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[PEP Editor’s Note: A PDF Original is available showing the original formatting.]
‘Catastrophic Change’ was presented by Bion on 4 May 1966 to a Scientific Meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Until the publication of The Complete Works of W. R. Bion, this important paper had not been widely available.
In 1970, an adaptation of the paper was reproduced, with one or two expanded segments, as Chapter 12, ‘Container and Contained Transformed’, of Attention and Interpretation: A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups (see Volume VI). Because the two texts are so similar – identical for many passages – the places at which Bion has thought to elaborate in the 1970 version are likely to be of interest to those studying his work in detail, in a manner similar to the way in which historians and cartographers superimpose maps of similar scale but from different historical periods in order to study small but significant variations.
Accordingly I have arranged in this appendix the text of ‘Catastrophic Change’ alongside that of ‘Container and Contained Transformed’ in a manner suited to close comparison of the two.
As I wrote in the ‘Introduction’ in Volume I, there is considerable repetition across Bion's writings and in his talks and seminars concerning his core clinical and theoretical ideas, but in many instances additional meaning may be gleaned from the variations on a theme, modulations in the ‘angle of approach’, and the ‘binocular vision’ of comparing apparently small differences, something very much in keeping with Bion's beliefs concerning what he was attempting to do with his communications, both spoken and written.