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It took some years for Melanie Klein's theory to make its way into the mainstream of the American psychoanalytic dialogue. Rejected for many years as beyond the pale, Kleinian theory gained new ground when Otto Kernberg integrated it with ego psychology. Gradually building interest in the British Middle School and especially in D. W. Winnicott, as well as Roy Schafer's work on the contemporary Kleinians, also contributed to turning Klein's work into a basic component of how we understand psychoanalysis in this country today.
Something similar seems to be arising around the work of Wilfred R. Bion at present, and Lawrence J. Brown has become one of the key voices in bringing this about. Although Bion had long been regarded as the authority on psychoanalytic group process, his work that followed was typically relegated to the fringes, and his late work, from the mid-1960s until his death in 1979, has often been dismissed as incoherent and bizarre. Of course, Bion's difficult prose style—perhaps matched only by that other bitter pill for Americans, Jacques Lacan—contributed much to this reception.
Yet widespread interest in the topics of projective identification and countertransference, and the advent of intersubjectivity, particularly through the work of Thomas Ogden, has led to a reconsideration of these views. Brown's book Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious will undoubtedly serve as an important contribution to Bion's reception and understanding in the United States, while at the same time enlightening its readers with an excellent introduction to contemporary field theory.
Originally developed by Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist, field theory was meant to describe the dynamic gestalt environment underlying