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‘If I succeed in binding a constant conjunction by writing this book the group can take over the task of discovering what it means’ (Bion 1965, p. 14)
Building on Bion is the title of two volumes of original essays, skilfully commissioned and edited by Robert Lipgar and Malcolm Pines (Lipgar and Pines, 2003). Stimulated by contacts and discussions during the International Centennial Conference on the Work and Life of Bion held in Turin in July 1997, Lipgar and Pines set out to ‘bring together some of the best visions and re-visions building on Bion's writings’ (Building on Bion: Roots, p. 7). Their primary focus is on Bion's thinking about groups and group mentality, but viewed also in the light of his continuing psychoanalytic preoccupations.
The product of this enterprising venture appears at an opportune time. Recently, at least amongst practitioners in the group and organizational field, working within frames of reference that owe much of their origin to Bion's pioneering insights, there have been signs of growing restlessness at the apparent dominance both of the man and of the work.
This restlessness is at once both predictable and paradoxical. Bion himself foresaw it and indeed, in Attention and Interpretation (Bion, 1970), his model of the relations between mystic, establishment, and group offers a possible approach to understanding some of the dynamics in play. But he also resisted it and it is this, surely, that accounts for the puzzling, frustrating, and at times infuriating opaqueness of his language and mode of address. As he might have put it, he wanted his thinking, as distinct perhaps from the observations on