Phenomenolgy, Hermeneutics, and Wilfred Bion’s Theory of the Primitive Mental States

손홍석 2025-01-01

1.Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Psychoanalysis

While the discipline of hermeneutics and psychoanalysis align with or coincide, the relationship between phenomenology and psychoanalysis is conflictual or, at least, complex. As Ricoeur demonstrated, psychoanalysis can be seen as a mode of hermeneutics: the hermeneutics of desire in suspicion of the patient’s discourse, compared to that of the text in hermeneutics.[1] According to him, the purpose of psychoanalytic theory, as the work of interpretation within the region of desire, lies in setting out the conditions of possibility of a semantics of desire.

    Ricoeur finds similarity between phenomenology and psychoanalysis in the respect that they share the premise that the meaning and the origin of language is incarnated in the body, and in their coincidence of theory of intersubjectivity in the constitution of the subject.[2] When psychoanalysis starts to demand the use of the unconscious as a substantive meaning, however, it falls to the category of “an epoché in reverse,”[3] an anti-phenomenology. Phenomenology’s fundamental hold on the most known consciousness contrasts with psychoanalysis’ seeking of the least known unconscious. The phenomenological investigation would clear out what does not manifest itself, the un-conscious. Nevertheless, paradoxical relationships arise when phenomenology pushes itself to the limit towards the revelation of what is beyond the objectified and represented intentionally, i.e., as in phenomenology after Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Then, “a phenomenology of unconsciousness pushes both the conception of the phenomenon and the conception of logos to their limits, or beyond.”[4]

    Therefore, phenomenology and psychoanalysis merge again in the domain of the inaccessible. The inaccessible, firstly, in the sense of “transcendent,” which can never become accessible to human beings. Secondly, in the sense of “limitation,” which disallows the human to apprehend it as it is in-itself.[5]Unfortunately, the fruitful philosophical studies on the crossover of phenomenology and psychoanalysis have, thus far, been concentrated only to the narrow extent of psychoanalysis, mostly and limited to that of Freud and Lacan.[6]

 2. Wilfred Bion’s Theory of the Primitive Mental States: The Phenomenology of the Absence

In contemporary psychoanalysis, one of the significant trends has been the shift toward the practice and theoretical explorations of primitive mental states. While Freud conducted classical psychoanalysis on patients with neurotic problems, the object-relations theory and infant studies took a step inside the deeper level of pathologies, thereby gaining knowledge of the infantile lives. Nowadays, psychoanalytical encounters involve patients struggling with even more severely compromised psychic structuralization deriving from deeper levels and earlier stages of life: psychotics, severe trauma, and autistics. Such trend unfolding the studies of primitive minds rely heavily on Wilfred Bion.

    Bion’s work made it possible to explore the primordial mental state, unmapped by the previous theories. Psychoanalysis of the neurotic conflict and object-relations elaborates the mind as premising the capacity for representations - dream thoughts, symbols, and fantasies. Bion’s psychoanalytic theory, on the other hand, questions the fundamental possibilities and conditions of any representation in the mind. Primitive mental states are devoid of representational and symbolic function or any differentiation between psyche/soma, subject/object. Bion could not but postulate that the mental space or the human psyche is “a thing-in-itself, that is infinite and unknowable.”[7] His scrutinization of the unrepresented states,[8] or the “ineffable experience unmediated by thought,”[9] is phenomenological in that he tried to investigate the foundational possibility of the thinking process itself and his careful elucidation of experience without any suppositions. Bion starts with the phenomenology of the clinical situation, focusing on the inner processes of the mind, where he examines its constituent elements.[10] This phenomenological stance drives Bion’s later works to delve into the realm of the ultimate reality, moving away “from mechanism and causality and toward a phenomenology of what is” of which dimension is “beyond psychoanalysis to draw on philosophical and mystical ideas to impart a mode of apprehension that is nonlinguistic.”[11] 

    In short, one can denote Bion’s psychoanalytical investigation of the primitive mind as the “phenomenology of the psychosis” in clinical terms,[12] where he sought to explore the preconditions of achievement of a capacity for verbal thought. Furthermore, Bion’s work can be designated as the “phenomenology of the absence” in theoretical terms,[13] concerning the fact that he grounded the possibility of thinking under the condition of the loss or absence of the object. Bion assumed that the capacity to think can be achieved “when the absent object is recognized as absent but continuing to exist in some other [mental] space.”[14]

3. The Unstructured Unconscious, the Unrepresented States, and the Representational Imperative

“Unstructured unconscious” and “unrepresented states” are the recently conceptualized terms in the most contemporary - the 21st century - psychoanalytic discourse to denote the above-mentioned primordial or traumatized mental states.[15] he unstructured unconscious denotes the unstructured and unintegrated flows of forces in a formless state derived from and inscribed in the soma, never capable of being retrieved as a memory nor of being expressed in language.[16] Experiences in this realm are unattainable in mental representation; thus, unlived experiences that cannot be said to have been experienced. It must be transformed within the intersubjective context with the concrete Other to be relived and reclaimed.

The intersubjective processes through which representations become formed, strengthened, connected into narrative fragments and associative chains, connected to stable affects, and linked together in the pairs symbol and symbolized, signifier and signified; and the structuring role of language in the process of effective, emotionally invested thinking and the creation of mind.[17]

“The representational imperative” is a psychic activity “governed by an inherent pressure to form representations and link them into meaningful, affect-laden, coherent narratives.” This demand upon the mind is double-sided. When the pressure is contained within the optimal bounds, it has a vital protective role in the organization of the mind. On the other hand, the exceeding becomes “traumatic.”[18]

※ Argument

In psychoanalytic theories, the carnal desire to know is signified as “epistemological instinct(drive)” and “representational imperative.” Moreover, the concrete Other is designated as a “container” that co-constructs the understanding of the excess and the incomprehensible in an intersubjective context.

    Thus far, as explained in detail, the psychoanalytic theories of the primitive mind explore the constitutional elements that shape the human experience and affect human response to the phenomena as they are given. In other words, constitutional elements of the primitive mine shape the frame of hermeneutical interpretation.

[1] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970). [1965], 375.

[2] Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 382-383; 389.

[3] Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 118.

[4] Dorothée Legrand and Dylan Trigg, eds. Unconsciousness between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), xii.

[5] Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar, Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 7-9.

[6] Legrand and Trigg, Unconsciousness between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis; Askay and Farquhar, Apprehending the Inaccessible; Dieter Lohmar and Jagna Brudzinska, eds. Founding psychoanalysis phenomenologically: Phenomenological theory of subjectivity and the psychoanalytic experience. (Cham: Springer, 2011); Rudolf Bernet, Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. trans. Sarah Allen (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020). [in French as Force-Pulsion-Désir: Une autre philosophie de la psychanalyse, 2013]

[7] Wilfred R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation (London: Karnac, 1970), 11.

[8] Howard B. Levine, Gail S. Reed, and Dominique Scarfone, eds., Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning: Clinical and Theoretical Contributions (London: Karnac, 2013).

[9] Avner Bergstein, Bion and Meltzer’s Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life: Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), 160.

[10] Joan Symington and Neville Symington. The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2-3.

[11] Robert S. White, “Bion and Mysticism: The Western Tradition,” American Imago, 68.2(2011): 218.

[12] Symington and Symington, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, 143-165.

[13] David Bell, “Bion: The Phenomenologist of Loss” in Bion Today, eds. Chris Mawson (London: Routledge, 2011), 81-101.

[14] Bell, “Bion: The Phenomenologist of Loss,” 88.

[15] Donnel B. Stern. “Contemporary Theorie of Unrepresented States.” In Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Third edition, eds, Glen Gabbard, Bonnie Litowitz, and Paul Williams (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2024), 213-227.

[16] This is in contrast to the conventional concept of unconscious, the dynamic unconscious, where the psychic agencies such as id, ego, and superego are structured, where memories are repressed but able to be made conscious and verbalized by appropriate procedures, and where the relationship with external objects are mentally representable as internal objects.

[17] Levine et al., Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning, 45.

[18] Levine et al., Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning, 45-46.