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“Where now, who now, when now?” These are fundamental questions of psychological orientation, interpreted through the words of Samuel Beckett (Beckett, 2006, p. 285). Wilfred Bion goes a step beyond and leans upon the doggerel of Rudyard Kipling in discerning seven such signposts, useful for thinking oneself into the aliveness of the human condition: what, why, when, how, where, who and the “I” that integrates them all (Bion, 1978).
Often, today, W.R. Bion is read as a “mystical,” somewhat oracular clinician/writer. Indeed, Bion's approach to the questions framing the psychoanalyst's worldview might suggest to us the Delphic presence he explicitly names (pp. 15-16). Bion's descriptive prose often confounds the reader's imagination, but it fundamentally also extends a task-driven perspective that melds methodological rigor with profoundly sensitive pliability, or what Ferenczi long before, located in compassionate provision toward understanding patients, seeking what ailed them, no matter how disturbed (Rachman, 1998).
Despite the Foreword's promise of discovering lived “experiences” of Bion (italics original, p. 15), in reading Bion in Brazil, the experiential dimension of Bion's psychoanalytic contribution disappears under a clatter of confounding issues, such as: the demanding pleas of clinical supervisees for affirmation of technical certainty; the autocratic role of the Portuguese translator mediating between analyst presenter and Bion; and in the insistently overwhelming blur of 15 editorial commentaries recapitulating for the reader what has already been read.
The reader who pursues Bion in Brazil toward seeking a generalized model of how Bion worked, would be better served by consulting James Grotstein's magisterial synopses (2007, 2009a, 2009b), or look to Hanni Biran's user-friendly, The Courage of Simplicity (2015), or to this year's Argentinian addition to the Anglophone Bion literature, Lia Pistiner De Cortinas’ On Mental Growth. Bion's Ideas That Transform