Visual power, emotions, and mental growth: A clinical essay on some of Bion’s earliest psychosomatic intuitions

As an old proverb has it, well begun is half done. In this spirit I should like to go over some brief passages from one of Bion’s first papers, “The imaginary twin” (Bion, 1967a), which he read to the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1950, and in which he set forth certain ideas that would come to characterize his approach. They appear here in inchoate form, just as they emerge from his consideration of clinical material. Hence these hypotheses, well grounded in the concreteness of his experience, are particularly relevant to clinical experience generally.