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Whether to see life as it is, will give us much consolation, I know not; but the consolation which is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable; that which may be derived from error must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive. Samuel Johnson, 1934, p.339
It is a matter of the greatest possible urgency that the human animal should discover what sort of animal he is before he has blown himself off the earth. The monkey-trick department is far and away in advance of the rest. Wilfred Bion, Complete Works, Vol X, p.68.
At this moment in history, we seem to be poised at a point where life, as we have known it, seems emperilled in every possible way. Climate change and wars have been routinised into casual facts of life that we shrug off as inevitable. The idea of “anti-mind” appeared to organise (from Latin organum which means “tool”), such times as ours.
If the mind is the apparatus that gathers information and arranges it, then anti-mind is the force that opposes such activities that we include in “thinking”, that is, reflecting, observing, remembering, dreaming, and other such manifestations.
This issue was conceived as one that would invite reflections on the manifestations of clotting in the psychosocial arterial system using Wilfred Bion's theory of thinking. Bion's contribution to psychoanalysis included his revolutionary rewriting of psychoanalysis: where the emphasis shifted from sex, memory, content, and symptoms, to emotions, thinking, and the analytic link, in the here and now.
When Descartes (1637) famously said, “I think therefore I am”, he suggested that thoughts prove our existence. Bion however separated thoughts from thinking. He appears to imply, that everyone has “thoughts” but not everyone can think them. Infact, we can surmise, nobody can think their thoughts all the time. Bion (1962) called these “unthought and often unthinkable thoughts”, “beta elements” (unprocessed data). For Bion, thoughts were primitive impressions