ABSTRACT
Wilfred R. Bion's emphasis on consciousness, not as a system but as an organ of the mind, the organ of attention, had already been strongly recommended by the experiences with autistic children. Bion's approach to the problem, by assuming that the operation is the creation of thoughts which then require an apparatus to think them, seems to be the crucial break with the traditional implication that thinking is prior as a function and generates thoughts. Psychoanalysis as a thing-in-itself, and its particular manifestation in the patient's own experience of analysis, comes to form a link to the internal part object, the maternal thinking-breast as combined object, breast and nipple. The functions that the analyst is felt to perform within the analytical process assume definitive shape, greatly clarifying the nature of the felt dependence. Caution can replace rigidity of style and method when basic personal concepts of method and process have been established from experience with the particular patient and practice.
