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Q: The psychoanalytic institute here recommends that students should study Kant. Possibly this results from something you have written in which you refer to Hume and Kant. Would you clarify for us the relationship you see between certain theoretical formulations in relation to the problem of thought, and the works of Kant.
Bion: Kant was attracted by the fact that people think and that we do not all think in the same way, nor do we all see the same phenomena. Philosophers are curious about thought itself.
Most activities are apparently self-explanatory; even in extremely primitive times there was an awareness of the existence of something ‘not self’ and a curiosity about this other object; the self also obtrudes into consciousness and adds to the non-self experience. Objects which are not oneself can become names with the names which we ordinarily associate with things. Sometimes, in the course of analysis, one becomes aware that the analysand has had, and is still having, difficulties which appear to be associated with an awareness of himself. In practice the analyst can suspect that this difficulty, although discernible today, must have been apparent to the patient long before he can have had any equipment adequate to deal with what he was aware of. Our problem today is associated with the detection and comprehension of symptoms or signs of that awareness. You need hardly doubt that any analytic belief that that is happening would be sure to be both controversial and difficult.
If you watch a baby lying in the cot sucking its fingers or thumbs, or – that extremely admirable athletic ability – pushing its feet into
its mouth, do you think the baby might be experiencing embryonic, philosophical conjectures about its experience? Assuming that one does think so, in our hypothetical ‘tomorrow's baby’ are there vestiges of such a preoccupation? We know what a stir was created by Freud's suggestion that there was such a thing as infantile sexuality. We can scarcely hope