You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When a long lost manuscript or musical composition by Bach, Mozart or Gershwin in a forgotten attic or warehouse is discovered, we are immediately enriched. This collection of Seminars given by Bion during several weeks in 1977 during a visit to psychoanalysts in Rome, Italy, and now translated for the English-speaking world, is a treasure. Bion's writing can be abstract, difficult to understand with his use of symbols, is not present when he is speaking. Faced with an audience, Bion speaks with clarity and spontaneity and is a delight to read.
Bion brings to psychoanalytic theory his practice with groups and his understanding of group dynamics as well as his experience as a teacher. His work on the Unconscious Basic Assumptions in a group has implications that extend beyond group therapy and could be applied to any group in any situation.
In these seminars, the attentive Italian psychoanalysts were free to ask questions, and Bion was able to expand these questions respectfully, integrating them into a lengthy amplification. He displays an Englishman's understatement and wit. When he takes the “idea” of psychoanalysis, he states, “You can't smell it, you can't touch it, and indeed it is very difficult to say what the sensible component of psychoanalysis is.” This leads him to “make the obvious explicit” by saying that we use “the evidence of our senses.” Instead of attempting to be clever by coming up with interpretations, Bion returns to sight, hearing, smell, even touch.
Bion recalls Freud's thought concerning caesuras. Freud questioned the caesura of birth from the intra-uterine. He believed there was a continuity but later dropped this thought. Throughout the seminars, Bion questions caesuras in life. “Hear, see, smell, and feel” the patient, then the sense of the patient's character becomes evident and the senses leads to interpretations that can help.
Bion recognizes that the psychoanalyst can feel the pressure to “do” something. However, he reveals that he is qui