Wilfred Ruprecht Bion

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Wilfred Ruprecht Bion

DSO (8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) was a British psychoanalyst. A pioneer in group dynamics, he was associated with the 'Tavistock group', the group of pioneering psychologists that founded the Tavistock Institute in 1946 on the basis of their shared wartime experiences. He later wrote the influential Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock, 1961. Experiences in Groups was an important guide for the group psychotherapy and encounter group movements beginning in the 1960s, and quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields.

Bion's training included an analysis with Melanie Klein following World War II. He was a leading member in the Kleinian school while in London, but his theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, eventually revealed radical departures from both Kleinian and Freudian theory. While Bion is most well known outside of the psychoanalytic community for his work on group dynamics, the psychoanalytic conversation that explores his work is concerned with his theory of thinking and his model of the development of a capacity for thought.

Bion's main contributions to psychoanalysis belong to the fields of psychoanalytical technique and epistemology, with particular reference to the process of thinking. He approached this latter subject from different viewpoints (vertices): that of the group; of the psychotic, schizophrenic or borderline patient; and that of the individual thinker, "genius" or not, who has to deal with the pressure of attacks, from within and without, due to hostility towards both the thinking process and the resulting thoughts. The principal concepts he developed are those of "reverie based on free-floating attention", "alpha-function," which Bion himself felt could replace the Freudian theory of primary and secondary processes, alpha- and beta-elements, container and contained, and "reversed perspective." His writing is commonly considered challenging, particularly the trilogy A Memoir of the Future (1975, 1977, 1979/1991). His other most important publications are Experiences in Groups (1961), Four Servants (1977) and Attention and Interpretation (1970).

Bion's influence in the field of group psychotherapy and the development of more or less closely related group techniques was both very rapid and widespread. In the field of psychoanalysis, despite the fact that his thinking is firmly rooted in that of Freud and Klein, his innovative ideas and theories engendered a great deal of controversy, and were hardly accepted until the 1970s.

Bibliography

Bion, Wilfred R. (1961). Experiences in groups. London: Tavistock Publications.

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