Bion Today explores how Bion’s work is used in contemporary settings; how his ideas have been applied at the level of the individual, the group and the organisation; and which phenomena have been made more comprehensible through the lenses of his concepts. The book introduces distinctive psychoanalytic contributions to show the ways in which distinguished analysts have explored and developed the ideas of Wilfred Bion. Drawing on the contributors’ experience of using Bion’s ideas in clinical work, topics include: an introduction to Bion clarification of the inter-related concepts of countertransference and enactment concepts integrating group and individual phenomena clinical implications of Bion’s thought Bion’s approach to psychoanalysis. Bion Today will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and all those who are interested in learning more about Bion’s thinking and his work.

Wilfred R. Bion is considered a ground-breaking psychoanalyst. His thinking is rooted in Freud and Klein from where it takes an original flight. Reading Bion shows the evolution of his seminal insights in psychic functioning and puts them in a wider context. Rudi Vermote integrates a chronological close reading and discussion of Bion’s texts, with a comprehensive approach of his major concepts. The book is divided in two main parts: Transformation in Knowledge: Bion’s odyssey to understand psychic processing or the mind Transformation in O: in which Bion reinterprets his former concepts from the dimension of the unknown and unknowable The running text is put against a background of biographical data and scientific, artistic and philosophical influences on his work, which are highlighted in boxes and separate chapters. Bion’s concepts are important for anyone dealing with the mind. His ideas have an ongoing deep impact on psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychopathology. His concepts help to understand psychic change, creativity, individual psychodynamics and small and large-group phenomena. The discovery of their value for studies on art, literature, sociology, religion, economics has just begun. Reading Bion starts from the very beginning so that it is instructive for people who are new to his work, but the close reading and background information make it a meaningful companion for experienced psychoanalysts and psychotherapists studying his work.

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.

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.

This book is a reminiscence of the first twenty-one years of the Wilfred R. Bion's life from 1897 to 1919: eight years of childhood in India, ten years at public school in England, and three years in the army.

In Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film, Carla Ambrósio Garcia introduces the rich potential of the thinking of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for film theory. By so doing, she rethinks the space of the cinema as a space of retreat, and brings new insights into the representation of retreat in film. Presented in two parts, the book seeks to deepen our understanding of the film experience and psychical growth. Part I places Bion’s view on the importance of the epistemophilic instinct at the heart of a critique of the pleasure-centred theories of the cinematic apparatus of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Gaylyn Studlar, proposing an idea of cinema as ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’. Garcia then moves from Bion’s epistemological period to his later work, which draws on mysticism, in order to posit an emotional experience in the cinema through which the subject can be or become real (or at one with ‘O’). Part II examines representations of retreat in four European films, directed by Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, and Manoel de Oliveira, showing them to articulate a gesture of retreat as an emotionally turbulent transitional stage in the development of the psyche – what Bion conceptualizes as caesura. Through its investigation of the retreat in cinema, the book challenges common understandings of retreat as a regressive movement by presenting it as a gesture and space that can also be future-oriented. Bion in Film Theory and Analysis will be of significant interest to academics and students of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and film and media studies, as well as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

This book contains state of the art studies in Bion scholarship that are directly applicable to clinical and theoretical thinking.

This book is one of a short series on the teaching of post-Kleinian psychoanalysis, with a companion volume on Teaching Meltzer.

The discovery, translation into English, and publication of these previously unpublished recordings of Bion's clinical supervisions in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with commentaries by leading Brazilian psychoanalysts, gives readers the opportunity to experience for themselves his clinical and theoretical thought as it emerges and evolves through a series of fascinating case discussions.

This book provides a clear, comprehensive, and sequential account of Bion's thinking, his life experience and technical innovations, saturated with quotes from his diaries and theoretical papers. It offers clinical vignettes to illuminate salient aspects of the therapeutic encounter.