ABSTRACT

The clarity of W. R. Bion's blueprint in "The Psycho-Analytical Study of Thinking" integrates his reading of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Immanuel Kant, in light of clinical emergence. This chapter highlights the impossibility of the burden placed upon the infant's "rudimentary consciousness" under such maternal breakdown. Bion remains faithful to Freud's early concept of anxiety; but he substitutes the pressure of ideas within the mind for overtly libidinal pressures, while maintaining the notion that thoughts themselves are purposive or teleological. In approaching Bion 1962, he had entertained the notion that such understanding was possible together with the desire to seek such understanding. This unit of thought and desire came into conflictual conjunction with Bion's writing. Like D. W. Winnicott 1960, Bion 1962 presents a compression of a psychoanalytic curriculum rather than a singular point, or even multiple points, available easily for the reader's understanding.