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RECENTLY, THERE HAS BEEN a steady arrival on the scene of a number of works which offer as their aim the qualification of Wilfred Bion's thinking or, to be more exact, about his thinking about thinking. They include Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak de Bianchedi (1975), Meltzer (1978), (1983), Eigen (1981), (1985), Williams (1985), Simon (1986)—and even W. R. Bion and F. Bion (1980).
Boris' (1986) contribution is one which I believe would have pleased Bion. He seems to have captured the quintessence of this elusive man by employing on his palette the pigments of paradox, irony, enigma, complexity, and contradiction, but all with an underlying background of unity—and that unity is Bion's "obsession with Truth." Bion often said that Truth was as necessary to the mind as was food to the gastrointestinal tract. In the end, he was an existential philosopher who pondered the depths of existence, but perhaps he can best be compared to an abstract painter who presents us with seemingly meaningless disconnected globs of "beta elements" for us to reassemble in our own unique and individual ways in order that we might establish their newly rediscovered and renewed meaning, both personal and universal, in our own creative (? re-creative) space—and all of this, Boris reflects from the shadows caught by the light which hits upon the Bion edifice.
Boris alludes to Bion's cryptic and confusing style of writing and describes him as a "gnarled and quirky writer." Bion's writing