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In recent years, Neville Symington has published a series of books, on the analytic process, on narcissism, and on religion, characterized by a very distinctive style. In each, he has shown a determination to think about psychoanalytic theory in very simple, very direct, declarative sentences. One feels that in addition to communicating with the reader, this style reveals his determination to test at every point his own understanding of what he is writing, and to prevent himself from escaping into easy generalities or familiar formulas. The result is a sort of weighty simplicity, unusually clear for a psychoanalytic writer.
In the present book, written jointly with his wife, Joan Symington, the same style is brought to bear on the thinking of Wilfred Bion. (The title says: ‘clinical thinking’, but sub-divisions of this sort hardly make sense with Bion.) Bion's own style is, notoriously, very different: awkward, allusive, and sometimes almost theatrically abstract. The Symingtons do not go into this, but the stylistic vagaries of Bion's different works are a study in themselves.
One of the difficulties in approaching Bion is to disentangle his thought from the mystique in which his style and his personal reputation enshroud it. Would, for example, that lapidary injunction to psychoanalysts to ‘abandon memory and desire’ have had such an impact if it had come from any other source? Is it helpful, or