Brazilian Lectures

These lectures, delivered in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro during 1973 and 1974, reveal Bion in his most vital and challenging mode both in respect of the material he presents, and in his responses to the questions from his audience.

The Complete Works of W. R. Bion is now available in a coherent and corrected format. Comprising sixteen volumes bound in green cloth, this edition has been brought together and edited by Chris Mawson with the assistance of Francesca Bion. Incorporating many corrections to previously published works, it also features previously unpublished papers. Including a general index and editorial introductions to all the works, these volumes will be a useful and valuable aid to psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians, and all those interested in studying and making use of Bion's thinking.Bion's writings, including the previously unpublished papers and additions to his Cogitations, collected together in the Complete Works, show that the clinical thrust of Bion's work has clear lines of continuity with that of Melanie Klein, just as her work has an essential continuity with the later work of Freud. In Bion's clinical work and supervision the goal remains insightful understanding of psychic reality through a disciplined experiencing of the transference and countertransference; the setting and the method - however much Bion's terminology might suggest otherwise - remains rigorously psychoanalytic.

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.

Among the subjects this volume touches on are adult psychopathology, psychoanalytic technique, developmental theory, the training of psychoanalysts, child and adolescent psychopathology, and the appraisal and application of the work of W. Bion and of R. Money-Kyrle. This is a good introduction to the author's work but it is those readers with clinical psychoanalytic experience and a working acquaintance with his neo-Kleinian contributions who will enjoy this book the most.

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.

In The Violence of Emotions the author marries an ability to introduce the reader to the intimate climate of an analytic session with a passionate rereading of Bion. To emphasize both the empirical nature of psychoanalysis and its extraordinary capacity to engender illuminating hypotheses concerning the functioning of the mind, clinical examples alternate with theoretical argument. The psychoanalytic model espoused by Giuseppe Civitarese in his approach to both is analytic field theory. Developed by various authors, including Ferro, commencing with Bion and continued with contributions from the Barangers, Grotstein and Ogden, the theory of the analytic field reveals the social nature of subjectivity and, in clinical work, the intersubjective and dreamlike climate in which a psychoanalytic session unfolds. This leads to a new way of interpreting the facts of analysis. As such, topics of discussion include: transcending the caesura as Bion’s theoretical method hypochondria as de-subjectivation and narrative genre in analysis the aesthetic conflict and alfa function Bion’s search for ambiguity the casting of characters in the analytic dialogue metaphor of text and translation in Freud and Bion. Yet the book has an even more specific objective, focusing attention as it does on the central importance of emotions in mental life and of aesthetic experience as the model of what truly happens in analysis. This is an aspect which the author rediscovers and explores in the thought of Bion and his successors, and which he regards as a way of investigating the deepest and most primitive levels of mental life. This book will be of great interest to psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists.

This book forms a comprehensive bibliography of the works of W. R. Bion, and the other works that made some bearing of his life and thought. With considerable renewed interest in Bion's contribution to various disciplines beyond the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic, this work will be of use to practitioners, researchers and students.