Drawing a Blank: Bion Speaking on Chinese Writing1

I sometimes think there is almost an occupational neurosis of analysts, because so much time is spent in finding out the various mistakes which are made—our faults, sins, crimes and so forth—that we forget it is a very unimportant part of the whole story. We no doubt want to know what we are bad at—it is quite useful to know that—but the really important thing to know is what part of it we are any good at.

Since he is a human being there is no shortage of human frailty available for ammunition, the symmetrical approach being adulation and abuse.

In the final decade of his life, Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) gave public lectures and psychoanalytic seminars in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. In the course of these presentations he repeatedly alluded to the Chinese language—presumably Mandarin, one of seven major Chinese dialect groups that all share the writing system to which Bion referred. A search of the Complete Works of Wilfred Bion (CW, 2014-2021) turns up some dozen occasions when he engaged conceptually with what he thought were the entailments of fundamental differences between written English and written Chinese. Of these, five were made in private communications (two letters, from July 9, 1972, and from 1979; passages in his notebooks, from April 4, 1969, and July 10-16, 1971; and a May 29, 1977, tape recording he made for his own use, in preparation for lectures in Rome that July). Two were written and published during Bion's lifetime, in The Dream (1975/1991) and The Dawn of Oblivion (1979), which are the first and last books of his three-volume autobiographical dialogue, A Memoir

of the Future. Another six references to Chinese are from live, extemporaneous lectures and seminars Bion delivered in San Paulo (1973), Rio di Janeiro (1974), Los Angeles (1975; not included in CW), Rome (1977), and London (1979). This article surveys these passage