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Wilfred Bion continues to provoke: his writing can be inspiring, confusing, or irritating, but it is never straightforward. He developed an entirely new language for psychoanalysis, with terms like α and β elements, α-function, selected fact, container ↔ contained, L, H, and K linkages, and O. He also changed the conventional meaning of words like reverie, pre-conception and conception, realization, publication, and common sense. Most fundamentally, though, he used these new concepts and unconventional definitions to develop a vision of the human experience and of the psychoanalytic enterprise that extends beyond Freud's drives and the Oedipus complex, and beyond Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Instead of a linear and conflictual relationship between the Systems Cs. and Ucs., Bion differentiated between finite and infinite. Instead of a conflictual and hierarchic progression from paranoid-schizoid (P-S) to depressive (D) positions, Bion conceived of this as functioning in a dialectic way (i.e., P-S ↔ D). He added an intersubjective, communicative dimension to Klein's concept of projective identification and emphasized the crucial importance of the real (external) mother's state of reverie in his conception of container ↔ contained. In this latest book, Grotstein brings a coherence to Bion's thinking and writing that is an enormously helpful anchor to balance the leap of faith that Bion asks of us in reading his work and in applying it to our analytic technique.
The book is loosely organized into 31 chapters that run the gamut from