Bion: Is there anything new in this? You must often have heard, as I have, people say they don't know what you are talking about and that you are being deliberately obscure.

Myself: They are flattering me. I am suggesting an aim, an ambition, which, if I could achieve, would enable me to be deliberately and precisely obscure, in which I could use certain words which could activate precisely and instantaneously, in the mind of the listener, a thought or train of thought that came between him and the thoughts and ideas already accessible and available to him.

In Building on Bion, Robert Lipgar and Malcolm Pines have put together a rather extraordinary two-volume set that amplifies and enriches our understanding of the man and his work. These volumes focus most particularly on Bion's ideas regarding groups, and yet, as noted recurrently throughout the text, these ideas can never be entirely separated from his thoughts regarding individual dynamics. Pulling together theorists and clinicians from different countries and diverse professional backgrounds, we are invited to view Bion and his work from quite disparate vertices, including elucidations of some of the experiences and intellectual underpinnings that informed his thinking. The first volume, subtitled Roots, shows a young Bion in war uniform on the cover, juxtaposed with the gnarled and twisted roots of a tree. This volume explores the roots of Bion's theories including formative influences such as Bion's battle experiences in World War I and his early exposure to some of the theorists whose echoes we encounter when reading Bion. The second volume, subtitled Branches, juxtaposes an aging Bion with one of his own paintings: a watercolor of branches seen through a window. This image brings to mind Bion's ideas regarding the “caesura,” one of the conceptualizations explored in this second volume, in which the authors illustrate some of the many ways in which Bion's thinking can