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This is a series of essays recently delivered online as the A-Santamaría Association Bion Seminars by well-known Bionian analysts and scholars. Santamaría Linares invites us to read them in the light of the concept of caesura – as gateways into the many branches of Bion’s thought, by making contact with a “language of achievement” that can penetrate his ever “enlarging and evolving spiral of ideas” (2). She emphasises a core idea in the deep need of every human being for an experience of containment, to allow nurture and enable the growth of the mind. This approach makes containment central since it describes attempts to make contact in a communicative process between the mind of the patient and the analyst (1, 3). Many of these papers link Bion’s earlier and later thinking, most frequently here through the lens of his later thought and find new perspectives and insights to penetrate further into his ideas using his own developed later analytic approach – “without memory or desire”.
Santamaría Linares views the earlier and later Bion not simply in terms of one set of ideas “succeeding or conversing with one another” but as Bion himself would see it as different “vertices” (Bion 1970, 93), different perspectives of thinking that “give stereoscopic depth to one another” (7 emphasis added). Not all papers take this view, one or two distancing Bion’s work from his analytic roots in Klein and Freud’s thinking, so privileging or isolating later conceptualisations from his earlier thinking. It is clear to me, however, that Bion’s analytic thinking kept its roots in his earlier work and analytic influences although it did change over time, giving more full attention to the evolving unconscious aspects of both the patient’s and the analyst’s experience within the analytic process – the concept of “O” and Faith in O, F (O).
Viewing the earlier papers, Smith researches Bion’s autobiographical memoirs and focuses on how Bion’s early traumatic experiences as a boy and adolescent a