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These four short papers were published between 1976 and 1979. I shall make a few comments on the first of them, and on the last. The first of the four has the title ‘Emotional Turbulence’, a concept at the heart of Bion's ideas concerning learning and growth. In his 1965 book Transformations (see Volume V) Bion had linked emotional turbulence to the inevitable pain of inquiry. Bion wrote of column 2 of his Grid as specifying the acceptance of an answer known at some level to be false, in order to evade the pain of leaving the question open and allowing an evolution, with the possibility of disruptive growth of the mind.
He had written elsewhere – for example, ‘São Paulo 1978’ (Volume VIII) – about the ‘emotional storm’ resulting from the coming together of two personalities in the analytic consulting room,1 and, like Grinberg (1957, 1962, 1979), he had emphasized a particular and clinically important aspect of countertransference induced in the analyst under conditions of intense, powerful projective identification stemming from the patient:
As a result of the pathological quality of this mechanism, the patient is able to induce different roles, affects and fantasies in the analyst, who unconsciously and passively feels himself ‘carried along’ to play and experience them. [Grinberg, 1979, p. 226]
This harked back to Bion's clarification,2 using the group situation, of the relationship between projective identification and countertransference.