ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the subtlety and complexity of the earliest communications between mother and infant, particularly those which promote individual thinking capacities and further the child's confidence, spontaneity and interest. In Bion's thinking, the model of the growth of the mind becomes an alimentary one, in which the mind is nourished by true experiences and poisoned by false ones. This kind of food for thought is less a cognitive matter than an emotional and imaginative one. Bion's notion of the process by which this very particular kind of "thinking" comes into being locates it in the quality of the original communication between mother and baby, in the availability of what amounted to a "thinking" breast. Implicit in Bion's idea of the maternal capacity for reverie is the presence of an unconscious process of a particular kind, one which forms a basis for the sort of reflective self-consciousness which defines the difference between theories of mental development and of personality development.
