International Forum of Psychoanalysis.

2009; 18: 8689

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Alpha-transformation, mental void, and edition

JAIME M. LUTENBERG

Abstract There are patients whose outstanding feature is a particular difficulty in communicating with themselves. According to Bion, who reconceptualized Freuds theory, all of us have in our inner world the potential for both producing and blocking alpha-transformations. When they are blocked, beta-elements are formed, which are unable to generate thought. Our capacity to think and to think ourselves depends exclusively on alpha-elements. Patients suffering from problems derived from a compensated structural mental void are unable to think. Following Bion, the non-edited would, generally speaking, be one of the facts that condition the formation of beta-elements. The production of beta-elements transforms these personalities into functional illiterates. To what extent can we ignore the novelties that these patients present us with through the production of beta-elements and bizarre objects? I wonder whether the concepts of repetition and reedition, as they are currently used in the clinical process, are not actually casting a shadow over our minds, thus thwarting our ability to assess the total dimension of this functional illiterate condition. The analysts mind can be the first link in a patients chain of unthinkable thoughts: (1) repetition; (2) embryonic thoughts; (3) the non-edited; (4) structural mental void; (5) functional illiterate; and (6) mental abortions.

Key words: W .R. Bion, alpha-transformation, mental void, edition

The coincidence between this congress on W.R. Bions work and the 30th anniversary of his Italian seminars (Bion, 2005) incited me to reread them. Among Bion?s first words, I ran across the following very striking consideration: the subject I want to discuss is one which I find very difficult to talk about in any language (p. 1). Almost without realizing it, I was facing what I felt to be a reformulation of the equation O l K. As we know, Bion claimed that the analyst?s work is an inquiry into the transformations in the analytic bond triggered by the cesura, which links and discriminates both members of the analytic couple. During each session, we witness the possibility of a new mental birth. Now, what is the meaning of mental birth according to Bion? We might understand this as a new vertex (or reformulation) of the Freudian technique consisting in making the unconscious conscious. Bion has repeatedly shown us that if we work leaving our conscious level free from memory (the past) and desire (the future), we situate ourselves in the best position to be open to the novelties of each session, thus transforming the cesura into a sort of creation generator for analyst and patient.

Re-reading Bions Italian seminars also led me to reformulate my own previous deductions concerning the concept of edition in analysis (Lutenberg, 1993a, 1996), in particular my connecting his final statements with those he had expressed in A memoir of the future (Bion, 1991).1 When I first noted the possibility of editing in analysis, I expressed the opinion that in every psychoanalytic process there are moments when the analytic dialogue is centred on the task of reediting, that is, trying to turn the unconscious into conscious. Yet there are also other moments of this dialogue when analytic work is based on edition. Re-reading Bion reminded me that, today, every analytic dialogue invites us to work permanently along the lines of edition. From the perspective Bion developed in his Italian seminars and in other papers (Bion, 1977), the entire emotional experience during the session is always an edition.

What follows is Bions statement from his Italian seminars on July 8, 1977: But I would like to be able to say, Please tell me when your optic pits, at about the third somite, became functional. Tell me when your auditory pits became functional (Bion, 2005, pp. 23).

Correspondence: Jaime M. Lutenberg, Av. Del Libertador 408- 2 8 Fl. Apt B, Buenos Aires Argentina. Tel: '54 11 4811 2753. Fax: '54 11 4811 2753. E-mail: jluten@mail.com

(Received 19 June 2008; accepted 20 February 2009)

ISSN 0803-706X print/ISSN 1651-2324 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08037060902850837

Alpha-transformation, mental void, and edition Lewin (1939) adds to this concept with his principle, which states that the whole is different from the sum of its component parts2. Each session is a different whole, a new thing in itself (O). In this context, we may consider the hypothesis of re-edition as valid. However, it is also an illusion of the analyst that does not account for the totality of the facts occurring during each session. If we agree with Bion that the vertex of psychoanalysis is in O (Bion, 1970), every analytic process undergoes multiple transformative instances originating in the link between the psychotic and nonpsychotic parts of both patient and analyst. If we base our considerations upon the cesura, each session will stand as a new thing in itself. This new synchronic whole will give rise to an edition and only one and also to a new vision of psychoanalytic truth: the truth of the relationship (verdad vincular), which is different than other truths. I will discuss here my personal conceptualization of the structural mental void and of the potential edition of those new mental elements inhabiting the mental void. I will do so with the expectation of starting a dialogue on the concept of alpha-transformation. My review of the ways in which the three concepts interrelate will be very brief and open to discussion. Synthesis of the concept of mental void (structural and emotional) During my clinical experience, I regularly observed that behind the silence of certain patients there was only that sheer psychic silence, void. This observation led me to an in-depth investigation of mental void whose conclusion was (cf. Lutenberg, 2007) that we should differentiate structural mental void from emotional void. The structural mental void is a non-structure that has a virtual existence. It is located deep down in the defensive secondary symbiosis and in autism. It is a primitive defensive organization secondarily compensated by different psychopathological structures that neutralize and hide it. Consequently, we will not encounter a positive mental void in clinical work. Symbiotic links ordinarily represent the most common form of a successful and balanced compensation of mental void. It is precisely the symbiotic link that houses the virtual structure described here. Only when individuals undergo physical or mental

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separation from those objects or institutions with which they were previously fused is the clinical evidence of mental void revealed in its dramatic turbulence. Normal perinatal symbiosis is the postnatal matrix where human beings start (or continue) their mental development. For the newborn, such a link constitutes an undifferentiated psychosomatic whole that serves as the basis for its mental transformations.3 The traumatic rupture of normal perinatal symbiosis during the first year of life gives way to a compensatory secondary symbiosis. Yet this secondary symbiosis perpetuates a narcissistic feebleness that leads to a marked fragility in the face of frustration. Mental void is the hiatus (split) arising within the mind between the symbiotic background and its narcissistic structure. From a metapsychological point of view, we may postulate that mental void comes to stand as a conceptual figure in the virtual space between symbiosis and narcissism. New psychopathological structures emerge from the secondary struggle against the feeling of terror. There appear also new traumatic fixations associated with the polymorphic nature of the secondary defence against mental void. That is why, in our clinical experience, we may find a range of complementarities between mental void and neurotic or psychotic structures. In different instances in the development of a personality, there may appear different alternatives concerning the relation container l contained. The most critical moment for the mind occurs when the total link situation requests the creation of different expansions of the capacity for reverie and a greater flexibility of the containment function (see Bions comments in Cogitations, February 1971, pp. 2424). Emotional void (feeling of void) is a conscious feeling of inner hollowness, of having nothing inside. That which is missing refers to emotions, sensations, affects, and everything deriving from these. The analyst must be able to differentiate the feeling of void from the feeling of sadness or depression. Emotional void may or may not be tied to structural mental void. Structural mental void is a phenomenon that affects only a split portion of the whole mind. The empty portion leads a life conditioned by the personality of

Gestalt theory claims both that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. There is a huge conceptual difference between more and different.

Ashley Montagus book Touching: The human significance of the skin (Chapters 2 and 3) was very helpful to me in reference to perinatal symbiosis and the continuity between intrauterine and extrauterine lives. He mentions there the neotenia phenomenon and says, quoting Bostock: Human gestation actually comprises an intrauterine phase or uterine gestation, and an extrauterine phase or extero-gestation . . . [which] finishes when the child starts crawling . . . and would last as long as uterine gestation (that is, nine months each).

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J. M. Lutenberg Edition: technical specificity of the concept For Freud, the one who thinks pre-exists thought itself; thoughts are the aim of the drive. For Bion, thoughts pre-exist the thinker. Thought is the specific stimulus for the thinking apparatus. To edit the non-edited, the analyst must be able to grasp, using his own insight, all those thoughts that have no thinker. The task of transference edition confronts us with unknown terror. Summing up, edition includes two core components, technically speaking. The most important one is creating the specific mental structure (reverie function) able to house (contain) the thoughts to come. It is like building up the printing structure for future editions. The other component refers to the contents to be edited, that is, the process of transforming into alpha-elements both the ejected betaelements and the bizarre objects created by them. Edition is configured following a special syntax that combines several elements: 1. verbal free associations, dreams, and the patient?s nocturnal hallucinations; 2. all the consequences of the defensive use of massive projective identification; 3. the patients free body associations (Lutenberg, 1993b); 4. the patients various acting-out manifestations; 5. the analysts countertransference, which includes dreams and bodily resonances; 6. all possible forms of attacks on linking (either verbal or presented as attacks on the setting) (cf. Bleger, 1967; Bion, 1967). Summary There are patients whose outstanding clinical feature is their difficulty in communicating with themselves; Freud dealt with this problem throughout his work. Yet it was Bion who reconceptualized it with his hypothesis that all of us have in our inner world the potential for both producing and blocking alpha-transformations. When blocking occurs, betaelements result, which are unable to generate thought. Our capacity to think and to think ourselves depends exclusively on alpha elements. I believe that patients suffering from problems derived from a compensated structural mental void are unable to think many of their own thoughts (Lutenberg, 2007). This is due to the fact that their ego is split into several isolated portions. One of these portions is the psychotic part of the personality, described by Bion. Following Freud, we might consider the nonedited in the context of what is clinically designated as repetition beyond the pleasure principle.

the individual (or institution) with which the subject is fused. We are dealing here with an amazing, paradoxical form of alienation of which the subject is completely unaware. The different parts that form the mental void demand to be edited in the analysis according to particular technical procedures. Edition The word edition has been coined to differentiate the task described above from that of re-edition. If we agree that the core of the psychoanalytic experience entails investigating the cesura (Bion, 1977), that is, the fluid exchange of interpersonal and transpersonal emotions in each session, the metaphor condensed in re-edition may be replaced. Here and now with me, like there and then may become here and now between us, unlike with anybody ever . . . neither in the past nor in the future. The particularity of this viewpoint lies in the fact that, working in analysis within the synchronic level, we include a synthesis of the three diachronic levels of the psychoanalytic bond, namely (1) the diachrony of the history of the analytic bond as a whole; (2) the diachrony of the prehistory and history of the patient; and (3) the diachrony of the prehistory and history of the analyst. Such inclusion of the diachronic levels in their articulation with the synchronic level takes on a different meaning if we connect it to Lewin?s principle, according to which the synchronic whole is different from the sum of its diachronic components. Concerning edition and the ways in which analysts can put interpretations into words, I found it useful to complement the concept of cesura with the notion of interface.4 Interface refers to the technical link between the computer and its user. According to Bion, edition corresponds to the transformation into alpha-elements of all those parts of thought which are ejected out of the mind under the form of beta-elements. From a semantic point of view, transference edition refers to the vicissitudes of a total process whose function is to give rise to the mental birth of all those aspects of the patients personality that had remained outside the dynamic area of their mind. Such areas were engulfed in symbiotic links (defensive secondary symbiosis) or deeply embedded in their secondary autistic defences. The structural mental void underlies both forms of defence.

This is a term originated in the field of information technology and formulated by Negroponte in his 1996 book Being digital. Negropontes approach helped me to rethink the concept of cesura (Bion, 1977; Freud, 192526). It also led me to include in my conceptualizations Libermans contributions to communications theory (Liberman, 1976).

Alpha-transformation, mental void, and edition Following Bion, we would include it among those facts that condition the formation of beta-elements. However, the mental production of beta-elements also gives rise to an active emptying of the mind. Whenever massive projective identification avoids thinking thoughts, a series of other functions are swept along as well. The main ones are the capacity for consciously registering feelings and perceptions (visual, tactile, and aural capacities) and the ability to pay attention. The preservation of these capacities depends on the subjects ability to tolerate frustration. The production of beta-elements transforms these personalities into functional illiterates. This word, which refers to the mind, implies a sort of semantic foreignness different from the foreignness derived from repression. In functional illiterates, the very production of words turns into a thing in itself, which is foreign even to them. The clinical process with severely disturbed patients poses the following question: To what extent can we ignore the novelties that these patients present us with either through their complex resistance or through the production of beta-elements and bizarre objects? I wonder whether the concepts of repetition and re-edition, as they are currently used in clinical practice, are not actually casting a shadow in our minds, rendering us unable to evaluate the full dimension of the functional illiterate condition we observe. The analysts mind can represent for the patient the first link in a chain of unthinkable thoughts. Transference symbiosis reproduces and homologates within the analytic bond both primal and secondary symbiosis. The first corresponds to the extrauterine gestation period, and the second develops as a defence against psychic traumas of that same period (mental abortions). Symbiotic transference opens our way into embryonic thoughts, all of which are virtual. They can become real only after patients succeed in weaving their missing mental fabric on the basis of alpha-elements. The equation mental abortions l edition represents a synthesis of the point of view I have developed in this paper. Translated by Silvia Feld, Marco Conci, and Judith Filc References

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Bion, W.R. (1967). Second thoughts. London: Heinemann Medical. Bion, W.R. (1970). Attention and interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications. Bion, W.R. (1977). Two papers: The grid and the caesura. Rio de Janiero: Imago Editora. Bion, W.R. (1991). A memoir of the future. London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (1992). Cogitations. London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (2005). Italian seminars. London: Karnac. Bleger, J. (1967). Simbiosis y ambigu edad [Simbiosis and ambiguity]. Buenos Aires: Ed. Piados. Freud, S. (192526). Inhibition, symptoms and anxiety, SE 20, 75175. Lewin, K. (1939). Field theory and experiment in social psychology. London: Tavistock. Liberman, D. (1976). Comunicacio n y psicoana lisis [Communication and psychoanalysis]. Buenos Aires: Alex Editor. Lutenbeg, J. (1993a). Repeticio n: reedicio nedicio n [Repetition: re-editionedition]. Revista de Psicana lisis de APA. Numero especial: La repeticio n [Monographic issue: Repitition], 89110. Lutenberg, J. (1993b) La asociacio n libre corporal [Free body associations]. Revista Psicoana lisis de APdeBA, 15, 26795. Lutenberg, J. (1996). La edicio n en el ana lisis [Edition in analysis]. Revista Zona Ero gena, 31, 3536. Lutenberg, J. (2007). Mental void and the borderline patient. In A. Green (Ed.), Resonance of suffering (pp. 89120). London: International Psychoanalytic Library. Montagu, A. (1971). Touching. The human signicance of the skin. New York: Columbia University Press. Negroponte, N. (1996). Being digital. New York: Vintage.

Author Jaime M. Lutenberg is a medical doctor and psychiatrist, and has an MA in psychoanalysis. He is full member of the Argentinean Psychoanalytical Association (APA) and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). He is a training teacher at the Psychoanalytic Training Institute of the APA and on the Masters in Psychoanalysis course, and has given seminars at various psychoanalytic institutions in America and Europe. He is the author of the following books: El psicoanalista y la verdad [Psychoanalysis and truth] (1998), La ilusio n vaciada [The empty illusion] (1999), Rigoletto, un drama actual [Rigoletto, a still relevant drama] (2000), El vac o mental [Mental void] (2007), and Teoria de los v nculos en psicoana lisis [Theories of links in psychoanalysis] (2008). He has published over 40 papers in different journals in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, and also in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.