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This is a collection of 36 articles by 34 contemporary Bionian psychoanalysts. It is inevitably uneven, but for the most part the papers are interesting, creative and worth reading. The first section of the book (the first five chapters) explores Bion's personal history and its impact on him and his theories. This is an especially moving section. I would have thought that I understood and appreciated the impact of his experiences in World War I, but I was wrong. Carole Beebe Tarantelli's paper (‘“I shall be blown to bits”: towards Bion's theory of catastrophic trauma’) greatly deepened my understanding of those experiences and their impact. Her mastery of his (very difficult) memoirs is dazzling, and from it she has written a paper that brings him and his terribly traumatic history into sharp focus for the reader. This paper and José Américo Junqueira de Mattos's memoir of his analysis with Bion are two of the highlights of the book.
But given the size of the book, I cannot hope to speak to everything in it. Consequently, I would like to think about what this book offers regarding Bion's O because I see this concept as a natural bridge between him and Jung, expanding and deepening our understanding of the Collective Unconscious. ‘O’ is the absolute truth of - me, you, the earth, the solar system and the universe. O is Ultimate Reality, Ultimate Truth, the Ground of Being, God or the godhead. As we know from the alchemists, as it is above, so it is below. O is thus the archetypal unconscious, including all of nature, our nature and the