Bion emphasizes that he is not attempting to develop a new psychoanalytic theory. Instead, he focuses on a theory of psychoanalytic observation. In this work, Bion seeks to study the conditions of the various transformations of emotional experiences in both normal and pathological development. He does this in light of madness, which he sees as a misrepresentation of emotional experience, and includes this as a constant possibility within the spectrum of transformations that the analyst must observe. On the other hand, he draws on widely disparate fields of human creative potential developed over many centuries—such as painting, poetry, philosophy, geometric and algebraic mathematics, and mysticism—to illuminate his findings and thought processes in relation to the pleasure principle.