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This is the fourth book by Dr Bion to appear under the auspices of the Melanie Klein Trust. It collects Dr Bion's papers from the period 1950–62, some of which have been published in this Journal. Dr Bion's contributions towards an understanding of the schizophrenic syndrome, psychotic personalities, hallucinations and the theory of thinking have already become the source of lively discussion and research in current psychoanalytic literature. In the past two decades Dr Bion has been one of the most creative clinicians as well as theoreticians of the Kleinian school in the British Society. In his introduction to this book, Dr Bion states: 'For those who want the papers as they were originally printed, here the papers are, but I have added a commentary which involves an evolutionary change of opinion. I do not regard any narrative purporting to be a report of fact, either of what the patient said or of what I said, as worth consideration as a "factual account" of what happened.' And it is the 'Commentary' of some 50 pages at the end of the book in which Dr Bion re-examines his own work that is the most fascinating additive contribution in this book. One of the issues Dr Bion takes up is how does an analyst record and report on his work, which constitutes the specific and essential problem of communication in psychoanalysis. He tells us that one reason he gave up note-taking 'was my growing awareness that the most evocative notes were those in which I came nearest to a representation of a sensory image; say an event visually recalled. … The evocation however was not of the past but of interpretations wise after the event. In short the value of the notes lay not in their supposed formulation of a record of the past but in their formulation of a sensory image evocative of the future. The notes did not make it possible to remain conscious of the past but to evoke expectations of the future.' This leads Dr Bion to state that: 'The psychoanalyst's note on a se