ABSTRACT
W. R. Bion's own reading of Sigmund Freud relies on the expansion of individual knowing to others in the world, who aid in the translation of consciousness into meaning. Freud's earlier conceptual uncovering discloses the lost kingdoms of infantile development. Bion's rendering later in the twentieth century discloses that these remnants of earlier personal experience are themselves enduringly catastrophic. Bion addresses the antagonism of primary process experience within its therapeutic realisations. Bion's projective identification, represented often through attacks on linking, functions as the communicative vehicle of D. W. Winnicott's mother–infant unit within the pairing of therapist and patient. The reader remembers Winnicott's observation that the therapist often finds himself unable to communicate to the patient the nature of experience undergone within therapy. The link Bion describes is a joining relationship: between people, participants in the therapeutic relationship; and between individually held thoughts.
