ABSTRACT
Bion returned from Los Angeles to Britain in 1979, going to live in Oxfordshire, with the intention of setting up a separate Institute with Donald Meltzer, Matti Harris, Isabel Menzies Lyth and Oliver Lyth. Bion took 10 years after World War 1 to find a direction for his life. He went to medical school with the intention of becoming a psychoanalyst. Most people read Bion’s works with an excitement about novel ideas and his intricate ways of expressing them. Bion’s hesitancy about being able to write with transparency and conviction about his clinical work makes it much harder to access and assess the clinician. Bion’s heavy emphasis over the years on social field theory, Kleinian schizoid mechanisms and the philosophy of science were not simple rationalisations but an attempt to go beyond a threatened emptiness.
