ABSTRACT
Essential to W. R. Bion’s account of the development of thinking is the external fact of the present and returning breast. The breast comes and goes, and may come less and go more than the infant would like, but essentially the breast is present and returning. Thinking may then take on a different colouring, perhaps move for preference towards the abstract and impersonal. But for those under consideration the wound remains open, as it were, life-long, if the right things for them do not happen. The emphasis is on the implications of all this for the life of the mind, rather than on the emotional havoc; on the deformation of the life of the mind the emotional havoc brings about. The mental processes indeed travesty and in a way parody thinking and in affect are full of nightmare that cannot be dreamt.
