between thing-presentations and word-presentations, following the philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and Hegel) who reflected on the materiality and essence of things, Bion considered that reality – the psychic reality, infinite by nature, of patients, which he calls “O” – is unreachable by the means the human mind possesses, and yet analysts must strive to “become” the reality that the patient is trying to describe, in order to be able to share the world in which he/she is living. Thus Bion was always interested in the relationship linking the patient and the analyst and in the “preconception” that the latter must preserve for orienting his thought. Here, once again, it is incumbent upon the analyst to accept variations of orientation which can cause the sequence of causes and effects to oscillate. Their sequence becomes “logically necessary” from the moment it is “psycho-logically necessary”, that is to say, necessary for someone. The mechanism described by Bion under the term “alpha function” is a mechanism of transformation that links the mouth and the nipple, the infant and the mother, the patient and the analyst. It serves to provide meanings, without which anyone who is lacking them fills this lack with hallucinations. “Becoming O” – or in Lacan’s terms, being in a state of “unbeing” (désêtre) – requires the analyst to strive to be “without memory, desire or understanding”, just as Freud wrote to Lou Andréas-Salomé that he sometimes “artificially blinded himself at his work in order to concentrate all the light on one dark passage”. The figure of the blind Tiresias, whom Lacan regarded as “the patron saint of analysts”, illustrates well the role of seer that the analyst has to incarnate.
