You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There is a fairly widespread belief among analysts, which I share, that Bion's works are both very important and very difficult to understand. Moreover, the difficulty is felt to reside in the novelty of the notions introduced rather than in any obscurity of expression, which is expected to become clear as soon as the novel notions are recognized for what they are.
The book to be reviewed is a summary of Bion's works arranged in such a way that an understanding of one notion is likely to help the reader to understand the next one to be introduced. And I think this aim has been very well achieved and that, by this linking of one new concept with another and by the general discussion of them, Bion's works are made a good deal easier to understand. And if the reader, as I did, still finds some notions difficult, perhaps this is a salutary experience. For it makes one realize that however much analysis one thinks one knows, there is always an infinite amount which remains unknown to one - in other words, that psycho-analysis is an endless quest.
Whether this review of a review, or ‘transformation of a transformation’ to use one of Bion's terms, will make it any easier, I do not know. But as a start it occurs to me that some of his notions become easier if one remembers that much of what he is writing about is that mysterious thing called instinct, particularly the cognitive aspect of it which is now, for the first time, being psycho-analytically explored. For instance, although he expressly calls them instinctive, it is easy to forget that the ‘basic assumptions’ which can, be believes, be observed in a group, are in his view instinctive. In fact, I think they are the same sort of things that he calls ‘innate preconceptions’ in individual psychology. In other words, I think that just as there is an innate preconception of a breast which mates with the realization of being fed by a real breast or bottle to form a conception of one, so in a group there are basic assumpti