Book Review: The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion

Abstract

I have been teaching Bion to psychotherapy trainees and students in psychoanalytic studies for many years. I have also published earlier writings by both Joan and Neville Symington which I regard as excellent. I therefore took on the job of reviewing this book with a real anticipation of beneŽting from their thinking about Bion. However, as I began to read it, I quickly became bewildered and uncomfortable. Bion’s work is not easy of access. One often feels after reading and re-reading an essay or book of his that one simply could not tell someone else what it said, while at the same time feeling that one has taken in something important. There is a feeling of being inward with and changed by something profound which one cannot articulate. There are not many expositions of Bion’s work, but there are a few, and only one of them, Gérard Bléandonu’s Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897–1979, is mentioned by the Symingtons; they see it as complementary to their book. I found this odd, since with such an opaque writer one needs all the help one can get. I was particularly surprised that they nowhere draw on R. D. Hinshelwood’s A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (where, among many examples, there is a Žne exposition of how Bion elevated ‘containercontained’ into a whole theory of human nature), Donald Meltzer’s extensive writings on Bion (e.g., The Clinical SigniŽcance of the Work of Bion (1988) and Studies in Extended Metapsychology: Clinical Applications of Bion’s Ideas (1986)), those of Meg Harris Williams (1985) or (particularly since they profess to focus on the clinical) PSYCHODYNAMIC COUNSELLING 6.2 MAY 2000