Bion’s Transformations and Clinical Practice

Abstract

Wilfred Bion’s contributions to psychoanalysis are numerous: his early work on the psychology of groups that grew out of his experiences in the first World War; theories and work on the treatment of psychosis with Melanie Klein and later psychoanalysis with her; and the beginning of his own theoretical and clinical ideas, which nurtured analytic thinking and treatment approaches beginning in the mid-1960’s followed by his relocation to the United States (1967). Bion’s thinking can be deceptively simple, such as his statement that his third book, Transformations (1965), considered by many as exceptionally dense, is about “the communication of both patient and analyst about an emotional experience” (p. 29).

Keywords:

• Bion
• transformations
• analytic process
• O
• countertransference
• reverie

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors do not have any relevant financial or non-financial competing interest.

DISCLAIMER

Potentially personally identifying information presented in this article that relates directly or indirectly to an individual, or individuals, has been changed to disguise and safeguard the confidentiality, privacy and data protection rights of those concerned, in accordance with the journal’s anonymization policy https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/upaq20.

Notes

1 In this article, page numbers with no other citation information are from Bion, W. (1965). Transformations. London: Heinemann.

2 Francesca Bion (2014) reports in her Introduction to this paper that it had been ‘lost’ until Dr. Rosa Beatriz of Rio de Janeiro sent Francesca Bion a copy in 1994. Dr. Beatriz had received the paper from Dr. Hans Thorner in 1971, although Bion had given the paper to the British Society in October, 1963.

3 Previously discussed in Brown, L. J. (2007). “On dreaming one’s patient: Reflections on countertransference dreams.” Psychoanal. Q, 76:835-861.

4 The following two page numbers are also from Bion, W. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Heinemann.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lawrence J. Brown

Lawrence J. Brown, PhD is a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and an Adult and Child analyst there. He has written extensively about the work of Wilfred Bion. Dr. Brown has lectured internationally and is the author of several books, including Transformational Processes in Clinical Psychoanalysis (2019), Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious (2011), and is the editor of On Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism,” (2023).