The Grid and the Truth Drive

As the thing, as the other, the true dawns through an emotional and almost carnal experience, where the «ideas» - the other's and our own - are rather traits of his physiognomy and of our own, are less understood than welcomed or spurned in love or hatred.

Chatting about this and that to a friend, I let slip that I am thinking of writing something about Bion's Grid. All of a sudden, an expression somewhere between dismay and wry amusement appears on his face. Then he immediately associates Grid to the Italian word grida (yells). Who is yelling? What does this image express? Indeed, why is it that even among Bion scholars and his readers, the Grid is so infamous? Why is it seen as the pinnacle of Bion's frustrating tendency to indulge in abstract speculation? What actually is Bion's Grid, the «notorious» Grid? A cross for his readers to bear? An ingenious invention? A harmless leisure occupation for the analyst? His Rubik cube? And then, is it more like a periodic table of the elements, a Cartesian coordinate system, a naval battle game, a chessboard or a military map? Lastly, what is the meaning of the «mysterious» column 2? Is it the column of lies or of dreams? Again, what can it tell us about the «truth drive», which Grotstein identifies as the key principle of Bion's entire oeuvre?

In this paper I shall attempt to answer these questions on the basis of the fascination and slight sense of annoyance that this instrument has always aroused in myself as well as others. In the first part, I shall examine the construction of the Grid. Allowing my imagination to roam freely, I shall tentatively offer a dynamic, in-relief representation of it. Precisely because it illustrates with such immediacy the compact dialectic that links the various concepts used by Bion, the Grid lends itself to the generation of new interpretative hypotheses. In the second part of my text, I shall consider the meaning of column 2. My basic