ABSTRACT
W. R. Bion's introduction to his 1962 paper, "The Psycho-Analytical Study of Thinking" is aimed at the practising psychoanalyst; yet it begins in a painfully abstracted manner, deploying dense, unsaturated language repellant of the reader's desire to understand. The equivalence of Bion's schematic blueprint partnered with the reader's experience of a hard slog in attempting to understand, indeed signals success. The comparative link with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic project provides a similar correlate at a different level. Like D. W. Winnicott, Bion addresses the clinical world of psychosis or the wildness of untamed thought; and along the same path too, it would seem, by which the Winnicottian parent or therapist perceives the uniqueness of patterning that characterises the individual. For Bion, thinking is humanity's basic housekeeping, the necessary operation of coping with the overwhelming untidiness of thought. Winnicott focuses upon the insufficiency observed by Freud, of data on infant development.
