ABSTRACT
In Second Thoughts, Wilfred Bion brought together eight papers that represented an ongoing chronicle of his psychoanalytic work with psychotic patients, which he had either presented or published between 1950 and 1962. The pains of psychic reality are exacerbated by it and the patient who regresses to the paranoid-schizoid position will, as he does so, turn destructively on his embryonic capacity for verbal thought as one of the elements which have led to his pain. In “Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Personalities” Bion, with his characteristic keen ability to view things from different vertices or angles, approaches the problem of a psychotic patient, a schizophrenic, and shows us that the psychotic, like the neurotic, has at least two personalities. “A Theory of Thinking” represents a major turning point in Bion’s psychoanalytic episteme. It is the culmination of his work of treating psychotics and clearly adumbrates his future work on emotional epistemology.
