André Green’s Dilemma, the Sublime Object, and the Aesthetic Function of Psychoanalysis.

Rodrigo Barahona, Psya. D., is a faculty member at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is on the board of directors the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, where he is also the Book Review Editor, and of the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies. Dr. Barahona serves on the editorial boards of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and formerly on the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of Negative Hallucinosis in Wilfred Bion’s Theory of Transformations. On Finding One’s Ghost, published by Routledge in 2024. He has a private psychoanalytic practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.

It is well known that in 1975, André Green postulated a problem to the psychoanalytic community that concerned more than just a technical challenge in working with narcissistic and borderline structures, or what today we might more equitably refer to as non-neurotic patients or the non-neurotic parts of the mind. At stake was our confidence in a method which relied on interpretation, essentially, the use of language of one order to translate language of another order. In neurotic structures, anxiety emerged from areas of the mind organized in represented and discernible unconscious phantasy; if difficult to reach, these areas were reachable-enough through words that touched the patient and stimulated associative activity, relieving the defenses. What of those patients whose ability to represent even at the level of primary symbolization (Rousillon, 2018) was affected? Those whose problems lay at the crux of the contact with the primordial object and who therefore never developed a robust ability to sustain thinking, modification in Bion’s terms, in the face of frustration? In these patients where deficiency in primary symbolization lead to tears or deletions in the fabric of the psyche, how could the analyst’s words not provoke passion, Green’s term for unrestrained force without content (Levine, 2023), instead of understanding and healing? In these patients, passion floods the gaps in representation, alienating the subject further from reality as their ability to libidinally invest in it, through thinking, becomes disabled.  

Since Freud we’ve understood that the turbulence induced by the combination of presence/absence of the object leads initially to its hallucination, and if there is a good enough rapprochement with the external environment, thinking in the form of modifications takes place. Instead of having to imagine the object is present when it isn’t, the subject begins to develop a sense that it is likely to return, a rudimentary thought that brings much relief. When the frustration is too much, however, the thinking process breaks down and the bad feelings are evacuated into persecutory hallucinations which come to make up the first persecutory bad objects (for Bion, let’s remember, absent object outside = persecutory object inside), developmentally necessary structures that, with adequate containment, over time even-out into realistic perceptions of objects. But when a certain threshold of frustration is breached, thinking itself becomes crippled in the service of avoiding the eventuality of further pain. These defensive maneuvers redistribute or sever the connection to the intolerable feelings, but since these defenses (i.e., splitting, projective identification) are themselves phantasies, the object continues to exist as a stimulus to the mind. What “disappears” essentially is the subject’s ability to make sense of it, thus rendering it overly present when absent and overly absent when present. Green called this separation/intrusion anxiety, or in shorthand, private madness.

 Gabriele Münter - Woman in Thought (also known as Musing) (1917)

Since the 1960’s, analysts were noting the emergence of a new class of patient that was a sort of hybrid between psychotically-neurotic and neurotically-psychotic (Aguayo, 2023), and their clinical work reflected an appreciation for the intrapsychic and intersubjective dilemmas raised later by Green. The crucible where the subject meets the object is at the center of Bion’s (1962) theory of thinking and following his work, of Meltzer’s (2018) aesthetic conflict. To my mind, these two authors did the most to inaugurate—Meltzer explicitly—the paradigm of an aesthetic psychoanalysis that dealt directly with rendering meaning from the encounter with the primordial object. In the dialectic thus constructed between primordial analysts and patients, each is facing the sublime in the other. Green postulated the creation of a “double” as a space for the analyst to effect transformations of this object, in order to make public and shareable the subject’s private madness. I believe Bion and Meltzer’s aesthetic psychoanalysis is an enriched extension of this. 

For instance, if, for Bion, the primary task of the psyche is to decide what to do when it encounters the object—to evade through evacuation or modify through thinking—the emotional turbulence aroused in the presence of this object, by the presence of this object stirs up love and hatred and a pull towards and away from the object. Both tendencies must be tolerated by the analyst and the patient in order to get to know the object. Positive and negative hallucinosis are reactions to the existence of the object and are therefore expressions of love and hate, respectively. In as much as loving (L) and hating (H) are links to the object, they regulate closeness and distance. Bion writes,

"I prefer three factors I regard as intrinsic to the link between objects considered to be in relationship with each other. An emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship. The basic relationships that I postulate are (1) X loves Y, (2) X hates Y, and (3) X knows Y." (1962, pp. 42-43).

For Bion, the place in the middle of L and H is negative capability. To stay in contact with the object while in this space is to be in O, and to think from this space is the aesthetic analytic task, where X knows Y. In essence, the mind for Bion is constituted of relations between objects linked together by loving (L), hating (H), or knowing (K) links, so that x loves y, x hates y, and x knows y. Since x can only know y if y remains the same in x’s mind while being both loved and hated, linking leads to a greater approximation to psychic reality or truth, though greater tension between L and H. Knowing, or K, then involves obtaining perspective on the object to link with it through learning from experience (Hinshelwood, 2023). The experience is always in relation to the object, and it is through transforming the turbulence of this experience that we learn from it, i.e., represent it. Essentially, the conflict between love and hate disturbing our relationship to reality is resolved through the desire to know the object (Williams, 2022), which can only be generated through sustained contact with O.

This brings us to Meltzer’s notion of aesthetic conflict stirred in the presence of the primary object. The slow construction of a sense, and then a notion, that there is something mysterious and unknowable about the inside of the object, another person, and the world is what stimulates mental development. Beauty is apprehended only in as much as its mystery remains incomprehensible. This means apprehension is accomplished not through trying to get at the underlying meaning of the beautiful object, but aesthetically—by allowing it to create meaning inside of us, touch our emotions, and create other objects of beauty within us. For Meltzer, after all, psychoanalysis was closer to an art than to a science; he felt—and this is in keeping with Bion and Green—that the object the patient transfers onto the analyst can be aesthetically intuited and conjectured, but its interior cannot be grasped by the senses. That is, we paint a picture—a double—of the patient’s experience that until this moment lacks structure or form, by linking it with myth, sense and passion derived from our interrelated experience with the patient. “The transference is not a fact,” writes Virginia Ungar (2024) in a paper on Meltzer, “but more of a construction in the mind of the analyst, and…in devising an interpretation, the analyst gives an opinion to the patient that may shed light on something happening in the patient’s mind and, therefore, may help them to continue thinking” (p. 129). If the analyst is available to allow the patient to awaken aesthetic reciprocity in him, then he is more available to awaken a similar aesthetic reciprocity in the patient.

Claude Monet - Un Bras de la Seine près de Vétheuil (1878, Edited and Zoomed in)

But aesthetics primarily concerns beauty, and not merely that which is creative. For Meltzer and Bion, what is beautiful is the sublime, that which repulses and attracts at the same time. As alluded to earlier, for Meltzer, it is the presence of the object more than its absence that instigates aesthetic conflict. Here, the infantile self encounters the primary object and is overwhelmed by the emotional-sensorial-perceptual blizzard it creates, which from the infant’s point of view arouses a tremendous ambivalence composed of wonder and idealization and something akin to disgust or fear. We might assume that when the beautiful object is absent, a persecutory object is present (Bion) adding weight to the aesthetic conflict by providing the subject with evidence that there is something more to the object inside, unknowable, beyond its control, and therefore rendering it sublime. Thus, the object’s presence grows to contain an absence (something unknown) within that is paradoxically overfull, an unbearable reality that cannot be easily sublimated or symbolized, though these are the tasks of development and of thinking. What makes the object sublime and therefore beautiful is the combination of the attraction it exerts and the repulsion it engenders evoked from the discrepancy between beautiful exterior and unknowable interior. Emphasizing curiosity as a derivative of K, Meltzer thinks, like Bion, that only this combination of loving and hating the same object can generate the kind of curiosity for the world that leads to the formation of the developmentally crucial question, “this beautiful object, is it beautiful inside?” Meltzer refers to Bion’s LHK, a combination of links that includes curiosity (K) and inaugurates the subject into the depressive position; to avoid or attack these links because of the unbearable weight of thinking is to enter the claustrum or transformations in negative and positive hallucinosis, all anti-aesthetic forces.

Thus, an aesthetic psychoanalysis is one that concerns itself with the symbolization of terrible beauty, forged out of sustained immersion with the sublime. The primary task of an aesthetic psychoanalysis then is the recovery of the aesthetic object (Meltzer, 1988), by which is meant the reclaiming or development of the capacity to find beauty in the world—curiosity, wonder, and enjoyment—born out of the positive tolerance for mystery.  To apprehend beauty, to paraphrase the title of Meltzer’s book where he develops these ideas, is to embrace the double meaning of the word apprehension, at once fear of something unknown and impending, as well as grasping and understanding. It is from this well of aesthetic curiosity that psychoanalytic interpretations must be drawn, a curiosity that can only be stimulated through the mystery of the object, or in Bion’s term, O.

References:

Bion, W. R. (1962) A Theory of Thinking. In Complete Works, VI, edited by C. Mawson. London: Routledge, pp. 153–161. 2014.

Green, A. (1975) The Analyst, Symbolization and Absence in the Analytic Setting (On Changes in Analytic Practice and Analytic Experience)—In Memory of D. W. Winnicott. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 56:1-22

Hinshelwood, R. (2023) W.R. Bion as Clinician. Steering Between Concept and Practice. London: Routledge.

Levine, H. B. (2023) A Metapsychology of the Unrepresented. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 92:11-25

Meltzer, D. (2018) The Apprehension of Beauty. The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art, and Violence. London: The Harris-Meltzer Trust.

Rousillon, R. (2018) Primitive Agony and Symbolization. London & New York: Routledge.

Ungar, V. (2024) The aesthetic model in psychoanalytic practice. In The Work of Donald Meltzer Revisited. 100 years After His Birth, editors Moguillansky, C. & Legorreta, G. London: Routledge. pp. 124-136.

Williams, M.H. (2024) Donald Meltzer. A Contemporary Introduction. London: Routledge.