Foreword to The Grid. Taming Wild Thoughts [I]

The Grid was given to the British Psychoanalytical Society on 2 October 1963. The principal theme is that of the classification (and hence the taming) of the psychoanalytic objects that belong to the domain of ideas, as Bion defines them at the end of the first chapter of Elements of Psycho-Analysis , and the ways in which they can be used. The short paper would seem to have been written at much the same time as Elements of Psycho-Analysis and might constitute an early draft which later grew into the book. My reasons for thinking this are based on a fairly detailed comparison of the two texts. In the first place, the Grid itself has a slight change in it: in the paper printed here, Column 5 is indicated as Oedipus, whereas the Grid printed in Elements of Psycho-Analysis and onwards has this column labelled as Inquiry, as though the author had decided to opt for the more general category, of which ‘Oedipus’ is simply a special case, as the discussion of this column in the book shows. Secondly, if you try to read Elements of Psycho-Analysis ‘innocently’, so to speak, as though you did not know that the book contains the first and main detailed discussion of the Grid, you will discover that Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the horizontal and then the vertical axes of the Grid without mentioning the word ‘grid’ for a full nine pages, and when it is brought in towards the end of Chapter 6, the term itself is not discussed at all. It is almost as though an introductory piece had been left out at the beginning of Chapter 5. I do not think that the paper printed here constitutes the missing introduction – it is far too long and detailed for that – but I suspect that Bion may have had the paper in his mind, as something ‘already written’, while he was preparing Elements of Psycho-Analysis for the press and did not feel the need to enlarge further on the introductory aspects in the book itself.