The primacy of psychic reality: A Kleinian-Bionian exploration of 'ultimate reality'

Wilfred R. Bion's "epistemological theory" describes a model-of-the-mind that deals with meaning and "ultimate reality," and has at its center a transformational process in which one ultimately "becomes" what one "knows about," thereby linking experience and knowledge and discovering one's true-self. In this work, Bion's model is used to analyze a theological idea of God (Friedrich Schleiermacher's "feeling of absolute dependence.") The analysis explores how "psychic reality," which requires a "process of thinking" forged out of the mother-infant couple, is the prerequisite for the perception and conception of the external world and of Bion's Kantian-type or Schleiermacher's mystical-type of "ultimate" reality. This work considers how emotional experience is the incarnation of these realities, and how the search for truth and/or God must involve true-self experience, knowledge, and transformation. It offers a psycho-analytic perspective on the dialectic between knowledge of oneself and of God, arguing for the value, necessity and primary of psychic reality.; The Klein-Bion model-of-the-mind conceives of a Platonic-Kantian-type of "ultimate reality," unknowable in itself and apprehended in the psycho-analytical experience. According to Donald Meltzer, the Bionian search for truth (psychic growth) requires a "flight of imagination" into aesthetic experience where the "new idea" may be born and change one's picture-of-the-world and oneself. Schleiermacher's understanding of religious experience appears to be Bion's aesthetic experience, but his interpretation differs from Bion. Where Bion's Theory of Transformations brings "infinity" back to the concreteness of psychic reality requiring true-self experiences and transformations, Schleiermacher's phenomenological theology seeks knowledge formulating an idea and doctrine of God out of aesthetic experience.