A Critical Companion to Bion Functions of a Psychoanalytic Personality

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)

Biography

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

'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