Bion and the Theatre of the Absurd

During the 1960s there was a vogue for the ‘theatre of the absurd’ in London, with playwrights like Luigi Pirandello (from Italy), Eugen Ionescu (France), Sanuel Beckett (Ireland) and a number of others. Bion records in a letter to his children that he saw Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, in 1964. The play turns on the relation between the characters in a play and the author/director of the play. It turns that relationship around, or upside down. The characters are looking to the playwright for help in making the story they are part of. Of course, this is absurd but entertaining and thought-provoking.

When a little after this Bion started using, in his writing, the phrase ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’ it also seemed to me somewhat absurd – if less entertaining. How could thoughts possibly exist without being produced by a thinker? In fact, it was of course a concise indicator of his model of containing when someone cannot make sense of their own experiences, rage or joy, and therefore turn to someone else to do the sense-making for them. In fact, this is what happens, according to Bion, from our very earliest days as infants. We scream with something that has to be made sense of as rage and desperation, or we are joyously beaming in a process of ‘imitative conversation’. But it is the infant's parents who have to slowly do the sense-making for their baby.

The point is that Pirandello and Bion both seemed to be attempting to capture the same personal kind of process. We borrow each other's minds as auxiliary egos, and to make sense, and to acquire new mental functions. I note that Bion started using ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’ a little after he'd been to the play, in 1966 (in his paper ‘Catastrophic change’). Is there a connection between Pirandello's masterpiece and Bion's masterpiece (as we might call his model of ‘containing’). I delved further.

Pirandello's play was not written in the 1960s. It was merely an inspiration for the theatre o