Bion today

Chris, Mawson, , Routledge (New Library of Psychoanalysis), London, 2010, 464 pp., £22.99 (paperback)

Bion is often thought to be confusing, sometimes wilfully so, but this excellent book from the New Library of Psychoanalysis series goes a long way to make the relevance of his work clear. My interest in Bion stems from my general psychiatric training and his work on the psychotic and non-psychotic personalities (Bion, 1967a) but, in the field of dementia, many behaviours become understandable when considered in the light of his theories. When verbal communication diminishes, communication by projection or projective identification becomes increasingly prominent and the ability of care workers to contain painful emotional states becomes increasingly important.

The structure of the book will be familiar from ‘Melanie Klein today’ (Bott Spillius, 1988a, 1988b) with ‘mainly conceptual’ and ‘mainly clinical’ sections and additional parts entitled ‘aestheic’, ‘group mentality’ and ‘later Bion’. The majority of the book originated in the ‘Bion today’ conference which took place in 2005.

Chris Mawson, the volume's editor, effortlessly sets the scene in the outstanding first chapter, providing a coherence to the collected chapters which follow, not all of which are newly written. Edna O'Shaughnessy's companion introductory chapter selects, as the distinctive element of Bion's work, ‘the epistemophilic impulse … which as the “K link” was given equal placing by Bion with the relations of Love (L) and Hostility (H)’ (p. 17).

The conceptual section begins a re-consideration of the container-contained relationship (Bion, 1967c, 1970) which has been readily absorbed into day-to-day practice in a variety of disciplines as a useful metaphor, but often without giving credit to its originator.

Ron Britton's chapter in the conceptual section compares Bion's innovations in psychoanalysis to the development of quantum physics and specifically refers to Werner Heisenberg's famous ‘uncertaint