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In giving us the Grid and the Theory of Thinking to enable us to think about thinking, Wilfred Bion has set us a hard task to fill it out with psycho-analytical clinical realisations. Even more difficult is the exercise that he has only hinted at, namely forming a Negative Grid to describe the genesis of lies, or misrepresentations of the truth. In this enquiry I will assume that the truth with which we are concerned is the immediate state of mind of the subject and its primary representation in dream and unconscious phantasy (Row C of the Grid). It is necessary at the outset to exclude the category described by Roger Money-Kyrle as the “misconceptions” derived from the mating of a preconception with an inadequate realisation. I am not concerned with errors in conception or, if they exist, of errors in representation. Rather I wish to approach the problem which Freud sometimes thought lay at the basis of repression, namely tampering with the truth, ‘Bowdlerising’ as it is called in relation to history and its documentation.
The method of exposition I wish to pursue is as follows. First, I will present the material brought by Dr Scotti to the seminar in Perugia in October, 1982; then there will follow an exposition of the theoretical model for organising our understanding of the material; and finally the discussion. But as a preliminary, in order to help the reader to focus his attention on the salient phenomena, we must mention one particular aspect of Bion's model of the mind as an organ of thought. In framing the hypothesis that the first step in thought formation is essentially a mysterious, unobservable mental function which he has termed alpha-function, Bion has followed the great tradition in philosophy which assumes that objects are not directly knowable but only construable from the phenomena they generate. This unobservable alpha-function may, under certain circumstances (or perhaps always, in parallel) operate in reverse, cannibalising the partially formed