Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

James S. Grotstein, M.D. was Professor of Psychiatry, U.C.L.A School of Medicine, and a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and at The Psychoanalytic Centre of California. He was a member of the editorial board of the 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis' and was past North American Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He published over 250 papers and was the author or editor/co-editor of numerous books.

Wilfred R. Bion has taken his place as one of the foremost psychoanalysts of our time, yet it is only within recent years that the impact of his achievements are being felt. His death has stilled his pen and voice but demands a restatement of his view by those who have been most influenced by him. Bion's greatness lay, not only in the odd vertices of his incredible observations, but in the resources of his epistemological vastness, his respect for truth obtained in the disciplined absence of memory and desire, and his paying such scrupulous attention to and interpreting of recombinant constructions he achieved with mental elements their functions, and their transformations. His was the Language of Achievement, which is the tongue begotten by patience. Of note is his introduction of Plato's theory of forms and Kant's categories into psychoanalytic metapsychology, to sat nothing of his mathematical, group and religious theories.The contributors to this memorial all knew him either as analysands, supervisees, or colleagues. Virtually all of the psychoanalysts-analysands of Melanie Klein are represented as well, bearing testimony to his importance as a pathfinder for post-Kleinian thinking, to say nothing of post-Freudian. Their contributions can be thought of as prisms which refract Bion's profound but often recondite Language of Achievement into the differentiated color spectrum of sensible meaning for clinical reflection and practice.Contributors include: Ignacio Matte Blanco, Robert H. Gosling, Andre Green, Leon Grinberg, James Grotstein, Martha Harris, Betty Joseph, Sydney Klein, Robert Langs, Isabel Menzies Lyth, Donald Meltzer, Roger Money-Kyrle, Michael Paul, Frank Philips, Herbert Rosenfeld, Richard J. Rosenthal, Hanna Segal and Frances Tustin.

• The Grid , Wilfred R. Bion: the Man, the Psychoanalyst, The Mystic. A Perspective on His Life and Work , A Personal Reminiscence: Bion, Evidence of the Man , Clinical Contributions , On the Analyst’s “Sleep” During the Psychoanalytic Session , To Practice One’s Art , Bion and Babies , Toward the Experiencing of Psychic Pain , Autistic Phenomena in Neurotic Patients , Using Bion’s Grid as a Laboratory Instrument: A Demonstration , The Suffocating Super-Ego: Psychotic Break and Claustrophobia , On the Psychopathology and Treatment of Psychotic Patients (Historical and Comparative Reflections) , Psychological Birth and Psychological Catastrophe , Raskolnikov’s Transgression and the Confusion Between Destructiveness and Creativity , Theoretical Contributions , New Theories: Their Influence and Effect on Psychoanalytic Technique , Psycho-Semiotic Structures: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Relationship Between Psychoanalysis and the Semiotic of C.S. Peirce , Negation and Contradiction , The “Oedipus” as a Resistance Against the “Oedipus” in Psychoanalytical Practice , Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream and Who is the Dreamer Who Understands It? , The Aims of Psycho-Analytic Treatment , Philosophical Issues in Bion’s Thought , Some Communicative Properties of the Bipersonal Field , Reflecting With Bion , A Note on Bion’s Concept “Reversal of Alpha-Function” , Cognitive Development , A Mental Atlas of the Process of Psychological Birth , The Development of the Analysands’ and Analysts’ Enthusiasm for the Process of Psychoanalysis , The Function of Dreams , Notes on the Desire for Knowledge , Metapsychology After Forty Years , Contributions on Groups , Contributions on Groups , A Study of Very Small Groups , The Individual in the Group: On Learning to Work with the Psychoanalytic Method , Bion’s Contribution to Thinking About Groups , The Influence of Wilfred Bion on the A.K. Rice Group Relations Conferences , Publications by Wilfred R. Bion