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This collection of papers by contemporary Bionian psychoanalysts explores and develops Bion's legacy to the depth-psychological world. The quality of the papers is high, some are classics and some were written expressly for this volume. There are introductory papers; conceptual papers that extend Bion's highly condensed thinking
about such issues as ‘K’, loss, the truth drive and so on; clinical papers that pull his enigmatic ideas firmly into the consulting room; papers on the aesthetic use of Bion's ideas; on his legacy in understanding group functioning; and then a trio of papers on the controversial ideas of the later Bion. As with any collection, some of the papers struck this reader with more force than others but there is no paper here that would not be engaging to any analyst interested in the contemporary development of Bion's ideas.
Limitations of space make me unable to summarize the (many) valuable contributions here. I will therefore focus on the psychoanalytic controversy over the late Bion's contributions. This controversy has been explored several times in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and is continued in this volume. I chose this focus because I believe that it is the late Bion whose ideas regarding O, doubt, Faith, the impossibility of Knowing and the consequent need to focus instead on moving-toward-knowing, on endlessly becoming rather than existing in a fixed shape is the Bion whose ideas can be thought of as ‘Jungian’ in nature. (Although, of course, early and mid-Bion are of interest to analysts of any school because his profound insights into the clinical situation would enrich anyone's work.)
Edna O'Shaughnessy's ‘Whose Bion?’ outlines the controversy. Confronted with the vast scope of Bion's work, from group dynamics, through psychotic thinking, to all the issues involved in our attempts to think rationally about our situations and finally into his late interest in mystical issues of knowability, she asks whether the late work