A Critical Companion to Bion: Functions of a Psychoanalytic Personality
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : August 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 340
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98564
- ISBN 13 : 9781041168980
- ISBN 10 : 1041168985
Also by Charles Levin
Social Aspects Of Sexual Boundary Trouble In...
Price £29.99
Free UK Delivery over £25
There are currently no reviews
Be the first to review
A Critical Companion to Bion is an introduction to the extraordinary contributions of W.R. Bion, providing a close and 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 theoretical and clinical work, this is key reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and will also be of interest to cultural historians and critical theorists.
Reviews and Endorsements
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
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Putting a Stick in It
Part 1. Learning from Experience (1962)
2. Bion’s Intellectual ‘Gait’: An Overview
3. "Factor" and "Function"
4. A Teleology of the Unknown
5. Alpha-Function: The Transducer
6. Beta Reality
7. Complications in the Theory of Alpha Function
8. What is an Emotional Experience?
Part 2. Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963)
9. Situating Bion’s Textual Practice
10. The Grid: 1
11. The Grid: 2
12. The Elements of Elements: The First Three Chapters
13. Essential Isolation
14. Commentaries on Chapters 5 through 16
15. A Negative Ontology under Psychic Construction
Part 3. Transformations (1965)
16. Transformation and the Invariant
17. The Advent of O
18. Improvisations on Categories of Transformation
19. Catastrophic Change
20. Causality, Infancy, and Morality
21. Reason, Logic, and the Psychotic Mechanisms
22. The Travails of the Negative and the Slough of Minus K
23. An Ambivalent Geometry of Psychosis
Part 4. Attention and Interpretation (1970)
24. An Exploded View
25. Explosive Visuality
26. Non-Sensuous Realities: Part 1
27. The Reality Principle: A Metapsychological Detour
28. Non-Sensuous Realities: Part 2
29. The Evolution of Absolute Truth
30. Acts of Faith in the Dark Night of the Analytic Soul
31. Metanoia and the Group
32. The Lie
Part 5. Performances of Psychoanalysis
33. Some Reports on Bion as Analyst
34. Rarely Noted Features of Bion’s Clinical Stance
35. A Glimpse into the Brazil Seminars
36. Some Clinical Self-Descriptions
37. Bion’s Evasiveness
38. Bion’s Rigidity
39. A Weird Dream of a Weir
40. The Perils of Splendid Isolation
Part 6. Transmissions of Psychoanalysis
41. Textual Gaps
42. Anxious Patterns of Influence
43. Psychoanalytic Extraterritoriality
44. ‘A Shadow which the Future Casts Before’
45. The Bion Who Cannot Be Born(e)
About the Author(s)
Charles Levin, PhD, FIPA, is a training and supervising analyst, Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis. He has edited and authored several analytic books and many articles on clinical, ethical, and cultural topics.
Customer Reviews
Our customers have not yet reviewed this title. Be the first add your own review for this title.
You may also like
