ABSTRACT
Bion has meant, and will mean, a lot to babies. This may come as a surprise, especially to those many, perhaps most, people working in the field of human psychology who believe that the activities of Bion's complex mind are so abstruse as to be incomprehensible and are thus irrelevant to the day-to-day reality of life, even to that of a working psycho-analyst, let alone to babies. Bion was able to show how psychoanalysis was not separate from life, nor a substitute for it, but a method of microscopic distillation, making study possible if one could stand it. Bion deduced and described how early infantile emotional states, pleasurable as well as painful, are experienced concretely and as such are not available for mental growth. Bion is fond of Keats' phrase "negative capability," using it to describe the breast's capacity for reverie, and the psycho-analyst's ability to promote mental growth without undue distortion.
