ABSTRACT
W. R. Bion speaks of unobservable transformations and sometimes uses the notation T in O to signal unknown, unobserved transformational processes, O a notation for unknown, perhaps unknowable reality—in psychoanalysis, emotional reality. Buddhism also speaks of nameless Buddha lands suggestive of rapid transformational work outside awareness. Bion speaks of making the conscious unconscious. A psychoanalytic analogue to the mystic’s darkness that begets faith more brightly, a profoundly lived paradox. The symmetrical mode is given to psychic contagion and union, the asymmetrical mode to distinction. In The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, Matte-Blanco associates infinity with unconscious life. In psychosis, S. Freud writes of withdrawal of libido from object to the ego, resulting in ego inflation, megalomania. One protects oneself from the object by hyper-inflating the ego, emphasising narcissism, grandiosity. Bion speaks of faith in face of destructive tendencies and calls faith the psychoanalytic attitude, which he sometimes describes as being without memory, desire, understanding, and expectation.
