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As psychoanalysis approaches its centenary, appraisal and reappraisal of members of its pantheon has become a flourishing industry. A notable beneficiary of this tendency has been Sandor Ferenczi, lately rehabilitated and elevated to the status of a visionary figure by recent biographers who have, persuasively, claimed for him a major role in presaging the evolving shift towards object-relational perspectives and towards technical flexibility.
Now it is the turn of Wilfred Bion to be the subject of a biographical study which seeks to explicate and define his contributions to some of the newer directions in psychoanalysis. Like some of the principal advocates for Ferenczi, the present spokesman for Bion is French, described as a ‘community psychiatrist’ who, though apparently not officially a psychoanalyst, is thoroughly grounded in psychoanalytic theory and obviously dedicated to its practice. Recognising the complexity, even the maddening difficulty of Bion's writings, he struggles to clarify the master's thought and to place it in the psychoanalytic and philosophical traditions that, he believes, both nourished and benefited from it.
Bléandonu succeeds in organising Bion's work into four more or less chronological segments: his pre-analytic studies of group processes (still probably his most influential work); his Kleinian-influenced efforts to understand and treat the psychotic patient and the ‘psychotic part’ of the neurotic personality; his tortured efforts to formulate a ‘scientific’ psychoanalytic epistemology; and his late ventures into autobiography and ‘science fiction’. Further, he convincingly relates aspects of Bion's intellectual development to his experience as an Anglo-Indian child, displaced and separated in his latency years to an upper-crust English boarding school in which he was treated as an outsider and subjected to the hazing and homosexual abuses characteristic of such institutions, at least at that time. It was the last of these experiences t