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In this new book, Joan & Neville Symington provide an introduction to the work of Wilfred Bion. They supply abundant clinical illustrations of Bion's theoretical ideas, and their work therefore comes as a welcome addition to the effort of Meltzer (1978) and of Grinberg et al.
(1977). They summarise Bion's clinical thinking under the headings of ‘The Grid’, ‘Myth’, ‘Container/contained’, ‘Alpha function’, ‘Psychic reality’, ‘The growth of thought’, ‘Transformations’, ‘The study of groups’, ‘The phenomenology of psychosis’, ‘Without memory or desire’, and ‘Ultimate reality, the mystic and the Establishment’, ‘The theoretical disjunction between Bion and Freud/Klein’, ‘Bion: his character’ and an epilogue. The authors also provide a bibliography of Bion's writings.
The subtlety and compactness of Bion's ideas are among his great strengths, but they have also been sources of great frustration to generations of students. The Symingtons' account makes them accessible even to those with limited psychoanalytic experience. (This is, incidentally, more than Bion felt that he could do himself. He prefaced more than one of his books with the warning that nothing in it would make sense to anyone who was not a practising psychoanalyst.) The Symingtons may be criticised for not having captured all of the subtlety of Bion's thinking, but such a criticism would hardly be fair, since there is an inevitable trade-off between accessibility and subtlety in writing about the areas covered by Bion's work, and this will continue to be so until Shakespeare is reincarnated as a psychoanalyst.
In addition to introducing the reader to Bion's ideas, the Symingtons offer a highly interesting critique of his work. Because of the limitations of space, and because the critique is not only the most original part of the book, but is bound to be the most controversial as well, I will focus my attention on that. It centres on some important