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[Foreword, 1977 - On re-reading this paper, most of which I still think approximately valid, I found some passages which I no longer understood. But as I assume I at least thought I understood them when I wrote it, I have given them the ‘benefit of the doubt’ and left them in.]
The facts gradually revealed by psycho-analytic exploration can be expressed in several different ways. If a new way does no more than express familiar truths in unfamiliar words, it is likely to be redundant or actively confusing. But sometimes the change involves the sort of shift in perspective which can be extraordinarily illuminating. Thus, for example, without exactly increasing the analyst's theoretical equipment, it may enable him to notice, in his patients, more realizations of psycho-analytic theory than he had done before, and to interpret in a manner that his patients can more readily grasp. It seems to me that Bion's recent work - apart from its direct contributions to basic theory - provides just this kind of shift in perspective.
No doubt different analysts will abstract different elements from his work, and develop them on different lines. What I have abstracted here, and will try to develop, is a theory of the growth or misgrowth, from the apex of an entity which I shall call the ‘conceptual pyramid’.
Bion speaks of innate preconceptions mating with realizations to form conceptions - better terms, I think, and conveying more truth, than the term ‘innate idea’, whether imageless or not, which I had used before. But I transfer to the new concept of innate preconceptions the same origin and development as I used to attribute to ‘innate ideas’; that is to say, I believe