ABSTRACT

Reading Wilfred R. Bion is a unique experience in itself, but the combination of reading his works after listening to him, both in psychoanalysis and in lectures, was awesome and constituted an adventure in a different form of learning. Upon approaching reading Bion's published works, many readers become frustrated, perplexed, irritated and aversive. Some say that his style of writing closely resembles that of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, particularly his three-volume novel, A Memoir of the Future. Thomas Ogden studied his style of writing and noted how it had changed from a formal to a more open and available style between his earlier and his later works. Some readers have come to grips with the often impenetrable nature of his style by reading him in groups. His style of sentence structure seems to be clearly out of the Greek and especially the Latin classics.