Editorial introduction anti‐mind: Untruthful collusions in groups

Whether to see life as it is, will give us much consolation, I know not; but the consolation which is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable; that which may be derived from error must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive. Samuel Johnson, 1934, p.339 It is a matter of the greatest possible urgency that the human animal should discover what sort of animal he is before he has blown himself off the earth. The monkey-trick department is far and away in advance of the rest. Wilfred Bion, Complete Works, Vol X, p.68. At this moment in history, we seem to be poised at a point where life, as we have known it, seems emperilled in every possible way. Climate change and wars have been routinised into casual facts of life that we shrug off as inevitable. The idea of "anti-mind" appeared to organise (from Latin organum which means "tool"), such times as ours. If the mind is the apparatus that gathers information and arranges it, then anti-mind is the force that opposes such activities that we include in "thinking", that is, reflecting, observing, remembering, dreaming, and other such manifestations. This issue was conceived as one that would invite reflections on the manifestations of clotting in the psychosocial arterial system using Wilfred Bion's theory of thinking. Bion's contribution to psychoanalysis included his revolutionary rewriting of psychoanalysis: where the emphasis shifted from sex, memory, content, and symptoms, to emotions, thinking, and the analytic link, in the here and now. When Descartes (1637) famously said, "I think therefore I am", he suggested that thoughts prove our existence. Bion however separated thoughts from thinking. He appears to imply, that everyone has "thoughts" but not everyone can think them. Infact, we can surmise, nobody can think their thoughts all the time. Bion (1962) called these "unthought and often unthinkable thoughts", "beta elements" (unprocessed data). For Bion, thoughts were primitive impressions of the data that inundates us all the time. "Bion's contention is not "I think, therefore I am", but, if anything, "I mentate, therefore I am." (Civitarese, 2008, p. 1127) At any rate, these unthought thoughts (or raw data) remain in search of a thinker. They have to be subjected to thinking by the 'thinker': "…thoughts awaiting a sufficiently mature mind for them to be thinkable, thoughts pressing for the development of an apparatus to think them; thoughts that cannot not be thought — for example, the transience of things and the ineluctability of separation." (ibid, p. 1127). Just like the ironsmith needs to subject metal to a forge in order to shape it into something, thoughts need to be subjected to somewhat exacting conditions, that is, to be united with the emotions, and only then, does the thinker come into being. "It is indeed the emotions that aesthetically organize the first elements of experience." (ibid, p.1125) Unsurprisingly, the human psyche is marked by not wanting to feel the intensity that emotions bring. And so, following Bion, it is perhaps not inaccurate to say, that the essential psychic conflict is between bearing what is painful and rejecting it. Bion was fond of quoting Samuel Johnson who in the epigraph to this paper writes that, "To look at life as it is" (Johnson, 1934) is far from consoling. So, we look the other way, turning a blind eye, but in so doing, we lose touch with the orchestra of chaos and destructiveness that life is. We either modify (dilute) or altogether evade the forging process. We are adept at finding ingenious ways to evade the suffering that thinking and feeling bring in their wake. This shifts the aim of psychoanalysis to helping patients to bear what they have been evading and enable them to think. Freud speculates that the need to think must be born from absence, frustration, and loss. Bion further suggests that thinking is born from the pressure of thoughts. The mind, unable to bear the intensity of its emotions, needs another mind; much like the infant who needs the mother's mind to hold up in the face of its infinite terror. Psychoanalysis could be imagined as a replication of this relationship. Just as the mother's presence reassures the infant of continuity despite the terrors, so also the analysand draws comfort from the analyst's presence at predictable intervals. Freud suggests that at birth there is a "caesura," a pause that is both a transition and a continuity. The link between the fetus and the womb ends, the umbilical cord is cut, but the link between mother and baby carries on, albeit transformed: "There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of birth allows us to believe" (Freud, 1926, p. 138). Bion expands this "caesurean" space. He suggests that the moment of change, the place of pause, the interval between two movements, is the inherently cesural space where our thinking is tested. Like Oedipus, we are always on the crossroads. There is always a temptation to succumb to our fantasies. Oedipus believed he could bypass his fate (evade his suffering) and become king, because he had left his parents in Corinth. This may also be read as our capacity to delude ourselves. Bion suggests that the human mind has a "psychotic part" which is marked by its skill at evading what is painful, difficult, and displeasing. When reality feels overwhelmingly unbearable, the part of our mind that can see truthfully gives way to this psychotic part. Bion implies that this part manifests in each of us when we abujure pain and take refuge from truth and uncertainty. Bergstein (2018) writes, "It is suggested that a major differentiating factor between the psychotic and nonpsychotic parts of the personality is the capacity to tolerate the infinite complexity of the human mind." (p. 193). Bion radically revised the model of the mind. Psychoanalysis largely followed Freud's distinction between neurotic and psychotic structures of the mind. Freud (1924) suggested that the neurotic was born from the conflict between his id and his superego; the psychotic's ego on the other hand, was in conflict with the external world. Differing from this binary, Bion observed that even the so-called "sane" person has a psychotic part, and conversely, even the most psychotic person has some contact with reality. This led him to write of neurotic and psychotic parts of the personality, rather than as discrete psychic structures. Following his model, one can argue that even the Oedipus story may be read as a conflict that is not sexual, but rather, one between evading the truth and bypassing it. It is as though, each moment we face the Oedipal dilemma: should we recognise the truth, mourn, and bypass Thebes? Or should we succumb to the temptation of knowing everything? Bion (1963) thinks that Eve's forbidden fruit, the Tower of Babel, and Oedipus, are all parables about the lures of omniscience (p.63). We each want to "know" and perhaps Oedipus-like, we want to prove and exhibit this knowledge: "Viewed from this vertex, one might recognize that it is not sexuality that is at the center of the story, but rather the ambivalent attitude toward knowledge – the perpetual human struggle between the desire to truthfully contact reality and the simultaneous desire to evade this encounter." (Bergstein, 2024, personal communication) By inviting Oedipus to crack open the "riddle of life", the Sphinx lures him to prove his omniscience. Oedipus is tempted away from his path by his desire to show he knows the "answer" to an unsolvable riddle. He gambles his life: he will either be beheaded or made king. He mirrors the monstrous Sphinx, who is not searching for the truth, but proving that she alone knows the answer. The link even though it poses as a search for truth is laden with the question of power. When Oedipus destroys the Sphinx's delusion (that she is the sole bearer of the answer), he is rewarded with kingship. The Sphinx commits suicide, prefiguring Oedipus's fate. Following Bergstein (2024), the Theban crossroads may represent inter alia, having to choose between the psychotic and non-psychotic parts: the path that takes us towards bearing the truth, howsoever we hate it, versus the path that lures us with "Theban" fantasies. This choice seems to repeatedly confront us through our lives. Time and again, we are drawn into proving we know, and feel triumphant, till delusion pulls us down. Freud (1911) breaks down the steps in mental functioning: attention, notation, memory, impartial passing of judgment and action (pp.220–221). Our senses are the messengers that bring us information from inside and outside; alerting us to sensations inside us and data outside us. We may ignore this (Jocasta attempts to dodge the truth) or we may note it down. If we do record it (memory), we may be able to use it later in our life. From the notations of memory, emerges judgment, like Athena from the head of Zeus – wisdom we can learn to rely upon. Judgment helps us to discern: Is this true? Is this painful? Is this good? And most crucially, do I need to do something (take action) about this? Or do I need to bear it? Here is where we can locate tragedies: in the interstices of judgment and action. Antigone must choose whether or not to bury her brothers who have been unfairly called traitors. She is threatened with death by Creon. Her sister Ismene chooses to live. But not so, Antigone, who insists on burying her brothers. She uses her judgment to pursue an action that feels ethically necessary, despite her knowledge that she will be executed. All choices demand we exercise our judgment. But choices are often made in anti-mind states. The mind is adept at fooling itself and judgment too can be perverted into discriminations, prejudices, and biases, which are anti-thinking, or minus versions of discernment. Had Oedipus recognised the Sphinx's question as a fatal temptation, there would be no tragedy there. Compare this to Christ being tempted to rule the world, an offer which is rejected by him. Oedipus, however like Faustus, is tempted. It is important to remember that Bion (1962) placed emotionality at the heart of psychoanalysis. By doing so, he also observed that all emotions can be brought down to three basic kinds of links: L (love), H (hate) and K (knowledge). In all encounters that are meaningful, we can see that it is one of these three basic emotional links. But he also went on to say that these links may also be present in their negative forms. Dana Amir's article in this issue explores "minus links". Amir writes, that in these states, love is no longer linked to an object, but is like an empty, blank, mourning state. Hate takes on a murderous visage. When the link of knowledge breaks down, language loses its metaphorical quality and becomes literal. These broken links result in the kind of solidarity that is collaborative but rejects differences and otherness. This is a minus version of a solidarity based on cooperation. She introduces the idea of "broken links", and thereby, extends Bion's idea of minus links. It seems that if exercising judgment is an essential step in thinking, then it can very easily get substituted by its minus version where prejudice steps in before judiciousness, where discrimination clouds "impartial passing of judgment" (Freud, 1911, p. 221), where bigotry precedes observation. The riddle posed by the Sphinx poses as a test of knowledge but it is infact a deadly temptation that lures Oedipus to his tragic fate. In that sense it is a minus K link between Oedipus and the Sphinx. David Bell (2010) uses the term "pretender" to indicate this imitative, counterfeit quality of substitutes of thinking and knowledge: "I used the term "pretenders" in two senses. First, these processes pretend to be – that is, imitate – knowledge and thought; second, making use of the older meaning of the word as in the phrase "pretender to the throne," I am referring to processes that seek to overthrow knowledge and replace it with its various "pretenders". Such processes lead to degradation of thinking into ritual, dogma and the accumulation of facts." (p.95) By ignoring the senses that faithfully bring us messages. For instance, while walking down the street, we may hear the warning noises surrounding us, and yet as though, sleepwalk to the precipice, leading us to disaster and death By treating the truth as unnecessary information. We may know of climate change and indeed be living it, but we ignore our own carbon footprints. We may treat it as information that has no emotional bearing on our lives. By imagining we are helpless when we are not. For instance, knowing that smoking causes cancer but we believe we are helpless when it comes to stopping smoking. By believing we are potent, when we are not. This would be for many therapists the rescue fantasy – the heady, powerful feeling that we can save the patient by being "good" to them. Anti-mind suggested itself as a term that rallies together what appears destructive to the growth of the mind - all that is poised against thinking, and sways us away from the reality principle. Anti-mind is thus an expression of the psychotic part of the personality. It is a state (noun), manifest in actions (verb), and one that describes the quality of apparatus (adjective). As a noun, anti-mind is defined as the human faculty to which are ascribed thoughts, feelings, remembering and understanding. In Bionian terms, we could say, it is the apparatus that senses, observes, imagines, remembers and distinguishes (essentially between what is true and false). Anti-Mind may be thought of as the absence of the apparatus "… for thinking thoughts; the apparatus for dreaming dreams) designed to metabolize, process and organize inchoate sense impressions… that will constitute organized mental activity (including waking dreams, night-time dreams, fantasies, reverie, and so forth) and create structure within the mind by separating conscious from unconscious thoughts." (Levine, 2010, p. 189). But anti-mind is not merely a noun, it is also a verb, because it implies a process. To Freud's idea of the mind as an apparatus, Bion (and Winnicott) add the idea of a "living process located in the very act of experiencing." (Ogden, 2022, p. xv). This makes anti-mind, a verb: a condition which is antithetical to a living process which kills of the act of experience. Thus mind-deadening and mind-numbing are active forms of killing the mind. Bion suggests that the psychotic process is an active and ongoing one where there is a continual attack on the thinking, non-psychotic part. Anti-mind is a verb, because with Bion, the mind is a living, growing or stagnating entity. He even toyed with the idea of a grid to illuminate the fluctuating levels of functioning from making false hypothese to being able to observe accurately (notation, attention), inquiry and action. These are the verbs involving grades of mental functioning. These "act upon" different kinds of thoughts. There are the more formed "alpha elements" and unformulated "beta elements". There are dream thoughts that may or not be dreamed. And more evolved "pre-conceptions" and "concepts". At the highest end, Bion (2019) places "scientific deductive sysytems", and "algebraic calculus". As an adjective, "mind" may specify the qualities of the thinking apparatus: high-minded, broad-minded, narrow-minded, or else, mind-numbing, mind-deadening. Anti-mind, could then be a contracted adjective: being against the mindful. Dana Amir suggests "mind-deadness" and "mindedness" to describe the states of mind which contribute to "broken links" and re-establish what is broken. If we arrive at the idea of anti-mind as one that coalesces the "psychotic part of the personality", we can locate it in the primitive group functioning that is there not just in all groups, but also in all individuals. "This "group mentality" is present in every human being even if isolated, because of our condition of being a herd animal." (de Cortiñas, p.126) The human being, as a part of the condition of being a herd animal, is unable to relinquish the group functioning that staves off the isolation of being in his own mind. In this issue, Giuseppe Civitarese and Eduardo Distel's (2024) "Thus far and no further" examine how the group mind may operate in varying historical epochs such as the pandemic. Mind and anti-mind come to be thought of as dialectically essential accompaniments in the movement of history. The writers here all look at groups in the way Bion understands collusions. He recognised the psychic paradox of being human implies both being gregarious and being isolated. Civitarese and Distel draw attention to the dialectical relationship between these two contadictory currents, that drive us towards groups. Of these groups we form to avoid the loneliness of our condition, some groups come together to work, while others are bound together by powerful, shared unconscious assumptions. Bion calls these Basic Assumptions. Perhaps he chooses the word "assumption" over "phantasy" as phantasies suggest more active shapes to what is sought. Assumptions on the other hand are a body of beliefs that hold the collective psyche together. How may we understand a country as powerful and "democratic" as the United States choosing a man who is a convicted felon to be a President possible? What kind of assumptions are shared by Americans when they vote for such a retrograde figure? What does it tell us about the link between Trump and his followers? As the world we are born into is far from the one we would have liked, we feel its hostility and look for shelters. This overpowering need may often lead us to false havens. We may take flight into "promised lands," we may fight 'holy wars', we may feel false comfort chasing after false gods. These are false as they are based on an evasion of what lies outside our control. Group fantasies and assumptions are often about evading the loneliness of the psyche, the force of thoughts and emotional turbulence. The untrammeled power embodied by messianic figures becomes a refuge from such dreaded emotions. The Basic Assumption groups coalesce towards figures who claim potency and Bion (1952) calls such groups "dependency" groups. The second dynamic Bion calls the "messianic" group. This group superficially resembles the dependency group, but it is deposited in a promise of a savior. Two members are chosen by the group to give birth to the messiah (Joseph and Mary represent the prototype). The second coming of Christ represents this messianic promise. As with all such promises, they must not be realised, but must be in a state of waiting. The third dynamic that brings groups together is a threat (real or perceived), where, the group decides either to take refuge from the danger, or it chooses to fight with an aggressive leader. Bion terms the "fight/flight" group: "The first assumption is that the group exists in order to be sustained by a leader on whom it depends for nourishment, material and spiritual, and protection. This mental state I have called the basic assumption of dependence (D.) and its leader the dependent leader (D.L.). The second basic assumption is that the group has met for purposes of pairing; I have called this mental state the basic assumption of pairing (P.). It is suffused with messianic hopes and its leader (P.L.) can best be described as the unborn genius. The third basic assumption is that the group has met to fight something or to run away from it. It is prepared to do either indifferently. I have called it the fight-flight basic assumption (F.) and its leader (F.L.). Participation in basic assumption mental activity requires no training, experience or mental development. It is instantaneous, inevitable and instinctive." (p.235) In his play Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett (2006) pares down the messianic stage to two homeless tramps. They lay baer the void from where the messianic hope is born. Beckett's play makes real the terrifying formlessness of a mind that is unable to give meaning to life. The two tramps huddle together and feel disconnected, exemplifying Civitarese and Distel's point of hyperconnectivity as a respone to hyperseparation. The experience of the war was never out of Bion's mind. In his paper, "The war of nerves" (2014) he writes of how the attack is on the individual's mind. Such an attack can be warded off by dissociation. Or else he can identify with the community under fire. He will then feel persecuted. Both positions are psychological casualties. The only way to survive such a "war of nerves" is to remain a member of his community but mentally unaffected, that is, to keep thinking under fire: "The "war of nerves" is an attack directed at the individual personally; if he can dissociate himself from the mass movement of a nation at war he may escape some of the effects. But then, from the point of view of an enemy, he has become a casualty. Or he can remain a member of his society; in which case, the more emotionally bound the members are, the more strongly will he feel that the attack is being launched at himself. Only if he remains at once both a member of his community and yet unaffected by the enemy's attack, in the way that the enemy wishes him to be, can he be said to remain psychologically not a casualty." (Bion, p.5) It is no surprise that we succumb to "anti-mind" - forces that lure us away from the lonely helplessness of thinking. There is no conflict of interest.