A Critical Companion to Bion
Functions of a Psychoanalytic Personality
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:20th Aug '26
£34.99
This title is due to be published on 20th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A Critical Companion to Bion is an introduction to the extraordinary contributions of W.R. Bion, providing a close detailed reading of his work, anchored in systematic critical expositions of the arguments in his four main theoretical studies (1962-1970).
The complex reality of Bion’s texts and public talks is studied in depth, placing them in sharp contrast to the phenomena of Bion’s subsequent influence. Building on this analysis, the book goes on to explore the reasons for the striking gap between what Bion said and what professional psychoanalysis tends to imagine he meant. The author argues that the psychoanalytic profession has cultivated the charismatic authority of Bion’s posthumous “psychoanalytic personality” in the service of both clinical innovation and conservative psychoanalytic identifications. A careful reading of the Bion opus provides essential insight into the history of psychoanalytic thought and the chronic institutional problems still facing the psychoanalytic movement.
With a careful, detailed analysis of Bion’s work and a clear vision of how it can be applied to theory and clinical work, this is key reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
'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
ISBN: 9781041168980
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
370 pages