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Q: Last night Dr Bion asked us to express our wild thoughts and, at the same time, warned us not to express them too respectably. Then he made an interesting point about the difference between intelligence and wisdom, specifically as regards groups. I'd like to ask Dr Bion if putting one's wild thoughts into respectable form might not be equivalent to intelligence, as opposed to wisdom – in other words, a particularly well-masked form of destructiveness.
Bion: It is much more difficult to reply to that question when it applies to one's own thoughts at the time. There is no way of avoiding the fundamental fact that one is always dependent and alone. When I use those words, I am using relatively highly developed articulate speech about something which is basic, fundamental and has to be experienced. Even the infant has to be able to solve that problem; it does not like the feeling of dependence or the feeling of loneliness, isolation – nor do any of us. I can practise my speculative imagination and say that the infant feels that it may express its feeling of isolation by crying, supposedly for assistance from whatever it is dependent on – the breast, the mother, the parents. Both the infant and the parent have this same problem. The child one suspects of being psychotic or borderline psychotic can be so terrified of its feelings that it expresses them by crying for help, constantly, tirelessly. But the parents do tire; their problem is whether to nurse that infant or whether to escape from the sleepless situation. So when an individual – as, for example, here – knows that he has something to say, the question is whether to say it or not, because he is afraid of discovering either that there is no one to hear or that there is somebody to hear but that somebody will run away. Thus the dreaded isolation is made worse, not less.