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The present volume is a rather hefty memorial to the late Wilfred Bion, and it seems to fulfill its objectives admirably. Most of the well-known Kleinians, or post-Kleinians, are represented here, some quite heavily, some even substantively.
To open the cover of this compendious volume is to enter a Bionic world that seems somewhat strange and even befuddling to the average American-born and raised psychoanalyst. There is no primer here in Kleinian or Bionic rudiments. It is heavy-going, heady stuff, at times almost too heady for reading. It calls for a kind of lectio meditativa of more scholarly days. In view of the complexity and the expanse of the material, I will content myself with offering some general impressions and adding a few comments about particular contributions.
Perhaps the primary impression I derived from my reading was of the extent to which the roots of psychoanalysis intertwine with philosophical assumptions and perspectives. The penetrating manner in which Bion extended some of the basic Kleinian insights makes clear the extent to which the Kleinian-Bionic approach to the understanding of the mind is rooted in Kantian and ultimately Platonic approaches. I have never before had so vivid an impression of the Kleinian thought as—in some fundamental philosophical sense—pre-experiential. Like Platonic ideas or the Kantian synthetic a priori, this aspect of Bion's thinking is underlined in his notion of innate preconceptions and the essential role they play in human thought processes.
A second impression is of the vast difference between Kleinian and Bionic methodology and the more empirical, inductive, and theoretical emphases of American psychoanalysis. The prototype of the American approach to psychoanalytic matters is the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris, and Rapaport. There the model is scientific, and the emphasis falls on the understanding of