Bion

Bion the mystic

Abstract

In order to adequately understand the Bion’s mysticism we need to take in account the “catastrophic event” he meet in his life; as a matter of fact, until the half of the ’70 Bion wrote amply and skilfully about general psychoanalysis, in a frame of reference that could be sed “aristotelic-kantian”, and for the same reason in dealing with groups he took upon himself an evident “military” mindset. In this part of his work nothing is found of a mystical nature. The event that changed the Bion’s life seems to come from his gettino in touch with the Nord-American experience and psychoanalysis: this fact de-stabilized his mindset, and made therefore possible his use of “less scientific” and more un-saturated concepts than those of the more precise and formal earlier writings, showing a moving versus a “platonic-matteblanchian” direction. Since that Bion entered in a phenomenic word that does’not conceil its derivation from the indian culture in which Bion began his life and spent the infancy. Here we find the “mystic” in its proper sense . The assumption of the “sensory O”, of the intuitionistic “non-sensory O”; the functional transformation of the beta elements and of their very nature, moreover the dreaming contact as well as the terror of the meeting with patients: these are aspects of a lay mystic, which by the way corresponds to that take place in the holy mystic. The reference to a clinical case, to the concept of “sur-limation” here considered, and the coincidence of these later Bion’s principles with that of “symmetry” by Matte Blanco do reinforce the concept of a “lay mystic” in this part of Bion’s thought.

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