1st Edition
The Primordial Mind in the Work of Wilfred Bion Between Light and Shadow
1. Imaginative and Rational Conjectures 2. The Primordial Mind (1976 to 1979) 3. The Caesura 4. Thoughts Without a Thinker and Wild Thoughts 5. Feelings of Being Alone and at the Same Time Dependent 6. Some Considerations for a Discussion of the Clinical Fragments 7. Primitive Moral Conscience 8. Urge to Exist Conclusion References
Biography
Gisèle de Mattos Brito is a psychoanalyst, Full Member and Training Analyst at the Brazilian Psychoanalytical Societies of São Paulo (SBPSP) and Minas Gerais (SBPMG), both affiliated with the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). She teaches at the SBPMG Institute. Since 2009, she has coordinated the Study Group on W. R. Bion’s Supervisions at SBPSP. She is co-editor (with Howard Levine) of Bion in Brazil: Supervisions and Commentaries (2017). She has authored several scientific papers published nationally and internationally.
‘This is a book to be cherished. G. Brito offers an original elaboration of Bion’s notion of the primordial mind, rooted in the dynamic interplay between Beta elements and O, at the threshold of the unrepresentable. She draws on Bion’s late seminars and the work of Brazilian colleagues such as J. C. Braga, and grounds her ideas in compelling clinical material.’
Rudi Vermote, Belgian Psychoanalytical Society, Author of Reading Bion (2019)
‘In this captivating book, Gisèle Brito sets out to explore traces of our primordial mind—forces that act independently of the individual's will and often emerge as states of extreme vulnerability or unthinkable anguish. Drawing on her own emotional experience, she ventures into the raw, unknown, and often unknowable realms that analytic work evokes yet resists elaboration. Enriched by Bion’s supervisions, psychoanalytic literature, and vivid clinical fragments, the book illuminates the struggle to contain these primordial forces and inchoate experiences, which can, at times, be transformed through the analyst’s mind into elements with psychic quality. This is a moving and significant contribution to psychoanalytic work, inviting us to approach the caesura of the unthinkable with courage and depth.’
Avner Bergstein, Author of Bion and Meltzer’s Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life: Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis
