You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These four discussions took place over the month of April 1976, at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Hospital. What is striking in these, and all the recorded talks and discussions, is Bion's consistent preference for addressing questions put to him rather than answering them. However tangential or peregrinating his responses seem, they are illuminating in most cases, and in many they clarify at least the question posed.
In an unpublished 1977 paper with the ironic title ‘New and Improved’ (included in Volume XV), Bion expressed his gratitude to André Green for bringing to his attention the saying by Maurice Blanchot, “La réponse est le malheur de la question” – the answer is the misfortune (or illness, or disease) of curiosity – a quotation to which he had referred frequently. Bion was aware of how hostility, generated by the frustration and anxiety accompanying curiosity, can draw us to prefer the security of closure offered by certainty; much of his behaviour in discussion groups arose from his desire to keep questions alive and open – to the extent, in some large-group situations, of waiting in the growing silence in the hope that a Work-Group mentality might emerge to counter the prevailing culture of dependency combined with idealization.