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For a long time the real meaning of Bion's term «catastrophe» and its relationship with Winnicott's «breakdown» were not clear to me. The word catastrophe, it is known, comes from Greek «kata»— down, and «strephein» — to turn. Chambers Twentieth Century dictionary defines «Catastrophe» as follows: «An overturning; a final event; an unfortunate conclusion; a calamity».
Bion has spoken of «catastrophic change», never of catastrophe, in various places in his work, and particularly, in Chapter 12 of «Attention and Interpretation» (5), in «Learning from experience» (2) and, most of all, in «Transformations» (3). In 1966 he had given a paper to the British Society which was entitled «Catastrophic Change» (4). That paper was not published separately. It appeared, however, in the Bulletin o the British Psychoanalytic Society and it is printed almost exactly the same in «Attention and Interpretation».
The image of the catastrophe and of the extreme confusion which the analyst experiences when working in depth with adult psychotics has been associated by Bion with the experience of the archeologist who exscavates in the ruins of a buried city and, in the course of his excavation, due to movements the various geological strata have