Critical Companion to Bion

Charles Levin, PhD, (FIPA), is a training and supervising analyst in Montreal and a member of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis.

• 1. Introduction: Putting a Stick in It Part 1 Learning from Experience (1962) 2. Bion’s Intellectual ‘Gait’: An Overview 3. "Factor" and "Function" 4. A Teleology of the Unknown 5. Alpha-Function: The Transducer 6. Beta Reality 7. Complications in the Theory of Alpha Function 8. What is an Emotional Experience? Part 2. Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963) 9. Situating Bion’s Textual Practice 10. The Grid: 1 11. The Grid: 2 12. The Elements of Elements: The First Three Chapters 13. Essential Isolation 14. Commentaries on Chapters 5 through 16 15. A Negative Ontology under Psychic Construction Part 3. Transformations (1965) 16. Transformation and the Invariant 17. The Advent of O 18. Improvisations on Categories of Transformation 19. Catastrophic change 20. Causality, Infancy, and Morality 21. Reason, Logic, and the Psychotic Mechanisms 22. The Travails of the Negative and the Slough of Minus K 23. An Ambivalent Geometry of Psychosis Part 4. Attention and Interpretation (1970) 24. An Exploded View 25. Explosive Visuality 26. Non-Sensuous Realities: Part 1 27. The Reality Principle: A Metapsychological Detour 28. Non-Sensuous Realities: Part 2 29. The Evolution of Absolute Truth 30. Acts of Faith in the Dark Night of the Analytic Soul 31. Metanoia and the Group 32. The Lie Part 5. Performances of Psychoanalysis 33. Some Reports on Bion as Analyst 34. Rarely Noted Features of Bion’s Clinical Stance 35. A Glimpse into the Brazil Seminars 36. Some Clinical Self-Descriptions 37. Bion’s Evasiveness 38. Bion’s Rigidity 39. A Weird Dream of a Weir 40. The Perils of Splendid Isolation Part 6. Transmissions of Psychoanalysis 41. Textual Gaps 42. Anxious Patterns of Influence 43. Psychoanalytic Extraterritoriality 44. ‘A Shadow which the Future Casts Before’ 45. The Bion Who Cannot Be Born(e)

'Charles Levin believes that in today’s world our understanding of Bion bears an unknown relation to what Bion actually wrote. To understand Bion’s place in contemporary psychoanalysis, we must suspend our received understandings, which are sometimes idealized, and revisit his writings with an attitude of careful, intensive, and thoughtful attention to what he wrote and said... This book is a profoundly respectful and insightful work of scholarship.' Donnel Stern, Ph.D., William Alanson White Institute'A Critical Companion to Bion is a very special book. In this bold and illuminating study, psychoanalyst Charles Levin undertakes a rare and incisive re-encounter with Bion—stripping away layers of idealization to reveal the complex, unsettling, and profoundly generative thinker behind the legend... Refusing shortcuts, simplifications, or sanitized retellings, the author leads us deep into the dense forest of Bion’s thought, guiding us toward a more truthful, demanding, and transformative engagement with one of psychoanalysis’s most radical and mythologized figures.'Ofra Eshel'This book is an irreplaceable tool for anyone interested in Bion or psychoanalysis in general. In recent years, Bion’s name has become quite popular in the psychoanalytic world. But as with every author that comes into fashion, one can wonder how much of Bion was actually and properly read. The present book results from an exceptionally close reading of the essential works of the famous British analyst and it does him – and us – a service that is quite rare : it is a truly critical reading. It is a Companion that does not leave Bion unscathed but that enlivens the minds of its readers, be they "bionians" or otherwise.'Prof. Dominique Scarfone, Montreal