Taming Wild Thoughts brings together previously unpublished works from two different periods of Bion's life which are linked, as Parthenope Bion Talamo says in her introduction, by the concept of classifying and conceptualizing thought. The first paper, "The Grid", dates from 1963 and is a discussion of great clarity about one of Bion's most widely-used conceptual tools; it predates his more discursive paper of the same title (published in Two Papers) by several years. As a teaching paper on this topic, this version of "The Grid" is without parallel, and will doubtless be of great value to all students of his work.The second part of the book consists of transcripts of two tape-recordings made by Bion in 1977. They were apparently intended to serve as the first chapters of a book that Bion never completed. They underline his interest in "wild" or "stray" thoughts; and they provide an insight into his extraordinary sensibility at the time of A Memoir of the Future.
