Foreword to Untitled. Taming Wild Thoughts [II]

The two transcripts seem to have been intended as the first chapters of a book of which no more is known; the recordings were made on two consecutive days in late May 1977, when A Memoir of the Future was already finished and Bion was working on his autobiography, but they are different in kind from both of these. In the first ‘chapter’, he takes up the idea of stray and wild thoughts and how to capture them and introduces the concept of beta-element, in an almost whimsical fashion, as a ‘box’ into which to put one sort of captured stray. The discussion that develops links up with the Grid, as it deepens and develops the notions of alpha- and beta-elements, dream thought, and rhythmic, non-verbal communication. Bion goes on to show something of what he had in mind when he talks of language achievement, as a sort of high-point of sophisticated and efficacious communication, and then returns to the physical level, beta-elements, ending with a discussion of archaic vestigial aspects of the mind. The style is very discursive – conversational, almost – and might be thought of as rambling, but it is in itself a good example of the validity of the ‘large circumference’ of a circular argument, since the return to the theme of beta-elements towards the end of the chapter is notably enriched by all that has occurred ‘on the way’. (I have often thought that Bion's concept of a circular argument was well illustrated by the circular form of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.)

The second ‘chapter’ takes up the problem of evaluation; starting again from sensorial data, beta-elements, which Bion seems to assume in a relaxed sort of way as a non-questionable ‘given’ on which to build his architectonics of thought, he moves on to the question of psychoanalytic supervision. Several points come up for discussion on the first section, which might be headed ‘speculative

imagination’ – another term for wild thoughts: the relevance of the past only inasmuch as it obtrudes on the present; the deep