W.R. Bion

Franco Borgogno is full professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Turin and training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. He is author of several papers and books, including 'Psychoanalysis as a Journey', and lectures and supervises throughout Europe and Israel, as well as in North and South America. He is part of the Editorial Board of Italian and International psychoanalytic journals and IPA Chair of the 'Psychoanalysis and University' Committee. In 2010 Borgogno has received the Mary Sigourney Award. Parthenope Bion Talamo was the oldest child of W. R. Bion and a highly regarded analyst in her own right. After schooling in England she went to Italy to study, and later set up in private practice in Turin. She was a member of the Societa Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI) and of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). She translated many of her father's books and papers into Italian, and wrote extensively on her own theories and observations. She died in Italy in 1998.

"'How are we to become wise when so much emphasis is placed on cleverness, on building increasingly complex substitutes for thought? Where does wisdom come on a scale measuring success?' So writes Francesca Bion, when considering her husband's work. A fitting tribute to Bion would be a collection of papers containing passionate attempts at thinking, not substitutes for thought. In this book, concern with psychic life, far from being dead, reaches new places, takes deeper, more nuanced turns. Authors penetrate subtly into our lying ways and soundly appreciate the complexities of our hunger for truth and experience.'Borgogno and Merciai note that over half of Bion's writings were produced after the last of his more "formal" works. These authors are interested in taking the starch out of psychoanalysis and letting personal dimensions of experiencing speak. Green calls attention to a division in Bion between scientist and artist. He seems to favor the scientist's writings, especially aspects relevant for a theory of thinking. His work carries immense clinical power, clarifying ways thinking is destroyed, damaged, never born. Grotstein focuses on faith and transcendence, deeper ground of thinking. He pulls threads of tension of mystic and dead aspects of self. Other authors dream and reverie on their and their patients' lives, feelings, ideas. Some find ways of being formal and informal at the same time. Each tries to contact and midwife some way psychoanalysis is developing. We barely hang on to the tiger's tail, as it swings and hurls us. Some hold on longer than others. Wherever it hurls us, we look around, say what we see, make our way back to the swinging source - a little like a childhood game when we spin with a blindfold on and must find our way to someone. Bion's psychoanalytic O is the spinning top that knits this book together, moving this direction and that. His persistence, fortitude, and fervor are contagious. So is his fierce and kind determination that we seek our own voice, live a self worth living'.- Michael Eigen

• Foreword -- Introduction -- Random reflections on Bion: past, present, and future -- Laying low and saying (almost) nothing -- Considerations on some of W. R. Bion's ideas -- The sick syllogism: the fear of dying and the sacrifice of truth -- Searching for Bion: Cogitations, a new “Clinical Diary”? -- Whom was Bion addressing? “Negative capability” and “listening to listening” -- Sexuality as a narrative genre or dialect in the consulting-room: a radical vertex -- The primordial mind and the work of the negative -- Bion's “transformations in ‘O’” and the concept of the “transcendent position” -- Thinking aloud about technique -- A dreamlike vision -- The theoretical and clinical significance of the concept of "common sense" in Bion's work -- The fundamental role of the Grid in Bion's work -- What is thinking— an attempt at an integrated study of W. R. Bion's contributions to the processes of knowing -- The various faces of lies