Editor's Introduction. Second Thoughts

Introducing his 1967 compilation, Bion wrote, “Now the time has come to reprint old papers, I find that the change in my views about psychoanalytic method makes me unwilling to let them go out without showing what that change is. For those who want the papers as they were originally printed, here they are, but I have added a commentary which involves an evolutionary change of opinion.”

In publishing these clinically centred papers from the period 1950 to 1962, which have vital connections with the formulations to be found in the works that followed – Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis, Transformations and Attention and Interpretation – Francesca Bion suggested the addition of a numbering system (numerals in bold type before each section of each paper) – continuous across the eight papers – to facilitate a discussion of the shifts in his ideas published in the final section, the ‘Commentary’. This reported Bion's ‘evolutionary change of opinion’ on various matters.

It is because of this that Second Thoughts appears here as an exception to the chronological structure of the Complete Works, since it makes sense to keep the papers together and to retain the numbering system that facilitates an understanding of the ‘Commentary’.

Much of the clinical work informing these papers is from the analyses of patients in psychotic states of mind. Bion discussed his ideas concerning the relationship between what he observed in these cases, and the work of Melanie Klein, with Hanna Segal and, at length, with Herbert Rosenfeld. These two Kleinian colleagues were also accumulating clinical experience of analysing psychotic and borderline patients using an unmodified psychoanalytic technique.

The first chapter, the paper ‘The Imaginary Twin’, was Bion's Membership paper. It was first read to a Scientific Meeting of the British

Psychoanalytical Society on 1 November 1950, four months before Bion met Francesca McCallum, who was to become his wife. She reports that the o