Commentary on “Bion's Grid: A Tool for Transformation” by Marilyn Charles

Wilfred Bion, the psychoanalyst, was also an autodidact and a polymath. With those talents as a background and from his experiences in studying groups and psychoanalyzing psychotic patients, he was able to provide arguably the most profound, original, and far-reaching meta-theory for psychoanalysis, a metatheory that is distinguished by perhaps the only attempt, aside from Freud, but yet far beyond Freud, to establish an epistemology for psychoanalysis, and in addition to that, ontology as well. His epistemology is rooted in emotions and in human relationships. In order to study these profound areas of the infra- and ultra-sensual spectrum, he first went to scientific and mathematical models to create scaffoldings to carry the elements of mind he had been able to distinguish. One of these scaffoldings is his now famous grid. Marilyn Charles has beautifully captured the essence of how this particular scaffold has become a Rosetta Stone to the hieroglyphic of unconscious processes.

Bion's grid has been a source of considerable discussion by Bion scholars, many of whom find this aspect of his work paradoxically puzzling and enlightening. Bion himself has given different motives for conceiving of the grid. I was in the audience at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society when he first presented his ideas about it. He stated something like the following: He had been concerned as an analyst in London about the great schisms that existed between the various psychoanalytic schools, principally Kleinian and Anna Freudian, and consequently sought a scientific representational system that would be unencumbered by prior associations with pre-established meanings so that analysts of whatever school could converse without passion. He meant it as a kind of Esperanto for psychoanalytic communication. At the time (I should say times1), he first came up with the grid at a point in his development as thinker when he was preoccupied with mathematics, science, and formal logic. He was atte