ABSTRACT
Going in depth into Freudian developments on unconscious thoughts before becoming conscious thoughts, Bion states that problems associated with thought disorders require us to think thoughts and to acquire an apparatus for thinking thoughts. He also considers that thoughts pre-exist the thinker, who is capable of thinking them once he has succeeded in constituting an apparatus for thinking them. To do this, thought, as “content”, must have remained in the “container” destined to become the apparatus for thinking, which supposes that it has been sufficiently transformed by alpha function to avoid being evacuated from the psyche, without which a hypertrophied apparatus of projective identification develops. This transformation then depends on the capacity of the infant and of the patient for tolerating frustration. This mechanism makes it possible to develop, first, the sense of reality, and then, subsequently, knowledge of it. It is thanks to the links L, H, and K and their “negative” counterparts – the links −L, −H, and −K – that knowledge of reality is developed thanks to oscillations effected for each object between concretization and abstraction. These links established in the form of a “constant conjunction” between the elements make it possible to meet substitutable objects that exist in reality. Thus, an infant can come into the world with an “innate preconception” that there exists, in reality, “an object capable of satisfying his needs”.
The Grid, established by Bion to bring together all the movements and displacements of thought, sums up his overall conception of the genesis and development of thought.
