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This work was published in 1970, when Bion had been living and working for two years in Los Angeles. As André Green (1973) suggested in his review of the book, readers who turn to this work hoping to find a definitive theory either of attention or of interpretation will be disappointed, the former term not even making an appearance in the book's index. Reflecting, however, on the definition of attention used by Bion and Freud, Green had a flash of realization: if the function of attention is, “periodically to search the outer world in order that its data might be already familiar if an urgent need should arise” (Freud, 1911b, p. 220), and “Its activity meets the sense impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance”, then Bion's book could be understood as fulfilling just such a function – that of meeting the reader half-way. So, wrote Green, “Attention was not what was in the book, it was the book itself.”
This is an interesting and accurate statement, and one that holds true specifically for Attention and Interpretation and generally in terms of Bion's overall project, which was to address the problem of “how to make the emotions which permeate the abstract formulations of psychoanalytical theories come alive for the reader or the listener” (Bion Talamo, 1981):
This sort of problem has been present in Bion's work from Second Thoughts onwards, when he states that: “The subject matter with which psychoanalysis deals cannot employ any form of communication which can cater for the requirements of a problem in the absence of the problem.” It seems to me that this statement implies Bion's desire to make the subject of the discussion emotionally present for the reader so that it is then possible to discuss it at once with an immediate awareness of the emotional aspects. [Bion Talamo, 1981, p. 626]