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The title of this slim volume (173 pages) refers to its structure. Dr. Bion collected a series of papers published between 1950 and 1962. He reread them and added a commentary to each paper. With respect to the first essay, “The Imaginary Twin,” he has written a commentary on many of the individual paragraphs. Initially his “second thoughts” are quite critical in the distant, laconic and “objective” tone for which the British are justly famous. Unfortunately the humor is missing.
Bion writes, “psychoanalytical literature has meaning for one or two readers of a particular article at most; it must be the dreariest and most unrewarding scientific literature for the others” (p. 129). One reason that his own papers may have so little meaning for readers are sentences such as the following: “The notes I am discussing can be used to belong to categories which are similar or close in that, if they purport to be records of the past, their object is to evoke memories presumed to be unconscious because they have been forgotten or suppressed or repressed; if they are to evoke ideas about the future they are to evoke prophecies or conjectures about what has not yet happened” (p. 124).
Nonetheless, there are rewards for the reader patient enough to not be put off by tendentious writing. Dr. Bion has been strongly influenced by Melanie Klein. In his paper called “Attacks on Linking” he presents his theory of the development of most emotional disorders. There is an “… inborn disposition to excessive destructiveness, hatred and envy; on the other hand the environment denies to the patient the use of the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification” (p. 106).
The infant has rage feelings which are split off from the self and projected onto the breast and mother. Rage feelings can also be split off from the mother and projected onto the infant. The infant from an early date perceives the breast as filled with a devouring greed which threatens to introject his projective identifi