Maps for Psychoanalytic Exploration

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.

• Preface , Foreword , Introduction , Why we can’t call ourselves Bionians (1987): notes on the life and work of W. R. Bion , Psychoanalysis is a “poppy field” (1988): “vision” in analysis; a divertissement about the vertex , Ps ? D (1981) , The role of the group with regard to the “unthinkability” of nuclear war (1987) , On “non-therapeutic” groups (1989): the use of the “task” as a defence against anxieties , Warum Krieg? (1990): the Freud-Einstein correspondence in the context of psychoanalytic social thought , Aggressiveness-bellicosity and belligerence (1991): passing from the mental state to active behaviour , The creation of mental models (1992): basic and ephemeral models , Experiences in Groups revisited (1992) , Some notes on the theories of structure and mental functioning underlying A Memoir of the Future by W. R. Bion (1993): festschrift for Francesco Corrao , From free-floating attention to dreamwork-? (1993) , Inside and outside the transference: more versions of the same story (1995)—or: history versus geography? , The concept of the individual in the work of W. R. Bion, with particular reference to Cogitations (1996) , The two sides of the caesura (1996) , Bion and the group: knowing, learning, teaching (1996) , Bion’s contribution to psychoanalysis (1996) , Bion: a Freudian innovator (1997) , Dreams (1998) , From formless to form (1998) , Laying low and saying (almost) nothing (1998)

'These essays that illuminate and are rooted in the ideas of Wilfred Bion are written from the heart, with warmth, depth and incisive intelligence. They provide a penetrating insight into the trajectory of Bion's thinking and make an important contribution in their own right to the understanding of mental movement, its role in psychic functioning and its relation to the cultural surround. Their innovative application and extension of Bion's understanding of the centrality of unique, personal emotional experience in psychic growth and development are a testament to the author's observation that "thinking dies if it is not refertilised and subsequently developed in the generation and the mind of each thinker"..'- Howard Levine, Faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East (PINE); co-editor of Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained and two forthcoming books, The Bion Tradition and Bion in Brazil