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In his admirable paper, Vermote characterises for us the shifts which distinguish the last period of Bion's remarkable body of work from the earlier and middle parts which, untendentiously, I will describe as his psychoanalytic maturity. In particular, Vermote directs our attention to the major and controversial change in Bion's approach for which he offers us the term late Bion. Its origin, Vermote suggests, can be placed at the end of Transformations (Bion, 1965), although he considers that it was only fully formed in Attention and Interpretation published some five years later, by which time Bion (then 72 years old) had made his move from London to Los Angeles.
Briefly, Bion seems to have come to the conclusion that there was a need to go further than what he saw as limits upon the psychoanalytic objects which can be accessible to conventional or empirical ways of knowing. Going beyond these limits was necessary if psychoanalysis was to be able to reach the possibility of change at a basic level of the patient's way of being. This level, Bion had posited, was the primary source of all mental productions and events. Through his account of this particular development in Bion's theoretical thinking, and through two clinical illustrations of his own, Vermote argues for the value of the ideas of late Bion. He suggests that it is possible to combine the different models of early and late Bion to produce what he calls ‘a dual track model of psychic change’.
Given the compression and nature of the matters with which late-Bion deals, it is extremely difficult to give an adequate sense of the set of changes involved within a restricted frame such as that provided by a single paper. Vermote's succinctness is therefore a considerable achievement. Regrettably, I have found it impossible to match this. The matters, of which Vermote gives an account, go to the depths of the human psyche. Bion's technical recommendations, which Vermote seeks to employ, are decisive for