I am going to speak about creativity not in a descriptive or behavioural sense, as when we say: “this person is very creative”; but, in a more precise and definite mode, I am going to talk of creativity as a phenomenon of the personality, of the family, and of the culture. I will speak of Bion as a genius who in a certain sense produced everything that he did produce as though in a dream. I will describe him as someone who struggled, who made some errors, who corrected himself and often did not know where he had arrived. A creative genius is someone who permits his own internal objects to give him new ideas—even if he does not understand them or cannot use them: his function is to receive them, and he possesses the art of transmitting them. There is a distinction between invention and discovery. Invention is a function of the self—discovery, a function of the creative self.

I will start with Bion's theory of thinking and his particular formulation of the grid. The grid was a means chosen by Bion to describe the