A Beam of Intense Darkness

Wilfred Bion's Legacy to Psychoanalysis

James Grotstein, James S. Grotstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367105679
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429910203
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and Sources of Information
• About the Author
• Prelude and prologue
• 1 An introduction
• 2 What kind of analyst was Bion?
• 3 What kind of person was Bion?
• 4 Bion’s vision
• 5 Bion’s legacy
• 6 Bion’s metatheory
• 7 Bion on technique
• 8 Clinical vignette encompassing Bion’s technical ideas
• 9 Bion, the mathematician, the mystic, the psychoanalyst
• 10 The “Language of Achievement”
• 11 Bion’s discovery of O
• 12 The concept of the “transcendent position”
• 13 The quest for the truth, Part A: the “truth drive” as the hidden order of Bion’s metatheory for psychoanalysis
• 14 The quest for the truth, Part B: curiosity about the truth as the “seventh servant”
• 15 Lies, “lies”, and falsehoods
• 16 The container and the contained
• 17 “Projective transidentification”: an extension of the concept of projective identification
• 18 Bion’s work with groups
• 19 Bion’s studies in psychosis
• 20 Transformations
• 21 Psychoanalytic functions and elements
• 22 Points, lines, and circles
• 23 The Grid
• 24 Fetal mental life and its caesura with postnatal mental life
• 25 What does it mean to dream? Bion’s theory of dreaming
• 26 Dreaming, phantasying, and the “truth instinct”
• 27 “Become”
• 28 P-S ↔ D
• 29 L, H, and K and passion
• 30 Faith
• 31 Bion’s discovery of zero (“no-thing”)
• Epilogue
• W. R. Bion Bibliography
• References and Bibliography
• Index