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Dr Grotstein is one of a handful of psychoanalytic thinkers who has much to say to a Jungian-orientated reader, particularly those who are not of an object-relations orientation. For others like myself who are, there is in his current writing a concern as to his vertex. Bion stated: ‘an emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship’. For Grotstein the infant appears to have got lost and the relationship has vanished. Yet his intellectual tracing of the concept of ‘O’ in this article written for a Bion centenary conference is impressive and fascinating, with his customary devotion to and passion for his subject. In this instance it is the meaning, the origins and the ramifications of ‘O’.
Grotstein asserts that Bion's work subsequent to ‘Transformations in O’ is considered ‘mystical’, ‘unscientific’ or ‘psychotic’ by his London Kleinian colleagues. In contradistinction to these attitudes, Grotstein sees Bion's ‘Promethean individuality and uniqueness’ culminating at this point in his creation of a psychoanalytic epistemology and ‘rescuing psychoanalysis from its … inaccurate foundation in “sensible science”’ and raising it instead to its apotheosis in non-sensible ‘intuitionistic science’ which ‘burst the bell jar of Kleinian and classical determinism’. Grotstein counters the putative Kleinian dismissal of Bion's later work with his view that Bion brought ‘psychoanalysis into alignment with virtually all the fields of knowledge, including mathematics, physics, aesthetics, literature, mythology, philosophy, poetry, religion, archaeology, etc., all for the purpose of putting it on a veritable ‘Internet’ of a universal epistemology’.
It is in the spiritual-metaphysical dimension introduced in the concept of ‘O’ that Grotstein considers Bion to be at his most revolutionary and charismatic. The vertex is not a new one, however, for Jungians and there is much that Grotstein appreciates that would resonate strongly for them. He discusses Bion's