ABSTRACT
In a way that is not true of any other contemporary psychoanalytic writer, we are still dealing with the consequences and implications of Bion’s ideas. In the same way that Wittgenstein made philosophers re-think the nature of their subject, Bion has made us re-think the nature of psychoanalysis, particularly the nature of psychoanalytic enquiry. This similarity can be taken further for, like Wittgenstein, Bion centres an important part of his enquiry on the nature of the investigation itself, an approach that tends to disturb our complacency when we use taken-for-granted ideas. Bion is a writer who has an effect on his reader, and one that is most peculiar. It is as if the very thing that he discusses takes place in the act of reading him; there is a reflexivity in his writing. This seems also to be true of Wittgenstein, referred to by Stanley Cavell (1969), when he stated that in reading Wittgenstein one feels exposed to the peculiar experiences he describes.
