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The work of the eminent psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, is best described as being particularly concerned with the notion of thought as a bridge between truth and fiction, sanity and madness. As the Symingtons say, Bion's ideas are therefore to do with imprisonment (constriction) and freedom. Much so-called thinking, often positioning around bubbles of ideas that masquerade as solid substances, locates self and others either inside the compound or Bion the pale. Ho! Ho! What might have interested Bion is not whether such a joke was a good or bad one but whether, in true psychoanalytic fashion, it was interesting and also helped develop thinking further. Reading this book certainly helped develop my thoughts about Bion because it refreshed the parts that original readings didn't always reach. Clearly the Symingtons have enjoyed writing in a similar way as I have enjoyed reading. If this much-needed volume enhances, as Barthes would say, our pleasure of the text, then the writings of Bion can't be that difficult. Now, be honest, there can't be many sentiments you've come across in black and white that have associated Bion with intellectual knockabout fun and pleasure. But hist, something sober this way comes; Ha! ‘Tis the cloak of seriousness, a must for all true clinicians’.
How did the Symingtons achieve this impressive effect of seriousness and good humour around a project that is, after all, an exegesis of sacred texts? Mainly by warning us that Bion's ideas are complicated and that the book will ‘not absolve the reader from hard thinking’ (p. xii), and then going on to make complex ideas accessible, especially through the judicious use of interesting examples in myth and resonant ones in clinical experience.
The organization of the book is clear and straightforward enough - which is something to be appreciated given its subject matter. A helpful introductory chapter discusses the relation of Bion's thinking to Freud and Klein, and makes the point that Bion was neither