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In her 1981 commemorative essay on Bion's theory of thinking, Edna O'Shaughnessy asks the question ‘What does Bion mean by “Thinking”?’ and continues:
He does not mean some abstract mental process. His concern is with thinking as a human link — the endeavour to understand, comprehend the reality of, get insight into the nature of … oneself and another. Thinking is an emotional experience of trying to know one's self and someone else.
Endeavouring to understand the emotional impact of congenital blindness or severe visual impairment on the development of the child requires of me, as a sighted person, an imaginative leap into a world which is necessarily different from my own. I am bounded by the experience of my own vision. If I am to reach into the world of the visually impaired child I must both hold to the experience I know and accept the dignity of theirs.
The blind and severely visually impaired children I have encountered in my work over the last seventeen years have constantly challenged my thinking. While it is of course true that there are common patterns of development, no two children are alike. Developmental, psychological and even psychoanalytically based studies of blind children have, for many reasons, endeavoured to frame their work into categories of the normal blind child, the child with residual vision, the partially sighted child, the congenitally blind, the non-congenitally blind and the uneducable