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Bion’s writing is difficult: often turgid, frequently confounding (maddeningly so), and regularly mystifying. And yet, I find that my attempts to paraphrase his writing almost always leave me feeling that I have lost what is most important to Bion’s thinking. I offer here some thoughts on how, over the years, I have come to read Bion, which I hope will be of help to others in their efforts at finding their own ways to read his work. Perhaps most important to the way I read his work is the state of mind I try to bring to it – a state of mind in which I fully accept what I believe to be Bion’s view of his own writing: he strives not to be understood, but to serve as a catalyst for the reader’s own thinking.
A second orienting idea that I bring to my reading of Bion is a conception of Bion’s opus as being comprised of two periods that I think of as “early” and “late” Bion. I view the writing in the two periods as based on overlapping, yet distinctly different sets of assumptions regarding psychoanalysis. The writing from the two periods requires different ways of reading, which generate different experiences in reading. I believe that much confusion is generated if the reader treats Bion’s early and late work as constituting a gradual unfolding of ideas that are continuous in their view of psychological development. To my mind, the late work, while incorporating and assuming a thorough familiarity with the early work, represents a radical departure from it. “Early Bion,” as I conceive of this body of work, consists of all of his writing up to and including Learning from Experience (1962a); “late Bion” begins with Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963) and continues through the remainder of his work (in which Attention and Interpretation [1970] stands as the major contribution).