Thought Disorder1

… what was required was discipline. An officer who aspires to be the psychiatrist in charge of a rehabilitation wing … will realize that it is his task to produce self-respecting men socially adjusted to the community and, therefore, willing to accept its responsibilities whether in peace or war.

—Bion (1961)

This paper is an attempt towards a critique of Bion's unusually suggestive work, focussing in particular on his concept of thought disorder and on his effort to think about psycho-analytic thinking. I investigate the suggestiveness to decide whether it is as fecund as it seems exciting; but I intend to leave aside any discussion of the concept of personal identity, although the most fundamental examination of Bion's account of thought disorder as a form of dissociation presupposes clarification of what is meant by association as incarnated by a person.

Bion's theory of thought disorder, I argue, is like the "scientific deductive system" he calls Dada (Bion, 1962): i.e. it has become a thing-in-itself, without connexion with the phenomena from which it is supposedly deduced; or, rather, the phenomena are seen in terms of what it is claimed is the scientific deductive system abstracted from them, and this deductive system is grounded on a false premiss. This does not, of course, entail ubiquitous rejection of all his descriptive inferences (such as projective identification, etc.), but it does of his explanation of that part of the patient's behaviour which is responsible for such attributions being, in his view, appropriate. His concept of thought disorder, I believe, transforms the analyst (or psychiatrist) into an appendage to a common fantasy object (in a way analogous to that, for instance, in which the Jews in Germany in the 1930s were constituted as such an object by the anti-semites), whose tromp l'oeil existence is maintained partly by means of the custom of regarding psycho-analytic theory, when convenient, as a branch of biology. I here argue that t