The Mystery of Analytical Work: Weavings from Jung and Bion by Barbara Stevens Sullivan New York:  Routledge, 2010;  272 pp.

In November of last year at a forum in San Francisco entitled, “Are You My Bion?,” three presenters endeavored to convey something about their own use, understanding, appreciation, and embodiment of Bion's concepts, along the way encountering poetry, a walk in the woods, and historical materialism. In its premise and unfolding, the forum was an instantiation of Bion's hope that each practitioner will forge “for himself the language which he knows, which he knows how to use, and the value of which he knows” (1976/1987, p. 242).

With her recent volume, The Mystery of Analytical Work: Weavings from Jung and Bion, Barbara Stevens Sullivan gives us her own Bion, and also her own Jung, forging a language that is wholly contemporary while unselfconsciously invoking ancient antinomies.

In a text that swoops in and among various theoretical perspectives and clinical moments — here magnifying, there coloring — what Sullivan offers is not a comparative but a mix and matchmaking for which “weaving” is as good a word as any. The effect is an often circuitous yet rich accumulation of a personal vision of not only Sullivan's clinical work, but also of human life as it is lived and can be lived in this evolutionary moment.

The book is organized as a discussion of theory that focuses on development and psychopathology and a consideration of clinical work that ties the theory to interesting and detailed clinical examples. The whole is informed by Sullivan's “weaving” (via Jung, Bion, and also Symington, among others) of several large, under-girding themes: the psyche and unconscious as immersive, non-material realities; the centrality in humans of a drive for truth and relatedness; the ceaseless struggle we embody between related and anti-related forces; and the ubiquity and inevitability of psychopathology, understood as the constriction of our capacity to truly have our own experiences.