Learning from Experience

Wilfred Bion worked clinically with psychotic patients and made many significant contributions in this area, viewing schizophrenic thinking as a difficulty in the "linking" of thoughts and objects. His concept of the "container" and the "contained" emphasizes the role of empathy in the infant-mother dyad. He used the term "alpha function" to conceptualize how the data of emotional experience is processed and digested, and he developed the "grid" to locate the development and transformation of psychic elements. Wilfred Bion died in 1979.

No analyst working at deeper than oedipal levels can afford to ignore the fundamental ideas to which Bion's chief attention has been devoted.