In this chapter, I will demonstrate some of the ways in which this shift in emphasis from symbolic content to thought process has altered the ways I approach my analytic work.

I conceive of the three forms of thinking that I will be discussing – magical thinking, dream thinking, and transformative thinking – as coexisting, mutually creating, preserving, and negating aspects of every experience of thinking. None of these forms of thinking is ever encountered in pure form.¹ Neither is there a linear relationship among these forms of thinking, such as a “progression” from magical thinking to dream thinking. Rather, I see these forms of thinking as standing in dialectical tension with one another, just as I view the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind; the paranoid-schizoid, the depressive, and the autistic-contiguous positions (Klein, 1946; Ogden, 1989); the psychotic and the nonpsychotic parts of the personality (Bion, 1957); the basic assumption groups and the work group (Bion, 1959); the container and the contained (Bion, 1970); primary and secondary process thinking (Freud, 1911); and so on. More-over, none of these forms of thinking is a single, unitary way of thinking; rather, each “form of thinking” represents a rather wide spectrum of ways of thinking. The particular variation of the form of thinking that an individual may employ is always in flux and depends on his level of psychological maturity, the intrapsychic and interpersonal emotional context of the moment, cultural factors, and so forth.

The forms of thinking on which I will focus by no means encompass the entire spectrum of ways of thinking. For example, I will not address operational thinking (de M’Uzan, 1984, 2003), autistic thinking (Tustin, 1981), psychic foreclosure (McDougall, 1984), or “phantasy in the body” (Gaddini, 1969), to name only a few.

In order to provide a sense of the trajectory of this chapter, I will briefly introduce the three forms of thinking before delving into each clinically and theoretically. (In the tradition of Bion, when I speak of thinking, I am always referring to thinking and feeling.) I use the term magical thinking to refer to thinking that relies on omnipotent fantasy to create a psychic reality that the individual experiences as “more real” than external reality – for example, as seen in the use of the manic defense. Such thinking substitutes invented reality for actual external reality, thereby maintaining the existing structure of the internal world. Moreover, magical thinking subverts the opportunity to learn from one’s lived experience with real external objects. The psychological cost paid by the individual for his reliance on magical thinking is a practical one: magical thinking does not work in the sense that nothing can be built on it except for additional layers of magical constructions.

I use the term dream thinking to refer to the thinking we do in the process of dreaming. It is our most profound form of thinking, which continues both while we are asleep and in waking life. Though it is primarily an unconscious mental activity, it acts in concert with preconscious and conscious thinking. In dream thinking, one views and attributes meaning to experience simultaneously from multiple vantage points: for example, from the perspectives of primary and of secondary process thinking, of the container and of the contained, of the infantile self and of the mature self, and so on (Bion, 1962a; Grotstein, 2009). Dream thinking generates genuine psychological growth. Such thinking may be done on one’s own, but a point is inevitably reached beyond which one needs another person with whom to think/dream one’s most deeply troubling emotional experience.

The third of the forms of thinking that I will discuss, transformative thinking, is a form of dream thinking that involves a radical alteration of the terms by which one orders one’s experience: one transcends the categories of meaning that have previously been felt to be the only possible categories with which to organize one’s experience. In transformative thinking, one creates new ways of ordering experience in which not only new meanings but also new types of feeling, forms of object relatedness, and qualities of emotional and bodily aliveness are generated. Such a fundamental change in one’s way of thinking and experiencing is more striking in work with severely disturbed patients but occurs in work with the full spectrum of patients.

In the course of the discussion that follows, I will present clinical examples that illustrate some of the ways in which conceptualizing forms of thinking in the ways I have described is of value to me in talking with myself – and, at times, with the patient – about what I think is occurring in the analytic relationship and in other sectors of the patient’s internal life and life in the world.