Читать книгу The Handbook of Solitude - Группа авторов - Страница 70

A clear connection between the mother’s absence and the ensuing infant aloneness, on the one hand, and the capacity for thinking, that is, a very creative outcome, on the other, may be drawn from the work of W.R. Bion, who formulated a theory of thinking. Bion (1967) introduced the concept of linking one object with the other, self with objects, and the good and the bad in one and the same object. Linking means the process of connecting among people, emotions, and thoughts. It leads the infant to establish correlation, which is the basis of true communication and of thinking. The capacity for linking develops early in life in a healthy mother–infant relationship. In such a relationship the mother can contain the anxiety and the aggression that the infant projects onto her, and through her reverie, to return them to the infant in a modified, “detoxified” form, so that the infant can tolerate them and attribute meaning to them. Such a process transforms the raw (mainly physical and perceptual) elements, the so‐called beta elements, into alpha elements, which are storable and available in thinking, phantasy, memory, dreams, and in psychic life in general, and become food for thought (Bion, 1977).

According to Bion’s (1967) theory of thinking, thoughts are preconceptions. From the first experiences of satisfaction, which are provided to the infant by an actual breast (or breast substitute), the preconception meets a realization and becomes a concept. However, the mother is not omnipresent and omnipotent. Therefore, the frequent absence of the breast, which is experienced as a no‐breast or an “absent” breast inside, produces a frustration in the infant; this frustration meets the concept and becomes a thought. When the infant can withstand frustration and his/her envy for the mother’s capacity for reverie is not too great, an apparatus for thinking thoughts (Bion, 1967) develops, in other words, a way of thinking that is based on the links between thoughts. The absence of the breast and the related frustration constitute for the infant a problem to be solved, which is at the root of thinking and learning from experience. Through introjecting a model of containment from the start, the developing person has the chance to feel coherent and contained when he/she is alone. Furthermore, the capacity for thinking implies that one’s existence is re‐cognized by another, a state that apparently reduces loneliness.

Bion’s views about the absent breast as well as the no‐breast inside the infant are relative to the notion of the negative as conceived by Green (discussed in a previous section). They also place great emphasis on the mother’s absent presence as a fundamental experience of existence. A significant contribution of Bion’s theory to the understanding of mental health, and aloneness in particular, is that, when the linking process is facilitated by the infant’s genetic predisposition and the mother’s capacity for containment and reverie, the absence (the negative) becomes a fertile ground for thinking and learning. In other words, the mother’s absence and the resulting aloneness produce thoughts that exert pressure to be linked and develop into creative thinking – from the beginning of life.