There are an increasing number of publications concerned with the work of Wilfred Bion (1897-1979). Many have sought new ideas from his writing however, little attention has been paid to the intellectual context in which Bion wrote. Bion’s Sources traces where Bion’s new ideas came from, what job he required of them, how successfully he used his context and how that has fertilised psychoanalysis. Expert contributors provide chapters on areas of the intellectual context separate from or adjacent to clinical psychoanalysis in Britain which have clearly influenced the texts Bion left (those published in his life time, or subsequently). Chapters explore the influences deriving from Wilfred Trotter, Henri Bergson and process philosophy, Kurt Lewin and group dynamics, Immanuel Kant, R. B. Braithwaite and the philosophy of science, the mathematics of notation and transformation, as well as the work of psychoanalysts who have applied their theories to social science, psychosomatics, and literature and the humanities. By contextualising Bion in the wider culture of ideas, and removing him from the exclusive world of Psychoanalysis, Bion’s Sources aims to moderate his ‘genius’ by showing how it was shaped by very wide influences. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, clinicians and those interested in the history of psychoanalytic ideas.

"Ennius' Annales was one of the most important hexameter epics written before Vergil's Aeneid, and perhaps the most influential Latin poem of any period. ... This book ... capitalizes on the fruits of ... Ennian studies in order to analyze the reception of Ennius' Annales in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. ... For the reader interested in Lucretius, this book offers a systematic analysis of the primary poetic model of the De Rerum Natura and so fills a long-standing and sizeable gap in our understanding of Lucretian poetics and his allusive program. For the reader interested in Ennius, this book offers, at best, an excavation of Lucretius' version of the Annales, a version that must have been foundational for many subsequent receptions of the Annales ... . "--

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the fourth volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were written between late autumn 1820 and late summer 1821. They include Adonais, Shelley’s lament on the death of John Keats, widely recognised as one of the finest elegies in English poetry, as well as Epipsychidion, a poem inspired by his relationship with the nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’), the object of an intense but temporary fascination for Shelley. The poems of this period show the extent both of Shelley’s engagement with Keats’s volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) — a copy of which he first read in October 1820 — and of his interest in Italian history, culture and politics. Shelley’s translations of some of his own poems into Italian and his original compositions in the language are also included here. In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.

This book explores developments in psychoanalytic field theory internationally, and their relevance for therapeutic theory and practice. The roots of psychoanalytic field theory can be traced back to the work of Kurt Lewin, and it has taken particular shape in the hands of the Barangers, Bion and Ferro. The book's focus is on developments in field theory post-Bion ('Post-Bionian Field Theory') in Italy, with contributions from Brazil, Serbia and the USA, in the form of chapters by Boffito, Civitarese, Fagundes, Levine, Mazzacane, Mojović, Morgan-Jones and Snell and Penna and Hopper. Among the themes the book explores are the transformative potentials of play and the centrality of dreaming. The book is informed by a psychoanalysis not so much of decoding and archeological uncovering as one of being and becoming, within a shared ‘field’ in which therapist and patient are partners in creating, exploring and developing. The chapter by Mojovíc and the commentary by Penna and Hopper extend the use of field theory: in other historical and geographical developments field theory and group analysis have productively been brought together, notably in Argentina where the two are most closely linked. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Psychology and Psychotherapy interested in field theory and contemporary psychoanalysis. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling.

Plutarch was one of the most popular classical authors in Renaissance England. These volumes present nine Tudor and Stuart translations from his Essays and Lives with a General Introduction locating these works in the context of Plutarch’s wider influence in early modern England. They offer selections from two of the classics of English Renaissance translation, North’s Lives (1579) and Holland’s Morals (1603): the essays ‘On Reading the Poets’ and ‘Talkativeness’ and the Lives of Demosthenes and Cicero and Caesar. They also include editions of a number of less well-known but equally significant translations of individual Essays and Lives, one available in manuscript alone until now and several not reprinted since the sixteenth century: Thomas Wyatt’s The Quiet of Mind (1528), Thomas Elyot’s The Education or Bringing up of Children (1528–30), Thomas Blundeville’s The Learned Prince (1561), and Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s The Story of Paullus Aemilius (1542–46/7). Detailed annotations trace how translators drew on, and departed from, Greek, Latin, and French editions of Plutarch while introductions to each of the works examine their impact on English Renaissance literature and culture. By presenting a wide range of translations from the Essays and Lives, the volumes bring to light the variety of translation practices and the different social, political, and cultural contexts in which Plutarch was read and translated in Tudor and Stuart England.

Psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies, prophet of the sexual revolution—all fitting titles, but Wilhelm Reich has never been recognized as a serious laboratory scientist, despite his experimentation with bioelectricity and unicellular organisms. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist is an eye-opening reappraisal of one of twentieth-century science’s most controversial figures—perhaps the only writer whose scientific works were burned by both the Nazis and the U.S. government. Refuting allegations of “pseudoscience” that have long dogged Reich’s research, James Strick argues that Reich’s lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography and deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate scientific contributions. Trained in medicine and a student of Sigmund Freud, Reich took to the laboratory to determine if Freud’s concept of libido was quantitatively measurable. His electrophysiological experiments led to his “discovery” of microscopic vesicles (he called them “bions”), which Reich hypothesized were instrumental in originating life from nonliving matter. Studying Reich’s laboratory notes from recently opened archives, Strick presents a detailed account of the bion experiments, tracing how Reich eventually concluded he had discovered an unknown type of biological radiation he called “orgone.” The bion experiments were foundational to Reich’s theory of cancer and later investigations of orgone energy. Reich’s experimental findings and interpretations were considered discredited, but not because of shoddy lab technique, as has often been claimed. Scientific opposition to Reich’s experiments, Strick contends, grew out of resistance to his unorthodox sexual theories and his Marxist political leanings.

Bion's life spanned key events in the twentieth century. Born in India in 1897, he came to boarding school in England aged 8 and at 18 fought in the tanks in World War One. He trained as a doctor between the wars and, in his World War Two work for the army, he was an innovator. After the war, he became a patient of Melanie Klein, qualified as a psychoanalyst, and was part of an extraordinary period in psychoanalysis of work with psychotic mechanisms in patients. In the late 1950s, he identified the configuration container/contained as being at the heart of human development. He looked outside of psychoanalysis to philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, and even theo-mystical thinkers. His work evolved radically throughout the 1960s and, at age 70 when many would be thinking of slowing down, he emigrated to California and began to travel internationally, giving lectures and supervisions across three continents. After Freud, Bion appears to be the most quoted psychoanalyst of our time and this book provides the opportunity, even for those familiar with his work, to gain insight into its sheer breadth, showcased so brilliantly in this slim volume. As author of Bion: 365 Quotes, Nicola Abel-Hirsch's immersion in Bion's vast oeuvre has enabled a comprehensive introduction to Bion and his work. Her lightness of touch, whilst retaining the necessary depth, makes it a joy to read. Bion and his work can be somewhat enigmatic but Abel-Hirsch's understanding offers the ideal introduction to the man and his work.