This book provides a clear, comprehensive, and sequential account of Bion's thinking, his life experience and technical innovations, saturated with quotes from his diaries and theoretical papers. It offers clinical vignettes to illuminate salient aspects of the therapeutic encounter.

Series Editors’ Foreword -- Editors’ Preface -- Personal, Historical -- Impressions of my analysis with Dr. Bion -- A long meeting with Bion -- Non-analytic influences on the psychoanalytic theorizing of Wilfred Bion -- W. R. Bion: his cultural, national, and historical background, and its impact on his thinking -- “I shall be blown to bits”: towards Bion’s theory of catastrophic trauma -- Previously Unpublished Supervisions -- Supervision A34 -- Commentary on supervision A34 -- Supervision D14 -- Commentary on supervision D14: a language for the job -- Supervision A42 -- Commentary on supervision A42 -- Clinical/Theoretical: One -- Turbulence and growth: an encounter between Ismalia and Isaura -- Mental states and emotional relations in the analytic setting: implications for therapeutic work -- The function of evocation in the working-through of the countertransference: projective identification, reverie, and the expressive function of the mind—Reflections inspired by Bion’s work -- The truth object: growing the god within -- Making contact with psychotic and autistic phenomena: container/contained and autistic transformations -- Clinical/Theoretical: Two -- Changes in technique and in the theory of technique in a post-Bion field model -- Containing systems in the analytic field -- The hat on top of the volcano: Bion’s ‘O’ and the body-mind relationship -- Bridging the gap: from soma-psychosis to psychosomatics -- A Note and a Short Story -- Flying thoughts in search of a nest: a tribute to W. R. Bion -- A Clinical Exchange -- A silent war: dreading recovery -- Dreaming into being -- St. Sulpice -- Sense, Myth, and Passion -- Sense, sensible, sense-able: the bodily but immaterial dimension of psychoanalytic elements -- Myth, dream, and meaning: reflections on a comment by Bion -- Passion -- Late Papers and Basic Concepts -- “Notes on memory and desire”: implications for working through -- On Bion’s text “Emotional turbulence”: a focus on experience and the unknown -- On “Making the best of a bad job” -- Reflections on “Caesura” (1977) -- Evidence -- Is the concept of O necessary for psychoanalysis? -- Groups -- Affect, reverie, mourning, and Bion’s theory of groups in our time -- Containing primitive emotional states: approaching Bion’s later perspectives on groups -- Bion and the large group -- The influence of Bion on my research -- Aesthetics -- Using art for the understanding of psychoanalysis and using Bion for the understanding of contemporary art -- The buried harbor of dreaming: psychoanalysis and literature—towards a Bionian, non-archaeological approach -- Communicating pictures: aesthetic aspects as a developmental tool for the container-contained interaction