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The subject of Lawrence Brown’s book is transformation, as the concept pertains to psychoanalytic practice. With modesty from the outset, he states that by limiting his field of study to transformative processes discernible in clinical work he has been helped to forego an omnipotent
task, a definitive study of the concept that would, he says, become a preposterous over-reaching. Accordingly, Brown proceeds—after a useful introduction to the structure of his book and to some basic assumptions underlying his project—by employing a range of concepts, some derived from Bion’s own work on psychic transformation, some developed from his own clinical and theoretical contributions and from those colleagues whose emphasis accords closely with his own. The interaction of these perspectives, their breadth in particular, but also their clinical and aesthetic dimensions, makes for a fascinatingly pluralistic investigation. Like Bion before him, Brown’s intellectual curiosity for investigating the intersections between learning and growth is clear, and his work on the nature of transformation in the clinical practice of psychoanalysis is a serious contribution in its own right, as well as a welcome addition to a consideration of Bion’s later clinical thinking, in which his emphasis shifted from epistemology, a model of thinking, towards mental growth, while retaining both sets of ideas. That concern—most specifically the shift noticeable in chapter 11 of the 1965 work—had developed largely from discussions between Bion and Betty Joseph in the mid-1960s, and in my view, Brown’s book can usefully be read in conjunction both with Joseph’s (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change and with Feldman’s work (2009) on the relationship between doubt and conviction in the practice of psychoanalysis.
Bion had hoped that his 1965 book on transformations (the subtitle of which was: Change from Learning to Growth) would have been complete in itself but soon realised that reading it profi