Bion and the apes: The bridging problem of A Memoir of the Future

In Learning from Experience and ‘Theory of Thinking,’ Wilfred Bion’s conception of thinking is similar in several ways to Coetzee’s conception of thinking. For both J. M. Coetzee and Bion, thinking can develop only when one is placed into a situation that one experiences as a problem, when one knows one is supposed to think, and when one knows that the world has been arranged to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking. Bion seems to believe that, in psychological epistemology, an ability to tolerate frustration leads to the development of an apparatus for thinking and that, transferred into the aesthetic realm, the same will occur. In 1912, at the behest of the neurophysicist Max Rothman, the Prussian Academy of Sciences agreed to establish there the Anthropoid Station for the study of the thinking capacity of apes.