ABSTRACT
This chapter presents quotes on the Grid from the whole of Wilfred Bion’s writings. A detailed knowledge of the grid is certainly not necessary to understand Bion’s major conceptual contributions such as the theories of thinking, containment and preconceptions nor to grasp his ideas on psychoanalytic technique. The Grid has a horizontal and a vertical axis. The vertical axis are to do with the level of symbolic development of the analytic material being communicated between patient and analyst. Bion tried mapping the characters in the Oedipus myth onto the columns of the Grid. If both the myth and the Grid are understood to carry essential information about how the mind works, it makes sense to see whether the myth can be “mapped” onto the Grid. Bion is concerned that unacknowledged fear or anxiety in the analyst stemming from archaic areas in himself and possibly induced by the patient may lead the analyst to interpret in a defensive way.
