Approaching Bion

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The writings of Wilfred Bion have captured the imagination of many psychoanalysts worldwide.  That prompts the need to understand where Bion got his ideas from – not easy to discover from his own writing.  It has been of interest to me to try to indicate how he attempted to use the writings of others to think about the issues that he considered important to psychoanalysis.
 
2012  (Dimitris Vonofakos and Bob Hinshelwood) Wilfred Bion's letters to John Rickman (1939 – 1951).
 Psychoanalysis and History 14: 53-94. 
The turn towards the ideas of Wilfred Bion across the schools of psychoanalysis, raises interest in his own development.  Here are a series of letters from Bion to his first analyst during wartime Britain, at a time when Bion was first beginning to ask his own questions about psychoanalysis.
 
2013 Bion’s Sources: The Shaping of his Paradigms (Editors: Nuno Torres and R.D. Hinshelwood)
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
At this time there is a widespread interest in, even fashion for, the work of Wilfred Bion. His work is often treated as if he were a guru.

In this book we gathered contributors who examine carefully where Bion searched for ideas that he could use to do the jobs he needed in the various phases of his career. It is the beginning of an attempt to implant Bion and his ideas within the intellectual and psychoanalytic context in which he worked and wrote.
 
2015  Teaching Bion's teaching. 
Chapter in Meg Harris Williams (ed) Teaching Bion  (London: Karnac
In his last phase of thinking about psychoanalysis, Bion eschewed formal and theoretical learning, and teaching.  He favoured a spontaneous, intuitive evolution of one’s thoughts in the clinical work.  This chapter questions whether these views should influence the way Bion’s ideas are taught.
 
2015 Containing primitive emotional states: Approaching Bion's later perspectives on groups. 
Chapter in Levine Howard, Civitarese, Giuseppe (eds)  The W.R. Bion Tradition: Lines of Development: pp. 407-419.  London: Karnac.
This is a brief account of Bion’s attempt to elaborate his early ideas on the relationship between the individual and the group culture (mentality).  The development of his theory of containment and his clinical method based on intuition rather than theory, generated new ways of looking at group dynamics.