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For many American analysts, the work of Wilfred Bion is an acquired taste. His papers (Bion 1967) and early books are built on a foundation of Kleinian theory that may be unfamiliar to an audience raised on ego psychology and contemporary conflict theory. Attention and Interpretation (Bion 1970) and the various “lectures” and “seminars” that follow, can present even more of a problem. They can require familiarity—or at least comfort and conversance—with concepts such as “alpha and beta elements,” “container and contained,” “waking dream thoughts,” “thoughts without a thinker,” and Bion's infamous Grid. The result may seem baffling and esoteric, almost cultic. Is Bion writing as analyst, existentialist, philosopher, or mystic? What is the clinical relevance of his ideas? Will the effort required to master a new technical vocabulary prove worthwhile?
It is our great fortune that these two books, assembled and edited by Bion's widow, Francesca, from transcriptions of seminars given in the last years of his life, offer readers not only the opportunity to answer these questions for themselves, but a jargon-free entrèe into the mind of a consummate psychoanalyst and a brilliant thinker. Like Descartes, Bion is in search of an irreducible starting point from which to examine our knowledge of the mind and of the world: a point of certainty, analogous to the Cartesian cogito, from which all else can follow.