Two distinct theories, each developed by an important theoretician in the field of psychoanalysis, constitute the theoretical starting point of this book. Donald Winnicott described the dialectic between two modalities of experience, the subjective and the objective, as creating a potential space. Wilfred Bion, from a totally different standpoint, considered the possible effects of destructive relations between an emergent aspect and a continuous aspect of human very being, believing that the interaction between them was central to the existence of a healthy and dynamic self. Bion thus assumed not only the simultaneous existence of two forms of perception, but also the existence of dynamic relationships between them.
The aim of this book is to go one stage beyond these theories, and to describe the specific significance of different types of interaction
between the two aspects of the self, as defined by Bion, by examining the influence of the integration between them on Winnicott’s potential space.
For this purpose I expand Bion’s definition of these two elements: The term ‘emergent self’ embraces that aspect of the self which experiences the world of objects as constantly changing, discontinuous, impossible to grasp and explain, and not cumulative in terms of past and future or cause and effect. As against this, the term ‘continuous self’ embraces that aspect of the self which is responsible for the experience of continuity, for the ability to make deductions, and for the ability to remember and thereby to accumulate objects in terms of the laws of common reality: causality, time and space.
In this context I show that every mental event, whether it is located in consciousness or in the unconscious, in a dream or in memory, contains these two modalities. Every mental event has an emergent aspect – which marks it as a unique, private event, inexplicable and unforeseeable – as well as a continuous aspect that simultaneously locates that same event as part of a sequence of causality and memory. The nature of the interaction between the emergent and the continuous aspects determines the possible degree of integration between them, which creates what I designate as the ‘lyrical dimension of potential space’: the dimension which transforms human mind from a flat expanse to a three-dimensional space. The manner in which the lyrical dimension of mental space makes it possible to extract the a priori potential from within the boundaries of actual existence is described as explaining the human capacity to mourn,
to know and to love.
The book analyzes several major literary works, such as T.S Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphe”, as well as Israeli writers (H.N. Bialik, Amos Oz, A.B. Yohoshua), that either describe or else enact different variations on the theme of the lyrical dimension.