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In this book Lawrence Brown offers a detailed, yet very readable review of the developing thought about intersubjectivity of Freud and Klein, and particularly the expansion of perspectives by Bion. To this he adds his own perspective as well as those of other contemporary writers influenced by Bion. As Grotstein writes in the Foreword, Brown's interest ‘has taken him to the post-Kleinians in London, to the American ego psychologists and interpersonalists, and to South America’ (p. xv), drawing on the contributions of Racker, the Barrangers and ‘The River Plate Group’, as well as on Bion's theory of groups. Discussions of Bion's work often mention the difficulty in understanding his style, which many who knew him suggest was intentional. Brown gives excellent explanations of the manner in which Bion's thinking related to, expanded upon, or diverged from that of both Freud and Klein.
In this history of ideas of both the unconscious and intersubjectivity, analytical psychologists can see both similarities and divergences with the ideas of Jung. A thread throughout is Bion's discovery of alpha function. Using Klein's concepts of the paranoid/schizoid and depressive positions and projective identification, Bion introduced the ideas of the container/contained, and the movement between positions, as opposed to static or progressive developmental stages. Unlike Klein, he also recognized the normal, communicative function of projective identification. In addition to historical development, Brown gives his own perspective on what he refers to as ‘Bion's ego psychology’ as an intersubjective view of psychic structure, the reconsideration of the internalized, thinking Oedipal couple as ‘thirdness’, and the effects of relational trauma on the impairment of thinking, dreaming and alpha function.