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Since Bion’s death in 1979 there have been many books and papers on his work, and second to Freud, he is the most frequently cited author in psychoanalytic publications. To my knowledge, the first introductory text to Bion was published in 1975 (Gringberg et al.). Unfortunately, it was a rather compacted work that mostly reiterated and only marginally clarified Bion’s own dense and obscure style of writing. Fortunately, by contrast Nicola Abel-Hirsch’s recent contribution Bion: An Introduction has few of these faults, and we are given a clear and comprehensive account that is both clarifying and easy to read. The author received much praise for an earlier publication, Bion: 365 Quotes (2019), which cleverly selected extracts of Bion’s writings, one for each day of the year. Each selection could then be read as if it were a poem or thought for the day and the book could be perused in bite-sized chunks. Reading Bion demands patience and a mental preparedness that rewards slow, careful attention. It is to Abel-Hirsch’s credit that she cleverly recognised this fact and gave us a Bion-a-day quote for careful meditation and reflection. I have profitably used these quotations for teaching seminars, and the format has been a stimulus for focused and rich discussion. Abel-Hirsch’s new book, Bion: An Introduction, on the other hand takes a different tack and is a valuable companion that views the scope of Bion’s work as a unified whole.
Early in his psychoanalytic career Bion wanted to submerge himself deeply in clinical experience to get a long and hard look at the basics and founding principles, perhaps akin to the effort made in physics to discover the irreducible elements of subatomic particles. For this reason, his writing, with the exception of the straightforwardly autobiographical work, is often difficult and highly abstracted, sometimes irritatingly gnomic and arcane, but nearly always challenging. Considerable effort is required on the part of the reader to bring Bio