From Bion to the Interpersonal Field

W. R. Bion (1897-1979) brought about a huge paradigm shift in psychoanalysis, from a search for meanings to an experience of becoming – a psychoanalytic equivalent to the French Revolution, according to Antonino Ferro. This lecture / discussion is a basic introduction to some of Bion’s contributions, from his thinking on groups, to his theoretical innovations in the 1950s and 1960s (linking, container-contained, alpha and beta functions, waking dream thought, reverie, caesura - a whole new account of emotional development and transformation), to his extraordinary late trilogy, A Memoir of the Future. Robert hopes to outline how these innovations prepared the ground for Italian analysts, notably Ferro, to develop the idea of an analytic ‘field’, in which change is less a matter of individual psychology than a process of playful elaboration of the in-between, of the interpersonal field which the participants are constantly co-dreaming and co-creating. In preparation you might like to look at his ‘Antonino Ferro: A Critical Introduction’ (Routledge 2024) particularly Chapter 2, ‘The Bionian Dream Model’.

Dr Robert Snell is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton University, UK.

Host or Publisher Southern Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy