ABSTRACT
With a good deal of oversimplification, this chapter is preoccupied with cognitive development as the result of reaching the third of three stages to mental illness-stages which very roughly reflect successive attitudes which were fairly common in the psychoanalytic movement as a whole. In the first stage, 40 or 50 years ago, author's dominant assumption would have been that mental illness is the result of sexual inhibitions. In the second stage, 20 to 25 years ago, dominant assumption would have been that mental illness is the result of unconscious moral conflict. In the third and recent stage, dominant assumption is that the patient, whether clinically ill or not, suffers from unconscious misconceptions and delusions. Bion has described psychotic mechanisms which attack concept building at its source, so that the "thought" of an absent object-originally, the breast-is not formed and thinking is impossible.
