ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion’s Learning from Experience actualises in literary form, a metapsychological confusion of tongues in casting scientific usage within unsettling and unsettled meanings, provoking the reader’s curiosity and uncertainty. He cautions that his writing is meant to be comprehensible within the experience of the practising analyst, pushing the limits of what words must do beyond their fitness for purpose. Bion consciously reproduces the lived experience of psychoanalysis through literary conveyance. Bion’s text approximates a demonstration of psychoanalytic experience to colleagues, a criterion group notoriously critical of the relation between analyst’s theory and what is said to the patient. Psychological choice and creativity are at the heart of Learning from Experience. Neither theory nor practice but inchoate lived experiences, often conscious but with their articulations defended or unspoken behind institutional shibboleths, these caesurae describe an external world of new psychoanalytic realities.
