Homogeneity of the protomind
Abstract
Considering the homogeneous nature of the group (traumatised war veterans at Northfield hospital) that first led Bion to study the group function and the contribution of the social and primitive mind to cognitive processes and psychic evolution, the contribution first examines the etymological and historic notion of homogeneity, going on to compare it with the main psychoanalytic models that have used it in their theoretical treatment as an element significant to the psychic mechanism; and, finally, this dimension (of indistinction) is observed as a function that contains its own reciprocal (the fluctuating impulse toward individuation) and that will tend to behave in psychoanalysis as a “probe” (Bion, 1970) by Read more