Courage of Simplicity

Hanni Biran, MA, is a clinical psychologist, a trainee psychoanalyst and lecturer and supervisor at Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, where she is a member of the committee for social involvement of the Institute. A group analyst, she is also a lecturer at The Israeli Institute of Group Analysis and supervises many teams and staff members in public clinics and hospitals involved in group psychotherapy. She has also been trained according to the group relations tradition of Tavistock Institute, and conducts small and large groups and role analysis workshops in Israel and abroad. She is a lecturer in the program for psychotherapy at Tel Aviv University and in the program for psychotherapy at Magid Institute, The Hebrew University.

'What a lovely, probing book Hanni Biran has written, at once gentle, strong, warm and clear, touching individual, group and cultural processes important for the quality of life today. It contributes to our thinking and feeling about who we are and what we do and can do with ourselves.'- Michael Eigen, PhD, author of Contact with the Depths, The Sensitive Self and Faith'This is a rather special book. In an admirably evocative way, it balances the key Bionian ideas on one hand, with a wide range of Biran's own personal experiences - experiences in her own biography, and in her range of academic and professional reading. So, this book mixes an exposition of Bion from the primary sources, with an interwoven pattern of the author's own thinking, interpretation and almost love for her chosen subject. It is a straightforward confrontation between the essential ideas, as Biran calls them, against a backdrop of social instability which betrays in all details the disturbances that the professional sections calmly dissect, in terms of social forces, unknown to the individuals, and the unconscious of those individuals, also unknown to them. I can't think of a better place to situate oneself to read and understand Wilfred Bion.'- Professor R.D. Hinshelwood, University of Essex, author of Bion's Sources: The Shaping of his Paradigms'The scope of this book speaks to the strength of Hanni Biran's scholarship and the generosity of her spirit, showing clearly the depth of her command of the ideas and work of Bion and the power of both in the contextual and clinical applications of her own professional practice. She credits equally her learning from the patients with whom she has worked and accords them a public parity of respect. With beautiful prose, Biran goes further, offering the reader the line of her own life where these ideas, her practice, her dearly held values and political courage weave together to make her the exceptional colleague we know. This is an exciting and excellent contribution to us all.'- Dame Ruth Silver, Chair of the Learning and Skills Improvement Service, and founding President of the Further Education Trust for Leadership

• Series Editor’s Foreword , Introduction , Integrative Concepts , The concepts of the container and contained in Bion’s thought , The selected fact , The caesura , Person , How thoughts are born in light of Bionian theory , Looking at the myth of Oedipus following Bion , Group , An introduction to Bion’s contribution to group dynamics , Myths, memories, and roles: how they live again in the group process , Bion’s links: how they are manifested in the Foulkesian matrix , The “untouchable”: racism and prejudice in the analytic group , Society , The difficulty of channelling rage into dialogue , From possessing to belonging , The social unconscious and its manifestation in the analytic group , A boy is torn between two realities: looking at his biography in the light of the social unconscious , The unconscious emergence of identity , Epilogue