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It was suggested in the chapters dealing with the ‘Elements’ that Bion might be viewed from a rather military model as mustering forces, making sallies and skirmishes and periodically trying to take the citadel of the mind by storm. Perhaps this is too sanguinary a model to account for the experience of the reader who finds himself in a near constant state of exasperation eased by moments of delight and illumination. Perhaps we should imagine a present-day Leonardo designing his flying machines and incidentally producing marvellous drawings and paintings and entertaining fireworks shows and mechanical toys. Perhaps our exasperation will be less if we put to one side the desire to see him fly (or crash?) and enjoy the art and fireworks. To do that requires no critical guidance. ‘Transformations’ has some masterpieces of clinical description, notably the two-fold description of Patient B (p. 19), and sparkles throughout with little fireworks of observation and thought about the psycho-analytical situation and the world it inhabits.
But our task in this book is to take Bion's main purpose seriously and to struggle with our resentment, suspicions that he is mad, feelings of humiliation at his citing authors whose work is hardly known to us as if it were as current as the news on TV, and above all exasperation with the mathematizing. He says explicitly that he rejects the dictum that a system cannot be considered scientific until it can be expressed in mathematical terms. It was not so difficult to forgive the plethora of confusing and sometimes seemingly contradictory signs in the ‘Elements’ because behind it lay a model of the periodic table and the hope of a new order in chaos. In the present work no such hope sustains us in the face of the proliferation of mathematics-like notations, pseudo-equations, followed by arrows, dots, lines, arrows over (or should it be under?) words and not just Greek letters but Greek words. How are we to bear such an assault on our mentali