Bion S Sources

This book traces where Bion's ideas came from, what he required of them, how he used his context and how that has fertilised psychoanalysis.

Bion, Intuition and the Expansion of Psychoanalytic Theory illuminates how Bion’s work on intuition has changed the landscape of contemporary psychoanalysis through his understanding of its supra-scientific and non-sub-scientific condition. Based on the work of the biannual Bion conference, this book includes contributions from the most eminent voices on Bion’s work. The global cohort of contributors in this volume examine topics such as dream work, the Infinite Unconscious, the Spectral model of the mind, the realm of the minus and observation and intuition. Each chapter explores different elements arising from Bion’s insistence on learning from experience and establishing the difference between knowing and becoming as an experiential process of the mind as a container in relation to its contents of sensations, feelings, dreams and thoughts. This book will be of key interest to analysts and analytic therapists of all schools and is an essential resource for those that follow the work of Bion.

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.

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.

"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 ... . "--

This book examines the importance and continued relevance of A Memoir of the Future in understanding and applying Bion’s work to contemporary psychoanalysis. Bion continued to innovate throughout his life, but the Memoir has been largely overlooked. Focusing on A Memoir of the Future is not only of deep interest in terms of the author’s biography, or even only in function of a better understanding of his theoretical concepts, but can also be considered, for all intents and purposes, the final chapter of an ingenious creative enterprise While by some it was thought as the evidence of Bion’s presumed senility, this book challenges that perspective, arguing that it represents the last challenge he issued to the psychoanalytic Establishment. In each chapter, the authors explore this notion that A Memoir forms an essential part of Bion’s theory, and that in it he establishes a new ‘aesthetic’ psychoanalytic paradigm. With an international list of distinguished authors, this is a key book for any analysts interested in a comprehensive understanding of Bion’s work.

Embryogenesis is an unusual book in that it brings together a highly illustrated, practical embryology book in simple language, perfect for health practitioners, with a fascinating read on the history and philosophy of biological science. It discusses the various stages of embryonic development (meiosis, fertilization, blastula development, and gastrulation, and then the embryology of each of the human organs and organ systems in detail). It puts each of them in context, both in terms of its phylogeny: the evolutionary trajectory of cell-organized systems on Earth, and its ontogeny: the formation of individual organisms in the modern world. There are 24 color plates, many of them commissioned uniquely for this volume, and several hundred black and white illustrations. The book is 950 pages hardcover, 8-1/2 by 10.Chapters include: The Original Earth; The Materials of Life; The First Beings; The Cell; The Genetic Code; Sperm and Egg; Fertilization; The Blastula; Gastrulation; Morphogenesis; Biological Fields; Chaos, Fractals, and Deep Structure; Ontogeny and Phylogeny; and Biotechnology. The Origin of the Nervous System; The Evolution of Intelligence; Neurulation and the Human Brain; Organogenesis; The Musculoskeletal and Hematopoietic Systems; Mind; The Origin of Sexuality and Gender. Healing; Transsexuality, Intersexuality, and the Cultural Basis of Gender; Self and Desire; Cosmogenesis and Mortality

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.