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Freud's study of sexuality illuminated its nature, development and operation in its ‘natural’ and sublimated forms. Bion's work does an analogous job for thinking. He, perhaps more than anyone, has enquired into the nature, development and operation of thoughts, the thinking apparatus and the relation of thinking to being.
As one of the contributors comments, “we are still dealing with the consequences and implications of Bion's ideas […] in a way that is not true of any other contemporary psychoanalytic writer” (Bell, p. 81). This development is taking place on an international stage, with different aspects of his work developed by different individuals and in different regions of the world. The editor Chris Mawson has steered an intelligent, well-informed course through many aspects of the contemporary writings and issues related to Bion today.
Twenty-two years ago, in her Introduction to Melanie Klein Today, Elizabeth Bott Spillius noted that Bion's theory of thinking has had: “a profound effect on the conceptual and technical repertoire of all Kleinian analysts” (1988, p. 154). The drive to know (K) is now firmly established in Kleinian/Bionian thought as a primary drive alongside L (love) and H (hate). The first part of the Bion Today book is testimony to this, with papers by the British analysts, Edna O'Shaughnessy, James Fisher, Ronald Britton, David Bell and David Taylor. Included also in this section is one South American paper by Lia Pistiner de Cortiñas.
The O'Shaughnessy paper on Whose Bion? in Section I - Introduction to Bion presents Bion's work on ‘K’ and contains a frank critique of his later work. This is followed by Section II - Mainly Conceptual which begins with Fisher's paper on The emotional experience of K. In Britton's paper, The pleasure principle, the reality principle and the uncertainty principle, the reader will find an account of scientific thought since Freud's time and an innovative enquiry into the pathologies that can occur in our rela