Chapter XII. The Bondage of Memory and Desire

An approach to ‘Attention and Interpretation’ is probably only possible for someone already ‘hardened’ to Bion's extraordinary demands upon the reader, for he goes his way in this book not only in the expectation that no one ‘but a practising psychoanalyst can understand this book although I have done my best to make it simple’ but that the reader will have not merely read but mastered the previous books, the grid and the other quasi-mathematical paraphernalia. It is a book in which one of the two terms in the title hardly ever appears in the text. And yet attention is the underlying theme of the work.

In so far as this book represents Bion's most organized attempt to present a theory of psycho-analytical practice, it tends to read a bit like a handbook for pilgrims to a strange world. Until they actually arrive and begin to have the experiences and encounter the objects described, it is all meaningless. The practising psycho-analyst who, Bion hopes, will be his reader may have practised analysis for many years without ever entering the world of Bion's description. This is not merely because he may not have treated schizophrenics, say, but rather that his ‘vertex’ has been so different. He may be sophisticated enough to have realized that the medical model was too crude for application to this method and consequently have taken to referring to his ‘analysands’ rather than his ‘patients’. Readings in linguistic philosophy and philosophy of mind may have made him aware of the great difficulties inherent in the use of language for communication. His personal analysis may have humbled him to a state of tentativeness about his capacities to observe and understand himself and others. His study of the psychoanalytical literature may have warned him of the confusion and inadequacy of theoretical formulation in the field. Study of history may have enabled him to see or suspect that psychoanalysis had its historic roots more in philosophy and theology than in 19th-century scie