A THEORY OF THINKING

Wilferd Bion: A Theory of Thinking

Wilferd Bion A Theory of Thinking

Wilferd Bion A Theory of Thinking

Bion's work is not easy of access. One often feels after reading and re-reading an essay or book of his that one simply could not tell someone else what it said, while at the same time feeling that one has taken in something important. There is a feeling of being inward with and changed by something profound which one cannot articulate. There aren't many expositions of Bion's work, but there are a few, and only one of them, Gérard Bléandonu's Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897-1979, is mentioned by the Symingtons; they see it as complementary to their book. I found this odd, since with such an opaque writer one needs all the help one can get. I was particularly surprised that they nowhere draw on R. D. Hinshelwood's A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought these omissions set for me a keynote of curious bewilderment which I never shook off. They begin with a number of grand, sometimes grandiose, claims about Bion,           

Every phrase of that account can be opened out to illuminate an aspect of what was remarkable about Bion and his life(His biographer is Bleandonu, 1994.) The autobiography of his early life, The Long Week-End (1982), is a classic of its genre, and I commend it to you. His father was English but, like many of his forbears, lived and worked in India, in his case as a civil engineer concerned with irrigation. As was traditional in his parents' class and, in particular, in the expatriate way of life, Bion saw little of his parents and was mostly in the care of an Indian aya. His recollections of childhood were painful. He regarded himself as a suffering, unworthy sinner. He was particularly wracked by guilt feelings about masturbation, which he called 'wiggling'. When taken on a tiger hunt by his father he was overwhelmed by distress at the carnage. When he was eight he was sent away to be privately educated in England, and he never saw India again. His recollection of his mother sending him off is particularly poignant. There was so much that happened to him, then and later, that simply bewildered him, e.g., the meaning of The Lord's Prayer, which he heard as 'Arf Arfur Oo Arf in Mphm' (Bion, 1982, p. 9). The world into which he was born and others into which he was prematurely relocated were both too much for him and a source of his remarkable insight into the recesses of human nature.

Bion went to an English public school and remained n England during the holidays. When the war came he joined up and ended up in the new form of cavalry, the tanks. In their early days tanks were death traps from which few survived. On one occasion an attack was called. Bion, by now in charge of a group of tanks, objected that it was a suicidal ...