Editor's Introduction. Transformations: Change From Learning to Growth

Completing the trilogy of the epistemologically based papers published in the 1960s, Transformations followed on from Learning from Experience and Elements of Psycho-Analysis . Although Bion had meant Transformations to stand alone, as it were, he expressed some regret in his introduction that his intention that the book could be read without reference to the previous two works had not been achieved.

Bion, a painter himself, begins this book with a description of a painter who sees a field of poppies and decides to paint it. The painting represents the field of poppies. Bion makes the point that for the painting to represent adequately the field of poppies something must effect the representation by remaining invariant between the two ‘fields’ – that of the poppies and that of the marks on the canvas perceived by the human eye. The unaltered group of elements that enables this to take place Bion calls invariants. Another way to put it is that the painter has rendered on the canvas elements that are abstracted from his perceptions of the field of poppies. In Chapter 5 Bion refers to principles of abstraction described by Bertrand Russell in the Principles of Mathematics. There is also a relevant passage by Russell in his Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact. This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein's theory. That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, he contends, be itself in turn said in language. It can, in his phraseology, only be shown, not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure.