Learning From Experience by Wilfred R Bion;

Author:Wilfred R Bion;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The K Link

DOI: 10.4324/9781003411840-16

1. I SHALL IGNORE L and H and discuss K as it is important for the analyst and is the link that is germane to learning by experience. In the course of discussing it I hope also to take up further points which are relevant to linking but with which I have not so far been able to deal. My first point is that L or H may be relevant to K but that neither is by itself conducive to K. x K y, the analyst K the analysand, I K Smith, these are statements that represent an emotional experience. Like L and H, K represents an active link and has about it a suggestion that if x K y then x does something to y. It represents a psycho-analytic relationship. As I propose to use it it does not convey a sense of finality, that is to say, a meaning that x is in possession of a piece of knowledge called y but rather that x is in the state of getting to know y and y is in a state of getting to be known by x. The statement x K y, in so far as it means that x has a piece of knowledge called y, falls in the category of a relationship between the person making the statement and the person to whom it is made and a relationship with x and y about whom it is made.

2. In so far as it is a statement meaning x is concerning himself to know the truth about y it corresponds to statements of relationship that are said to be informed by a scientific outlook. The techniques employed by those who have a scientific outlook have achieved most success when y is an inanimate object. The conviction that a scientific outlook prevails in the relationship x K y is more easily maintained if y is inanimate and if x can be made to seem to approximate to the inanimate, for example x uses a machine. Truth value is felt to inhere in the record presented by a smoked drum or the record of the human voice in a way that is not felt to be the case in the report of human judgment. The simplicity of this view is exposed on occasions when it is believed that a photographic record cannot yield the evidence available to direct observation.

3. Doubts about human capacity to know anything underlie the inquiries of the philosopher of science; these doubts today spring from an inescapable awareness that the situation represented by these abstract terms x K y is identical with x L y or x H y in that an animate element exists intrinsically. That is to say that in proportion as inanimate machinery is introduced to displace the living element, L, H or K have ceased to exist. The problem with which philosophers of science have become associated has been given added significance by psycho-analysis and this for

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