Explorations in Bion's 'O'


Book Description

Wilfred Bion described "O" as "the unknowable and the unreachable ultimate truth". In this fascinating collection, a range of authors offer their own theoretical, clinical and artistic approaches to exploring this enduring but mysterious idea. Drawn from contributions from the 8th International Bion Conference in 2014, the book examines how "O" can be experienced in all aspects of internal and external reality and within all relationships, from an individual relating to the mother to their emotional relationship with their self. It features insights into "O" drawn from the area of faith as well as its manifestations in clinical practice, while also included is a chapter exploring the links between Bion’s ideas and those of Winnicott, Lacan, Green and Freud. Featuring contributions from some of the world’s leading Bion scholars, this will be essential reading for any psychoanalyst interested in exploring the concept of "O", as well as scholars in philosophy and theology.




Maps for Psychoanalytic Exploration


Book Description

Maps for Psychoanalytic Exploration brings together the author's main works, until now published only in Italian. They are made available to a wider readership in this volume through a translation into English by Shaun Whiteside, supported by the generosity of the members of the Melanie Klein Trust. In these chapters the author explores important implications of her father's ideas at different levels of psychic and social organisation. Her writing is very clear and, as Dr Anna Bauzzi, the Editor of the Italian edition, writes in her Introduction, the quality of it makes many of Bion's ideas more accessible, without any reduction of their complexity.




The Analyst's Reveries


Book Description

While the use of the analyst’s own reveries in work with patients has increased in recent times, there has been little critical inquiry into its value, and the problems it may lead to. The Analyst's Reveries finds increasing veneration for the analyst’s use of their reveries, while revealing important differences amongst post-Bionians in how reverie is defined and used clinically. Fred Busch ponders if it has been fully recognized that some post-Bionions suggest a new, radical paradigm for what is curative in psychoanalysis. After searching for the roots of the analyst’s use of reverie in Bion’s work and questioning whether in this regard Bion was a Bionian, Busch carefully examines the work of some post-Bionians and finds both convincing ways to think about the usefulness and limitations of the analyst’s use of reverie. He explores questions including: From what part of the mind does a reverie emerge? How does its provenance inform its transformative possibilities? Do we over-generalize in conceptualizing what is unrepresented, with the corresponding problem of false positives? Do dreams equal understanding and what about the generalizability of the co-created reverie? Busch concludes that it is primarily through the analyst’s own associations that the reverie’s potential is revealed, which further helps the analyst distinguish it from many other possibilities, including the analyst’s countertransference. He believes in the importance of converting reveries into verbal interpretations, a controversial point amongst post-Bionians. Busch ends with the difficult task of classifying the analyst’s reveries based on their degree of representation. The Analyst's Reveries will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.




Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life


Book Description

Drawing on the influential contributions of Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer to psychoanalysis, Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life explores and addresses the clinical implications of their work, both through revisiting several of their conceptions and illustrating them with detailed clinical material from the analyses of children, adolescents, and adults. Psychoanalysis strives towards truth; this is its essence. However, emotional truth is often unknowable and not amenable to verbal communication. This ineffable mental realm is at the heart of both Bion and Meltzer's psychoanalytic endeavours. Bion's writings reflect a developmental stage in the evolution of psychoanalysis, extending clinical work to mental realms that were seemingly unreachable. Donald Meltzer further infuses Bion's thinking with his own original notions of beauty and aesthetics, imbuing Bion's profound thinking with a poetic and lyrical tenor. Writing in a clear and lucid manner, Avner Bergstein integrates Bion's sometimes highly theoretical thinking with everyday clinical practice, facilitating his dense and condensed formulations and making them clinically accessible and useful. Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life is written for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists who are attracted to Bion and Meltzer's radical thinking.




A Psychoanalytic and Socio-Cultural Exploration of a Continent


Book Description

This important book gathers a set of influential international contributors with psychoanalytic and group analytic knowledge to provide a wide-ranging critical analysis of the present state of Europe. Europe is facing huge challenges: waves of immigrants are reshaping its identity and testing its tolerance; Brexit is a destabilizing factor and its outcomes are not yet clear; economic crises continue to threaten; the resurgence of nationalism is threatening an open-borders one-continent ideology. This book tackles some of these challenges. Divided into two parts, the first analyses the current social, political, cultural and economic trends in Europe using psychoanalytic and group analytic concepts, while the second concentrates on existing applications of psychoanalytic and group analytic concepts to help manage national and international change in individual countries as well as on the continent as a whole, including groups for German, Ukrainian and Russian participants; groups organised in Serbia in order to overcome the recent, traumatic past; and the "Sandwich model", developed to enhance communication in situations of conflict, trauma and blocked communication. When we feel threatened, we cling to our in-group and its members. We want to think the same and be the same as our neighbors, but this group illusion of homogeneity conceals the fact that we are different. While homogeneity offers stability, it is diversity that offers freedom. This book will be of great interest to researchers on the present state of Europe from across a range of different disciplines, from psychoanalysis to politics, sociology, economics and international relations.




The Bion Seminars at the A-Santamaría Association


Book Description

The Bion Seminars at the A-Santamaria Association offers readers insightful analyses and commentaries on Bion’s key papers and books, as well as providing a unique set of discussions and explorations of many of Bion’s central concepts and foundational texts. This diverse collection of essays brings together contributions from internationally renowned Bionian scholars and analysts, including Annie Reiner, Nicola Abel-Hirsch, Antònia Grimalt, Avner Bergstein, Afsaneh Kiany Alisobhani, João Carlos Braga, Tom Helscher, Tim Smith and Peter Goldberg. Readers will encounter expansions and extensions of contemporary and timeless themes and discover the originality with which psychoanalysts from different geographical regions take ownership of the ideas discussed. Chapters cover the early and late work of Bion, spanning topics such as arrogance, the theory of thinking, memory and desire, and the clinical importance of frustration. The authors reveal to us the elements of continuity and discontinuity in Bion's work, sharing open conjectures to allow new developments to evolve. This volume is essential reading for practicing psychoanalysts, analysts-in-training, analytic psychotherapists, and anyone interested in exploring Bion's work.




Building on Bion: Roots


Book Description

Two volumes of original papers by leading thinkers and practitioners of group therapy... The diverse collection that has informed and stimulated my thinking.' - International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 'The concepts that I liked were about the truth, the unknowable and unknown, and the functions he devised to communicate what is going on in the patients' world to other psychoanalyst. I am glad that I read these books with their wide range of ideas and I have gained insights which will make me more aware in my psychodrama practice.' - British Journal of Psychodrama. 'The book begins with a wonderful introduction by James Grotstien, a theorist whose grasp of Bion is enriched by his own formidable ideas. He sets the stage for what's to follow, toucing on Bion's groundbreaking work with groups, his formalizing of psychotic experience and several key concepts, like Bion's elaboration on the concept of projective identification. Grotstien's prose is remarkable. He conveys ideas about the most complex internal states with a clarity and reach that is unparalled, even by Bion himself. This is without a doubt a richly rewarding and ultimately exhausting text.' - www.mentalhelp.net This stimulating collection of papers by distinguished international contributors from the fields of psychoanalysis, group analysis, management consultancy and social science explores formative influences affecting Bion's emotional and intellectual development. The authors revisit in depth the origins of Bion's ideas, setting them in the context of his World War I experiences, his contact with Trotter, and his later work with the Tavistock Clinic and psychoanalysis. Chapters discuss the roots of his epistemology, re-examining and extending basic assumption theory; links between Bion and Foulkes; group mentality and Bion in Italy. Through these the spirit and shape of his work can be discovered by those new to Bion, and rediscovered by those who feel well acquainted with him. This is a collection of original and insightful papers which, along with its companion volume Building on Bion: Branches, will not only deepen understanding of Bion's contributions to theory and practice, but will also be invaluable to those who work with groups, in both therapeutic and management contexts.




Eigen in Seoul Volume Three


Book Description

Between 2007 and 2011, Michael Eigen gave three seminars in Seoul, each running over three days and covering different aspects of psychoanalysis, spirituality and the human psyche. This book is based on a transcription of the third seminar, which took place in 2011, on the subject of Pain and Beauty. The first two were published as Madness and Murder (2010) and Faith and Transformation (2011). A conjunction of the pain that shatters and beauty that heals is made by many authors, including Bion, Winnicott, Milner, Meltzer, Perls, Ehrenzweig, Matte-Blanco, Schneur Zalman, Chuang-Tzu, Buber, Castaneda, and Levinas. These and others are used as windows of the psyche, adding to possibilities of experience and opening dimensions that bring us life. Eigen explores challenges of the human psyche, what we are up against and the resources difficulties can stimulate. This work spans many dimensions of human experience with interplay, fusions and oppositions of pain, beauty, terror, and wonder, and makes use of poetic and philosophical expressions of experience. It will be vital reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.




A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Contemporary Search for Pleasure


Book Description

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the malaise of the contemporary individual by returning the economic point of view of Freudian thinking, the concept of satisfaction, libido, and pleasure–unpleasure principle to their rightful place as the motivating forces of human existence. For Freud, pleasure stands apart from other human experiences, side by side with unpleasure, always a bonus in the search for satisfaction of the pleasure principle and beyond. Along with libido, emotional fulfillment, and the capacities for sublimation and play, pleasure has not been given enough attention in the psychoanalytic literature. The editors of this book address this lack and highlight the importance of examining today’s social and individual malaise through these specific lenses of inquiry. It is particularly timely and important today to address this lack, and thereby examine the impact of the social phenomena of the pandemic, the crises of ideals and virtuality on the subject who feels in a state of constant emergency, overwhelmed, addicted, and delibidinalized. With contributions from across psychoanalysis, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts in training and in practice who want to understand how the modern world has shaped our understanding of pleasure.




Bion in the Consulting Room


Book Description

Bion in the Consulting Room addresses the long-unanswered question of Bion’s clinical and supervisorial technique and examines the way Bion’s conceptual model and clinical practices informed his theoretical work. As Bion wrote about technique so rarely, the authors set about looking at many of his clinical and supervisorial examples to infer what might be learned from them. This book factors in the four distinctive periods of Bion's clinical and supervisorial work in chronological order: the group period of the 1940s; the period of the psychosis papers in the 1950s; the epistemological period of the early 1960s; and, finally, the period of his international group seminars in the late 1960s and 1970s. In all four periods, the authors examine and analyze his method of clinical inquiry, or how he went about knowing and experiencing his analysands and supervisees. The authors offer a uniquely overarching view of his method of clinical inquiry, uncovering an amazing consistency in how Bion went about his work both as a psychoanalyst and supervisor. This illuminating book is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychologists interested in the work of Wilfred Bion and the importance of his legacy in contemporary practice.