Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works

Author: Gerard Bleandonu
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635421306
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
Wilfred Bion was one of the most original and influential thinkers in recent psychoanalysis. His ideas, which can be traced in direct line in the development of psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Melanie Klein, are difficult to grasp because his writing style was often enigmatic and ambiguous. This is the first full biography and the first comprehensive explication of his significant contribution to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Dr. Bleandonu takes us through Bion's personal and intellectual explorations and gives clear accounts of his key concepts, including work groups and basic assumption groups, psychotic processes, catastrophic change, abandonment of memory and desire, the mystic, and ultimate truth. In addition, the grid is carefully laid out and explicated; the emergence of the idea of links, and attacks on them, as a core theme for the rest of Bion's working life is given proper attention; and Bion's attempt to creat an extensive psychoanalytic epistemology is discusses. Finally Bleandonu guides the reader through the fantasy writings in Memoir of the Future, the masterpiece that is Bion's autobiography, and his final writings, including the posthumous Cogitations. Significant reading for anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and the development of psychoanalytic thought, this volume will be valued by professionals and students alike.

Learning From Experience

Author: Wilfred R Bion
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000955451
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
Wilfred R. Bion was one of the foremost psychoanalysts of his generation, whose work has shaped and enriched psychoanalysis and psychotherapy indelibly. Renowned for some highly original and sometimes cryptic ideas, such as the alpha function and theory of the grid, Learning from Experience is arguably his most important and enduring work. Bion brings knowledge into the psychoanalytic spotlight. What forces, he asks, interfere with knowledge? Crucially, Bion doesn't mean knowing only facts, but the lifelong process of understanding and coming to know things that is a consequence of the development of knowledge. However, Learning From Experience is perhaps best-known for its emphasis on the way emotion and knowledge are interwoven. Bion links the emotional capacity to develop and know to the capacity to tolerate frustration: if we can hold ourselves in check whilst we endure frustration, then we can come to know things. A remarkable and brilliant work by a fascinating psychoanalyst and thinker, Learning From Experience continues to inspire psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Robert Hinshelwood.

A Beam of Intense Darkness

Author: James Grotstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429910207
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
The author surveys Bion's publications and elaborates on his key contributions in depth while also critiquing them. The scope of this work is to synopsize, synthesize, and extend Bion's works in a reader-friendly manner. The book presents his legacy - his most important ideas for psychoanalysis. These ideas need to be known by the mental health profession at large. This work highlights and defines the broader and deeper implications of his works.It presents his ideas faithfully and also uses his ideas as "launching pads" for the author's conjectures about where his ideas point.

Wilfred Bion, Thinking, and Emotional Experience with Moving Images

Author: Kelli Fuery
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429956029
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Wilfred Bion’s theories of dreaming, of the analytic situation, of reality and everyday life, and even of the contact between the body and the mind offer very different, and highly fruitful, perspectives on lived experience. Yet very little of his work has entered the field of visual culture, especially film and media studies. Kelli Fuery offers an engaging overview of Bion’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis- his theory of thinking- and demonstrates its relevance for why we watch moving images. Bion’s theory of thinking is presented as an alternative model for the examination of how we experience moving images and how they work as tools which we use to help us ‘think’ emotional experience. ‘Being Embedded’ is a term used to identify and acknowledge the link between thinking and emotional experience within the lived reception of cinema. It is a concept that everyone can speak to as already knowing, already having felt it - being embedded is at the core of lived and thinking experience. This book offers a return to psychoanalytic theory within moving image studies, contributing to the recent works that have explored object relations psychoanalysis within visual culture (specifically the writings of Klein and Winnicott), but differs in its reference and examination of previously overlooked, but highly pivotal, thinkers such as Bion, Bollas and Ogden. A theorization of thinking as an affective structure within moving image experience provides a fresh avenue for psychoanalytic theory within visual culture. Wilfred Bion, Thinking, and Emotional Experience with Moving Images will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars and students of film and media studies, cultural studies and cultural sociology and anthropology, visual culture, media theory, philosophy, and psychosocial studies.

Attention and Interpretation

Author: Wilfred R. Bion
Publisher: Jason Aronson
ISBN: 9781568217147
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Book Description
Considers the concept of the container and the contained.

Transformations

Author: Wilfred R. Bion
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429923236
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
Transformations continues the investigation of various aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice which the author commenced with Learning from Experience (1962) and pursued in Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963). In this third work published in 1965, the author examines the ways in which the analyst's description of the original analytic experience, mediated by theory, necessarily transforms it in the course of effecting an interpretation.

Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism

Author: Naomi Wynter-Vincent
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000439879
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces the work of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), and the immense potential of his ideas for thinking about literature, creative process, and creative writing. There is now renewed interest in Bion’s work following the publication of his Complete Works but the complexities of his theory and his distinctive style can be forbidding. Less well-known than Freud or Lacan, the work of Wilfred Bion nevertheless offers new insights for psychoanalytic literary criticism and creative writing. For newer readers of his work, this book offers an engaging introduction to several of Bion’s key ideas, including his theory of thinking (the ‘thought without a thinker’), the container/contained relationship, alpha-function; alpha-elements, beta-elements, and bizarre objects; K and -K; the Grid, O, and the caesura. It also offers a way in to Bion’s astonishing and challenging experimental work, A Memoir of the Future, and explores the impact of his devastating personal experiences as an officer during the First World War. Each chapter of Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism draws on one or more specific aspects of Bion’s theory in relation to creative texts by Sigmund Freud, Stevie Smith, B.S. Johnson, Mary Butts, Jean Rhys, Nicholas Royle, J.G. Ballard, and Wilfred Bion himself. The first full-length study to explore the potential of Bion’s ideas for literary criticism, Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces his complex and extensive work for a new audience in an accessible and engaging way, and will be of great interest to scholars of creative writing, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis.

Elements of Psychoanalysis

Author: Wilfred R. Bion
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429913133
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 105

Book Description
Elements is a discussion of categorising the ideational context and emotional experience that may occur in a psychoanalytic interview. The text aims to expand the reader's understanding of cognition and its clinical ramifications.

Cogitations

Author: Wilfred R. Bion
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429912110
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Cogitations, the last of the posthumous publications, is a collection of occasional writings representing Bion's attempts to clarify and evaluate both his own ideas and those of others by casting them in written form and frequently addressing them to an imaginary audience. Covering a period between February 1958 and April 1979, Cogitations delves into a wide range of material - psychoanalysis and science, mathematics and logic, literature and semantics. Some form a background to Bion's theoretical development, showing the doubts and arguments leading to the ideas expressed in his books, others highlighting and detailing some of the more abstract points in them, and some exploring topics destined for books that were to remain unwritten.

Clinical Seminars and Other Works

Author: Wilfred Bion
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042991198X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
This selection of clinical seminars held by Wilfred Bion in Brasilia (1975) and Sao Paulo (1978) is the nearest we shall ever get to experiencing his application of his theories and views to consulting-room practice. It is also likely to be the only printed record of this area of his work. As those who underwent analysis with Bion will testify, nothing can approach the experience of the thing itself, but, failing that, these seminars may help to fill the gap now that his voice can only be heard through his published writings and lectures.