Mystical Gnosis and Esoteric Technē in the Writings of W.R. Bion

I can understand someone saying that they had an experience like thought-reading … It might be compatible with the idea that there is some mental phenomenon which is not bounded by what I can see and what I can hear, what I can smell touch and feel. Although you and I are in different places not known to each other there may … be some overlapping. I could not prove it … I suspect it is one of those things called “extrasensory perception,” but that is probably too crude. As our intuition continues to develop we get nearer to a situation where we seem to be aware that the boundaries of our mind are not our physical boundaries, nor yet the boundaries which are imposed by our central nervous system. That is more like a guess, or a “hunch,” than anything one could call evidence or fact. But it may be a fact one day.

Bion could be notably reticent when it came to the matter of explicitly acknowledging the contributions made by those authors whose ideas he tacitly drew upon during the course of developing his own innovations in psychoanalytic theory and practice.2 This is a matter of some importance, given that in the estimation of the Symingtons, Bion is adjudged to be “the deepest thinker within psychoanalysis—and this statement does not exclude Freud” (Symington & Symington, 1996, p. 12). As we shall see subsequently, this state of affairs can be at least partially attributed to Bion's own, very particular understanding of the relations that pertain between a writer and the purported sources of their clinical and theoretical creativity. Bion's most innovative period as a theorist corresponded with his decision

to move from London to California in 1968. One associated consequence that arose out of this move concerned the vehemence with which some of the London Kleinians, in particular, began to question the value of his later writings, even going so far as to question the sanity of their author (Symington & Symington, 1996, p