Bion's ideas are among the most exciting and influential of all those in modern-day psychoanalysis. Understanding them is far from easy, however. We are fortunate, therefore, when someone grasps important components of his formulations and articulates them in a clear and concise manner that allows them to be ingested, metabolized, and made use of in everyday clinical work with patients. The appearance of a work of this kind has made it possible to examine a central dimension of the contributions of one of the most heuristically stimulating but often abstruse and puzzling contributors to psychoanalytic thought, in a way that can make his ideas more easily comprehensible and utilizable than they have often tended to be.

Although greatly appreciated and significant, Bion's contributions are far from pellucid and are often misunderstood and misapplied. The publication of Containing States of Mind by Duncan Cartwright—a