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The writings of Wilfred Bion have been studied since his early papers on group process in the mid-1940s through the early1950s, and were followed by his investigation of psychotic processes in the mid-1950s. His work took another turn at the beginning of the 1960s with the
publication of an important paper, The Psychoanalytic Study of Thinking which anticipated and signaled his move into a new area of interest that began with Learning from Experience , the first of a quartet in the collection Seven Servants . Learning was followed by three further books: Elements of Psycho-Analysis , which extended the concepts of alpha and beta elements and alpha function introduced in Learning.
The third book, Transformations , which I consider his magnum opus, is subtitled “Change from Learning to Growth”, which links this book to Learning from Experience and also underscores Bion’s shift in focus to mental growth and the processes that occur between analysand and analyst to promote or forestall psychic development. His deeper discussion of such concepts as O, the “Grid” and his statement that “The differentiation I wish to introduce is not between conscious and unconscious, but between finite and infinite” (46), and that the analyst should train his attention to what is unknowable - O (or the Truth) - provoked O’Shaughnessy’s concern that Bion’s “late thinking becomes less boundaried … [that] make the texts too open, too pro- and e-vocative” (O'Shaughnessy, E., 2005, Who's Bion?. IJP, 86: 1523-1528). In the fourth book, Attention and Interpretation , written after his move to Los Angeles, Bion furthered his application of some religious notions meant as metaphors that he introduced at the end of Transformations, but that have been criticized as his having taken a mystical turn.
Bion’s oeuvre consists of far more than these four foundational texts that have generated a veritable industry of Bionian-influenced papers, books, study groups and local, national and international c