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Bion described his four books, Learning From Experience (1962), Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963), Transformations (1965), and Attention and Interpretation (1970), as setting out a theory of psychoanalytic observation rather than psychoanalysis as such. This is similar to the way in which a philosopher of science tries to understand scientific method rather than being concerned directly with specific items of scientific knowledge. The philosopher of science uses particular experiments to illustrate the principles underlying scientific experiments, and in those four books that was Bion's method. His clinical examples were very schematic abstracts intended as reminders to an experienced readership.
However, Bion's claim that he was not writing psychoanalysis was a little disingenuous. Many people have found Bion's illustrative observations of great value in their own right. In these illustrations he formulated clinical problems and phenomena, to use Bion's term ‘configurations’, which illuminate previously undescribed aspects of the personality. This work of Bion's also contains the basis of a psychoanalytic theory of meaning and understanding and this is the subject of this paper. I hope to show how these ideas can be helpful in clinical work with patients as well having general and theoretical interest. Of course, meaning and understanding are big subjects and the, therefore, incomplete theory of meaning that I will be describing will not touch on, for instance, philosophical or psycholinguistic aspects.
I am taking a psychoanalytic theory of meaning and understanding to refer to the consideration of the role of emotional factors, especially infantile and primitive ones, in the development of meaning. By meaning I am intending two approximate, general senses. The first is that of general significance - how much, or how little, someone or something means to us. An example of this would be the phrase, ‘life has a great deal of meaning’. The second is the way in which sy