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Taming Wild Thoughts is a short book containing two pieces by W. R. Bion: ‘The Grid’, presented to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in October of 1963, and ‘Untitled’, transcripts of two tapes of Bion talking to himself on two days in May of 1977, in preparation for a presentation in Rome in July of that year. There are brief, precise, very informative introductions to both pieces by his widow, Francesca Bion. Equally informative is a compact foreword by his psychoanalyst daughter, Parthenope Bion Talamo, setting and integrating the pieces within the evolutions of Bion's thinking and the overall context of his work.
As described in the foreword, Taming Wild Thoughts has to do with classifying psychoanalytic objects of the domain of ideas which defined in Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963). The qualities of such psychical objects are observed by our egos, analogous to the qualities of physical objects being observed by our sensoriums or machines which augment our sensoriums. ‘The Grid’ appears to have been a part of Bion's work in developing the book Elements of Psychoanalysis. For example, column 5 is named ‘Oedipus’ in the paper, and ‘Inquiry’ in Elements of Psychoanalysis and thereafter. As mentioned in the foreword, ‘The Grid’, along with passages in Cogitations on alpha elements, dream-work alpha, and beta elements, complement and make easier the study of Elements and related ideas. Other interesting links made in the foreword include: precursors of the in Experiences in Groups (1961), foreshadows of Transformations , and ‘the importance of the circumference of the circle … in the fecundity of thought’. There was a 1971 paper delivered in Los Angeles also titled ‘The Grid’ , but of different style and content. The two papers complement each other.
From Bion's work in the 1960s with analysands suffering from disorders of thinking (and feeling) comes his ‘Theory of Thinking’ with the idea that thoughts first evolve in genetic stages. In Elements, he