Editor's Introduction. Learning from Experience

Although Experiences in Groups and Other Papers was the most popular of Bion's books, Learning from Experience is the most clinically concise and influential of his 24 published works. The recent 50th anniversary of its publication seems a timely occasion on which to revisit it, to assess its significance, and to appreciate its distinctive qualities, beginning with its basic structure. It is a short work – a hundred or so pages – designed skilfully by its author to be read straight through without halting at parts that are at first obscure. Reading it in this way can produce experiences that reproduce something of the essential character of the concepts being discussed. Bion stated his aim as being, “to give some idea of the world that is revealed by the attempt to understand our understanding”.

Bion's overall project, as stated so concisely by his elder daughter, Parthenope (Bion Talamo, 1981), was to make the emotions that permeate the abstract formulations of psychoanalytic theories come alive for the reader or the listener.

In Learning from Experience, Bion begins with some notes on how he intends to make use of particular terms; a comment about how the book has been designed to be read; and a characteristic remark about the use of models known to be inadequate but nevertheless to be made use of until something better can be found. Next he introduces a co–ordinated set of abstractions – later to be matched with some clinical observations – to ‘catch the drift’ of mental processes underlying thinking and disorders of thought. Bion's recommendation to read without excessive strain, and to forego back-tracking and checking that one has understood each sentence or paragraph, is hard to do, in much the same way as evenly suspended attention is difficult in practice. But in reading the book in the way recommended, something is enabled that

could not have been gained otherwise, and which could not have been anticipated beforehand. Bion advised that his book should be