Reading Bion1 by Rudi Vermote New York:  Routledge, 2019,  273 pp.

Rudi Vermote has provided the psychoanalytic reader with a comprehensive and highly original text that reviews Bion's major contributions to psychoanalysis, and at the same time illuminates these contributions using a method of study pioneered by Bion, namely the caesura. This approach examines a phenomenon using binocular vision of shifting perspectives reversibly:

foreground ↔ background, past ↔ present, PS ↔ D, being ↔ thinking, inside ↔ outside, container ↔ contained, T(K) ↔ T(O), learning ↔ experience. In the process, Vermote has brought to life Bion's method of learning from experience, while communicating the experience of learning to the reader. He uses a device in structuring the text that introduces different vertices of the material as asides in boxes, causing a change in focus from figure to ground, and in appreciating another dimension, precipitates a transformation of the material in the reader's thinking. In the introduction Vermote places a major caesura in the foreground of Bion's thinking, oscillating between transformations in K in his earlier phase, and transformations in O in his later phase. It is in the turbulence of the caesura, the gap between the two perspectives, that transformations in learning from experience may occur. In the introduction, using the vertices of T(K) and T(O), Vermote contrasts Bion's thinking with that of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Jung, Lacan, and the empiricist and idealist philosophers. With this grounding in psychoanalysis and philosophy he moves on to examine Bion's work in transformations in K in the first part, and transformations in O in the second part. Vermote adds another dimension by tracing Bion's personal and family milestones, dovetailing these data with the evolution of his ideas. In this way, we appreciate the subjective experience of the man behind the ideas.

From his e