Editing Wilfred Bion (section)

===O: The ineffable===
As his thought continued to develop, Bion came to use ''[[Negative capability|Negative Capability]]'' and the suspension of Memory and Desire in his work as an analyst, in order to investigate psychic reality - which he regarded as essentially 'non-sensuous' (1970). Following his 1965 book Transformations he had an increasing interest in what he termed the domain of "O" – the unknowable, or ultimate Truth. "In aesthetics, Bion has been described as a [[Immanuel Kant|neo-Kantian]] for whom reality, or the thing-in-itself (O), cannot be known, only be "be-ed" (1965). What can be known is said by Bion to be in the realm of K, impinging through its sensory channels.<ref>Jacobus, p. 227</ref> If the observer can desist from "irritably reaching for fact and reason", and suspend the normal operation of the faculties of memory and apperception, what Bion called transformations in knowledge can permit an 'evolution' where transformations in K touch on transformations in Being (O). Bion believed such moments to feel both ominous and turbulent, threatening a loss of anchorage in everyday 'narrative' security.

Bion would speak of "an intense catastrophic emotional explosion O,"<ref>Quoted in Jacobus, p. 251n</ref> which could only be known through its aftereffects. Where before he had privileged the domain of knowledge (K), now he would speak as well of "resistance to the shift from transformations involving K (knowledge) to transformations involving O ... resistance to the unknowable".<ref>Jacobus, pp. 251–2</ref> Hence his injunctions to the analyst to eschew memory and desire, to "bring to bear a diminution of the 'light' – a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight. If any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly".<ref>Bion quoted in Patrick Casement, ''On Learning from the Patient'' (London 1990) p. 223</ref> In stating this he was making connections to Freud, who in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome had referred to a mental counterpart of scotopic, "mole like vision", used to gain impressions of the Unconscious. He was also making links with the ''apophatic'' method used by contemplative thinkers such as St John of the Cross, a writer quoted many times by Bion. Bion was well aware that our perception and our attention often blind us to what genuinely and strikingly is new in every moment.