In 1956 Wilhelm Reich published ‘Re-emergence of Freud's “Death Instinct” as “DOR” Energy’. The scientist reverted to psychoanalysis in what proved to be his last theoretical article, in which he reassessed the Freudian theory of the death drive, the very thesis he had rejected in the 1930s, and whose rejection had made him unpopular with the psychoanalytic movement. In that article, not only did Reich intend to pay homage to his old master Sigmund Freud, but also to partly revise his theories on the Eros-Thanatos instinct duality. After summarizing his own theories on the OR orgone life energy and its DOR negative equivalent, and continuing to claim that there was no clinical evidence to support the death instinct, Reich cautiously stated that Freud had had his legitimate reasons to classify that duality: the libido and the death instinct would actually be the psychological correlates of physical phenomena that he was able to observe both in the neurotics’ character armour and in the weather phenomena and climatic events affecting the environment.
Literature furnishes a particular vertex to see reality through narrative fiction. In particular, science fiction literature, which creates a fantastic situation starting from realistic data (history, science, cultures), may be considered a kind of creative process. It uses heterogeneous things and “integrates” them into a homogeneous, new and comprehensible product. Science fiction writing allows the objects of the real to be reprocessed in terms which are thinkable at the current moment. Using the terminology established in psychoanalysis by Wilfred Bion this reprocessing work is a transformation. According to Bion we can hypothesise that the writer of the science fiction literary work serves as a “container” and the science fiction novel, considered a different way to represent reality and not just a simple editorial product, serves as a alpha-function to make concepts that were not previously thinkable or understandable. Between the 70s and the 80s the writer Samuel Delany theorized and put into practice the use of a literary model called “modular calculus”. This model allows the literary work of making something unthinkable into thinkable. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how modular calculus is a particular type of Bionian transformation, and how the science fiction novel can play the role of alpha-function, transforming unthinkable concepts into thinkable ones.
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