ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion pulled the positivistic psychoanalysis of Freud and Klein into the new, uncharted realms of uncertainty: from the strictures and prison of verbal language to a realm beyond and before language. Unlike most analytic thinkers, Bion was able to extricate himself from the closed loop of analytic thinking by using analogic thinking—that is, models. Bion’s conception of container ↔ contained, along with his communicative extension of Melanie Klein’s conception of projective identification, is generally thought of as constituting a two-person intersubjective system. Bion was fond of using analogic models that he could apply to the mind’s transformative functioning but which would exist outside the actual functioning. Bion conceived of a-function and β- and α-elements as models for the epigenesis and evolution of thoughts and thinking. Bion contrasts models with theories. Models are analogues that are independent of the contextual field in which they are employed, whereas theories are defined within the contextual field in which they are used.
