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Whether to see life as it is will give us much consolation, I know not; but the consolation which is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable: that which may be derived from error must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive.
I have chosen to speak about Melanie Klein in opening these days dedicated to the memory of Bion and his thought, because it seems worthwhile to establish the link between Bion's work and earlier investigations. If we wanted to go all the way back to Freud, we could unroll a winding skein that is ever richer in its development and derives from the genius, generosity, and intellectual and moral courage of those who have made major contribution to the progress of our science.
Bion was a student of John Rickman, with whom he had his first experience of analysis and with whom he collaborated in his first works on groups; and he was also a student and then a coworker of Mrs. Klein.
Bion made use of Klein's concepts and theories in his first observations with Segal and Rosenfeld and then used them in developing his own new field: the study of thought and the attempt to develop a theory that could describe thinking with some sort of precision.