To Feel in My Flesh: Receptivity, Resonance, Representation, and The Beta Screen

Abstract

When we are confronted with the challenge of trying to fully convey or describe something about human life and emotional experience, we find ourselves up against the very limitations of language. This problem becomes especially relevant as we attempt to expand psychoanalytic theory so as to enable us to “approach a mental life unmapped by the theories elaborated for the understanding of neurosis” (Bion1962, p. 37). This paper seeks to aid in that expansion by revisiting Bion’s early writings about the beta screen, extending his conclusions about communication from the psychotic part of the mind to the broad area of the unrepresented (the unstructured unconscious), suggesting that there is often a potentially communicative meaning, a mute plea for intersubjective regulatory assistance (alpha function), embedded in the unconscious evocation of emotions in the object and that this cry for help may be encrypted in even the most seemingly destructive, resistant and oppositional patients.

Keywords:

• Beta screen
• emotions
• reverie
• analytic process
• pleasure principle
• reality principle

Notes

1 Symington & Symington (1996), p. 51.

2 Bion (1962, 1970) spoke of beta elements as emotions and sensations that one cannot think with or think about.

3 There is a sense in which a great deal of Bion’s writing, even his early formulations of unconscious group dynamics, attempt to address the problem of how to contain, recognize, and metabolize the infinitizing, potentially traumatizing, centrifugal forces of raw, being-in-the-world.

4 That is, while the fullness of mental space and the phenomena of raw existential Experience are overwhelmingly infinite, that part of the psyche that contains the set of representations that we speak of colloquially as our mind and its thoughts is three-dimensional. Readers may notice—and perhaps will forgive—my use of a spatial metaphor here to try to try to convey this thought. That I have to resort to something that is too concrete, potentially misleading and literally false—the mind is not a place—is an example of the limitations of language that I am trying to speak about! For an extended discussion of this problem see Bergstein (2019).

5 I will use the convention of using the capital E to talk about raw, existential Experience, which by definition cannot be fully known, but may only be or become and use the small e to refer to that part of Experience (everyday experience) that can come to be known.

6 Like Freud (see Stanicke et al. 2020), Bion’s epistemological reasoning rests within the Western philosophical tradition of thinkers such as Kant and Hume.

7 Laplanche (2002) describes an analogous process when he talks about the limitations in translation as we move from the unconscious transmission, implantation, and installation of an unknowable sexual desire in the creation of the infant’s unconscious.

8 “It is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating or communicating thought.” (Bion 1970, p. 3).

9 The capacity to accept this trade-off is captured in the concept of primary erotic masochism, a subject discussed at length by Aisenstein (2023).

10 We should also mention Winnicott (1968) here, because the frustration referred to may be that of what he called ego gratification, rather than instinctual gratification or survival need. “Thinking starts as a personal way that the infant has for dealing with the mother’s graduated failure of adaptation. Thinking is part of the mechanism by which the infant tolerates both failure of adaptation to ego-need and frustration of instinct producing tension, particularly the former” (p. 213).

11 In Attention and Interpretation, Bion (1970) referred to them as no-things.

12 See also Lombardi (2017).

13 See for example, Aisenstein (2017): “there are no psychosomatic illnesses: the human being, by definition, is a somatopsychic unity” (p. 76).

14 “healthy mental growth seems to depend on truth as the living organism depends on food” (Bion 1965, p. 38).

15 See also Freud’s (1937) paper “On Construction” and Levine (2022) for further discussion.

16 Although the psychotic part of the personality is the designation usually used to indicate the proto-mental or non-neurotic-normal parts of the psyche, I find it an unfortunate choice of words, because it may be taken to imply that we are all in some way psychotic or that psychosis is a normal part of infantile development and inheres in all of us throughout our lives. Bion may have chosen the term, psychotic part of the personality, because his view of the non-neurotic parts of the personality were emerging from his work with frankly psychotic patients and his choice of terminology was influenced by Klein, who spoke of the psychotic anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid position and categorized projective identification as a psychotic defense. However, Green (1986) cautioned that while we all have our own private madness, that is not the same as having a part of our minds that deserves the psychiatric diagnosis of psychosis.

Following the work of Winnicott (1965) and De Masi (2020), I believe that psychosis is better seen as a particular kind of psychic organization that becomes installed in the mind, turns away from reality, skews psychic functioning towards sensation-generation rather than sense-making, and is desperately clung to as a last-ditch defense against annihilation anxiety, nameless dread, and the threat of the explosive return of disruptive, traumatizing states of disintegration. While psychosis may defend against and embody a great deal of traumatized and traumatizing chaos marked by bizarre objects and failures of representation, I do not believe that psychosis should be viewed as a residue of a normative state of unrepresentation or unintegration or assumed to be equivalent to or to denote a mere absence of representations, i.e., the presence of beta elements, drives, not yet transformed sense perceptions, etc. The latter, which are inscribed but ideationally unrepresented may be potential or emergent but not yet formed and are better thought of as making up the majority of the Id. This is different from the dynamic unconscious, which is derived from and consists of secondary repression of unacceptable, anxiety arousing, ideationally saturated, nameable desires. What I am insisting, however, is that all of this should be distinguished from psychosis. The unrepresented is normative, universally present, and not linked to specific, fixed ideational elements that are saturated in regard to meaning.

17 For an extensive discussion of this, see Eshel (2019) and her formulations of analytic oneness and withnessing.

18 I should add that this at-one-ment and living-out-together does not necessarily imply or condone the need for self-disclosure or action outside of the analytic setting.

19 Implicit in Bion’s (1962) writings is a structural model of the mind consisting of two different sectors of the psyche, each with their own organization. The neurotic-normal sector is structured by a contact barrier that consists of alpha elements and separates conscious from unconscious thought and waking life from sleep and dreaming. The basic unit of this sector is the fully saturated ideational representation. Its unconscious elements are repressed, unconscious fantasies that are fully saturated in regard to meaning. The dominant form of communication that comes from this sector is conveyed by the semantic meaning of the words spoken. This is the area of the repressed unconscious and the ideationally represented.

The so-called psychotic sector of the mind, which I would prefer to call the ideationally unrepresented sector, is organized around a beta screen that consists of beta elements and diffuse, energic forces—think of Freud’s (1933) description of drive movements and cathexes of the id that are force without fixed or fully saturated ideational meaning, pure energic force in search of linkage to and containment by ideational meaning, which will give that force specific direction, aim, and object. In Bion’s theory, this force is embodied in the beta elements of projective identification. As will be described in the section that follows, the dominant form of communication that comes from this sector is the evocation of affect in the object.

20 Bion (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann, pp. 100-101.

21 Aisenstein (2017) makes an analogous assertion about somatic discharges: “Somatic outcomes are to my mind attempts—presumably last-ditch attempts—to mobilise a reparative aim in ‘another,’ whose value as an object is at the relevant time imperceptible and uncertain” (p. 90).

22 For example, Symington and Symington (1996) write that “It is as though the function of the beta screen is to stop the analyst from thinking and instead to act out” (p. 66).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Howard B. Levine

Howard B. Levine is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society; and faculty at Pulsion and NYU Post-Doc’s Contemporary Freudian Track; on the Editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry; and editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series. He is in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts and is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019) and Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry (Routledge 2022).