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Q Can you give me an idea what this is about?
A Psycho-analysis, I believe.
Q Are you sure? It looks like a queer affair?
A It is a queer affair - like psycho-analysis. You'd have to read it.
This book belongs to a series of short publications that Routledge is doing, on relevant topics and perspectives of psychoanalysis and on prominent contemporary psychoanalytic authors. Annie Reiner's book fulfills these aims.
A theory of mind is the foundation on which the practice of psychoanalysis and the understanding of what analysands bring to analysis rests. Bion's theories have undoubtedly become groundwork in the psychoanalytic movement. Reiner's book elaborates both on theory that offers a lens through which to observe the revelations of mental phenomena, as well as the technical tools that derive from it. In that regard it will find the interest of theoreticians and of practicing psychoanalysts alike.
As for the prominence of Bion, one needs only to look around to see how his work has been embraced, used, and further developed in Europe, South and North America and more recently in Asia. Annie Reiner is well versed in Bion's works, has had direct contact with him and belongs to a community in Los Angeles that, originally lead by James Grotstein, opened a valuable exploration and extension of his work.
Right in the foreword (p. viii) Reiner promises ‘… to focus on some of the mysteries to which he [Bion] drew our attention, including the transcendent, enigmatic, infinite reality he called ‘O.”’ There will be no disappointment for the reader on this. In each chapter various approaches to the understanding of O are offered, such that once one thinks one caught it, in the next chapter one must reshuffle and start again, which is consistent with Bion's spirit to prevent new ideas from becoming stultified. In this, the style of Reiner's writing gives the reader the experience of understanding, as work in progress rather than a result; very Bionian.
But the book of