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Less a sequel than an extension of Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind (2014), Fred Busch's The Analyst's Reveries (2019) explores, in illuminating fashion, a current enigma of psychoanalytic thought and praxis. Busch has taken on the task of explicating Bion's enigmatic concept and how these reveries have preoccupied more and more of the current mainstream of psychoanalytic understanding of our shared clinical ground. Wilfred Bion, not unlike Jacques Lacan, has been enjoying a resurgence of his theoretical concepts, and yet this focus, like many times in the past, has led to a pars pro toto elevation of primary original concepts into entire theories of mind, which in turn, in this age of pluralism and diversity, has led to a blurring of clear concepts and concomitant potential misuse in the clinical realm. Busch has done all psychoanalysts a great favor by engaging in the heavy lifting that is so often required but seldom done when new concepts emerge.
From a structural perspective, this book not so much begins as it embarks on a mission, with an introduction to the idea of a conceptual enigma, which is then highlighted by a chapter titled “Was Bion a Bionian?” While I and others have used the term neo-Bionian to describe current followers of Bion's opus, Busch uses the term post-Bionians. While it may seem picayune to address the difference, in fact, Busch's entire treatise is an explication of how three post-Bionians differ as well as agree with the definition of a term that is central to Bion's theoretical formulations. L. J. Brown (2009) has suggested that Bion's entire opus was his version of an “ego psychology.” Thus, it is clear that between translation and definition, all psychoanalysis currently suffers from a “confusion of tongues” that Busch is doing his best to demystify. He sees Bion from a clinical perspective, very close to that of mainst