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Between 1951 and 1967, Donald Winnicott wrote five letters to Wilfred Bion, attempting to engage his colleague in a discussion about their many overlapping interests. Yet there is no record of Bion responding to nearly any of them. This sad situation cannot help but tug at the hearts and minds of contemporary analysts. Why the unrequited bromance? What would the conversation have looked like had it occurred? Editors Steven Cooper and Christopher Lovett have prompted an international group of Winnicott and Bion scholars to offer their “personal and creative readings of that undeveloped conversation.”
The book takes as its launch point Winnicott's 1967 letter, written just 2 days after Bion delivered his October 3 lecture on “Negative Capability.” The letter touches upon both this lecture and Bion's earlier talk on “Catastrophic Change” (May 4, 1966). At this time, both men had amassed years of work and attained celebrity status at the British Psychoanalytic Society. Winnicott had published his articles on transitional objects, true and false self, and the facilitating environment, along with many others, generating his own distinct version of a two-person psychology. His emphasis on the role of the actual external mother in development, and thus in developmental trauma, put him at odds with his former supervisor Melanie Klein, whose views he hoped to influence. Winnicott warned that Klein's rejection of her colleagues' “creative gestures” would lead to Kleinian terminology becoming a “dead language” (Rodman, 1987, p. 33). Bion, a former analysand of Klein, entered the society 14 years after Winnicott and wrote for many years in a Kleinian frame. In Learning from Experience , Bion used the concept of projective identification to generate new theories on how we develop the capacity for thinking. In his container-contained model, the infant projects unthought bits of sensory and emotional experience into the mother, who, using her “alpha function,” takes these elements i