ABSTRACT
Any inquiry into the philosophical significance of Bion's work requires some explanation because Bion does not consider himself a philosopher, nor his works as a philosophical system. Bion's task is to get at the foundations, the most universal notation and language for the essence of psychoanalytic data. His work is philosophical as much as psychoanalytical in the same sense that Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica (1925-1927) is philosophical as much as mathematical. Bion's philosophical sensitivities have enabled extremely minimal and elegant fundamental formulations that go from strictly analytical data to a conceptualization of psychopathology, technique, defensive operations, and the possibility of cure. Psychoanalysis has tended, for the most part, to adopt Freud's antipathy to the philosophical enterprise. Freud had a tendency to equate philosophy with some philosophers of his time who equated the knowable with the contents of consciousness and, hence, were antagonistic to the very idea of the unconscious.
