Book Review Editor’s Note

In this Book Review Section, we offer four books dealing with topics of great interest to our readership: Three clinical and theoretical and one on psychoanalytic insights about organizational dynamics.

Book Essay: Three Papers of W.R. Bion. By Wilfred Bion. Edited by Chris Mawson. Reviewed by Howard Levine

In this thought-provoking essay, Howard Levine revisits Wilfred Bion’s “Three Papers” collection, recently edited by Chris Mawson and including a forward by Ron Britton. These remarkable papers by Bion (“Memory and Desire,” “Negative Capability,” and “Break Up, Break Down, Break Through”) contain his thinking on central issues that concerned him throughout his oeuvre—though sharpened considerably later in life as his focus narrowed on the clinical interaction and the nature of truth and psychoanalytic communication. Levine narrows his focus within Three Papers to examining the clinical implications and pragmatic values of Bion’s main ideas. The Three Papers, Levine argues, hinge upon an exploration of the relationship between negative capability and the injunction for the analyst to abandon memory and desire, and the related clinical stance with its implications of shifting the therapeutic focus from the epistemological to the ontological dimension.

Book Review: Finding a Place To Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders, and Citizens. By Edward Shapiro. Reviewed by Marie Rudden

In her review of Edward Shapiro’s Finding a Place To Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders, and Citizens, Marie Rudden examines the author’s account of his professional journey through the world of groups and organizations in settings such as McLean Hospital, the Tavistock Clinic, and the Austen Riggs Center. Rudden examines

Shapiro’s accounts of the sometimes humbling lessons he learned while studying and understanding regressive group processes among staff and other groups with whom he interacted. Throughout the work, Rudden notes, Shapiro emphasizes the