Psyche

Thinking

Take the egg and pierce it with a fiery sword. Music from 'Atalanta fugiens' emblem 8

Esoteric Links of the Day: aiwaz.net institute

The seven directions in the Cube of Space match Jacques Chevalier's (3-D Mind) planar organization of the brain. Perhaps his next book will add the seventh, interior, direction. If we combine Chevalier with George Lakoff, we are some distance towards a three-dimensional model of the embodied emotional mind.

"Thinking' developed in response to the challenge presented by the existence of "thoughts."     Bion, Seven Servants, p. 85

"The problem is simplified if "thoughts" are regarded as epistemologically prior to thinking and that thinking has to be developed as a method or apparatus for dealing with "thoughts". If this is the case then much will depend on whether the "thoughts" are to be evaded or modified or used as part of an attempt to evade or modify something else. If they are felt to be accretions of stimuli then they may be similar to or identical with beta-elements and as such would lend themselves to treatment by motor discharge and the operation of the musculature to effect the discharge. Talking therefore must be considered as potentially two different activities, one as a mode of communicating thoughts and the other as an employment of the musculature to disencumber the personality of thoughts."     Bion, 1962, p.83

Thoughts exist, therefore I need an I to think them.

"....thinking is merely a relation of ....drives [desires, passions] to each other...."
NIETZSCHE, 1866, Beyond Good and Evil.

"I never think, and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking."
'Federico' in Ernest Hemingway's (1929) A Farewell to Arms.

From Quotations on consciousness from Chris Brand's Personality, Biology and Society: A Resource Manual of Quotations about the Psychology of Individual and Group Differences.

And we add:

"The link between intolerance of frustration and the development of thought is central to an understanding of thought and its disturbances."   Bion, Seven Servants, p.29

The hatred of frustration is easily extended to embrace reality itself in a way that is typical of the psychotic; it may then be extended to that part of the mental apparatus on which the awareness of reality and frustration depends. There are degrees of intolerance of frustration, and there are degrees of intensity with which it is denied, until we reach that moderate degree of denial that passes over into the state of mind that, typical of the development of the domination of what Freud called the reality principle, in which frustration and its associated feelings, painful as they are, are tolerated sufficiently to enable the personality to entertain the possibility of modification of frustration rather than denial."   Bion, Cogitations, 1992, p.246

"Immaturity, confusion, helplessness and impotence are replaced, in those who are intolerant of frustration, by prematurity, order, omnipotence and power."   Bion, Cogitations, 1992, p.299

"'Thinking', in the sense of engaging in that activity which is concerned with the use of thoughts, is embryonic even in the adult and has yet to be developed fully by the race."   Bion, Seven Servants, p.85

And:

Bahir, section 103 The seventh? But, after all, there are only six? This teaches that here is the Temple of the [celestial] Sanctuary, and it bears all [the other six], and that is why it is the seventh. And what is it? The Thought that has neither end nor limit. Similarly this place, too, has neither end nor limit.   Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, Princeton, 1990, p.115

Posted by psyche at June 30, 2003 08:25 PM