Plato's Theory of “Form” and Homeomorphic Transformation of Pre-Conceptual Traumas, Using Bion's Model of Container–Contained

Abstract

I define psychic traumas as pre-concepts resulting when a transient event changes into a permanent one that will remain constantly conjoined(1) and is structured as an unconscious emotional narrative that compulsively repeats. I refer to pre-conceptual traumas because they represent events that took place at a time when there was not a mind capable of containing them. All forms of existing psychopathology are, in summary, the result of the way that explicit pre-conceptual traumas have eroded and outlined the Oedipus complex. Thus, the superego is not heir to the Oedipus complex alone, as Freud (1923, pp. 34-36) once remarked, but heir to an Oedipus complex specifically chiseled and modified by the precise pre-conceptual trauma experienced; a condition I refer as the "mark of Cain." Thle unconscious sequence of events that structure the "pre-conceptual" trauma follows a logic based on a kind of pseudo-causality or chain of beta elements (Bion, 1963, p. 40) in wait for a mind that could change them into a meaningful "concept." This form of pseudo-causality, considered as a minus knowledge (-K) (Bion, 1962, pp. 97-99), is the consequence of a continuous association of no-things or absences, that are modified with time: the appearance, form, or container, changes, but the meaning, or contained, remains the same. It is similar to the way that primary objects transform as the child grows, from breast to thumb, to a security blanket, to sexual acting out, smoking, obesity, drugs, and so forth. I have referred to this mechanism as "homeomorphic symbolization" (homos = same and morphus = form). It is similar to Plato's concept of the Form, in the sense that the external shape (thumb-blanket-obesity …), the phenomenon, changes, but the noumenon, the "thing-in-itself," (breast) remains. When the mind is contained by the psychotic (traumatized) part of the personality, the projection or atomization of pre-conceptual traumas could reach such a power of density and distension that the individual could live completely submerged-like in a dream-in a world of his or her own, without being aware of it. In The Republic, Plato referred to the Allegory of the Cave, where he described a specific condition that all men find themselves living in, where things as they are perceived by the senses might not be exactly what they are, and where the real world can only be apprehended intellectually. Clinical material from analytical patients is presented.