Chapter IV. Approach to a Theory of Thinking

The historical approach to Bion's work which we are following seems to reveal something of a latency period in his creativity contemporary with his apprenticeship in psycho-analysis proper, standing between the brilliance of his work with groups and the full-blown emergence of his thought in the books commencing with ‘Learning from Experience’. This period of re-orientation was followed by the period of the papers on schizophrenia which reveal him more fully than in any other of his writings deploying his extraordinary capacity for concentration and observation. The result was his uncovering a plethora of phenomena as yet unnoticed in the consulting room, at first with frankly psychotic patients and later with the ‘psychotic part of the personality’ of less ill people. The consequence was a kind of adolescence of reborn creativity in which his expanding thought was struggling to stay within the bounds of existing concept, both Freud's model of thinking and Mrs Klein's model of the structure of the personality in conflict. The areas of incompatibility of the two and their fundamental inadequacy to cover the phenomena with which he was dealing was revealed in the manner in which concepts such as primal scene, splitting of the ego, projective identification and verbal thought were stretched to the breaking point.

The three papers that followed in the years straddling Mrs Klein's death in 1960 reveal the germs of the new theory. These three, ‘On Arrogance’, ‘Attacks on Linking’ and ‘A Theory of Thinking’ have to be read against a background of the clinical data of the earlier four in order to gain any credibility, for, in themselves, very little description of the analytical situation is contained to help the reader make connections with his own experience in the consulting room. In addition the idiosyncratic features of Bion's writings are often rather exasperating: for example a section headed ‘Curiosity, Arrogance and Stupidity’ in which these three terms find virtual