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by Rafael E. Lopez-Corvo, London, Karnac Books, 2006, 229 pp., £22.50 (paperback).
The 16-page introduction to Wild thoughts searching for a thinker provides a succinct exposition of this very scholarly book on the theoretical ideas of Wilfred Bion and their links with classical psychoanalytic theory. It explains the ‘Wild thoughts’, of the title as being ‘the substance of dreams, phantasies, or transference and counter transference dimensions, eternally seeking for a mind that, by containing them, would provide a history and a truthful meaning’ (p. 4). Lopez-Corvo presents his reading of Bion in the light of an evolutionary, psycho-developmental vertex, establishing well Bion's roots in the origins of psychoanalysis in Freud and exploring some of the crucial developments which his thinking has brought. His writing seems to me to be reflective of someone deeply engrossed or immersed in studying their subject, consistent perhaps with ‘row G’ of Bion's Grid; the ‘Scientific deductive system’ (1967) in which each analyst rediscovers psychoanalytic theory for himself through his own practice, thereby giving it real personal meaning. The book is admirably well annotated and illustrated with clinical examples throughout. The fundamental Bionic notion of the search for analytic truth, or ‘O’, or rather, in Bion's terms; the examination of the relationship between preconception and truth (Grotstein's ‘Truing’), is maintained as a central concern within the book overall.
Dr Lopez-Corvo's text covers a wide and varied terrain which seems to posit a developmental ‘hierarchy’ of theory, with the last four chapters focusing on questions raised by the concept of ‘O’, and the Grid. Standing almost as an essay in its own right, the last chapter is a return to the dreams and ‘wild thoughts’ of the title, drawing upon Freud, Meltzer and that other very lucid commentator on Bion, James Grotstein. Grotstein himself (1981) quoted Bion who, after being introduced to deliver the Franz Alex