Main description:

With his concept of "O," Wilfred Bion provided a new psychoanalytic space in which to explore the mind. Dr Annie Reiner's new book, Bion and Being: Passion and the Creative Mind, examines the similarities between this psychoanalytic space and the artist's creative sensibility, as well as mystical and religious states. This most mysterious and revolutionary of Bion's analytic ideas reflects what is essentially a state of being, an experience of mental integrity and union between emotional and rational functions of the mind which is the basis of thinking and creativity. In an effort to provide emotional understanding to Bion's theoretical ideas, Dr Reiner uses examples of artists, poets, writers, theologians, and philosophers, including Rilke, Cummings, Shakespeare, Beckett, and Nietzsche, to illustrate these psychoanalytic concepts. She also presents detailed clinical examples of patient's dreams to explore the obstacles to these states of being, as well as how to work clinically to develop access to these creative states.

Contents:

Introduction , "O": Bion's "truth instinct" , Self and other: passion and play in analysis and art , The development of language , "A rose is a rose is a rose ...": the power and limits of language , "O": the spiritual aspect of being , The language of being and mental wholeness , Being and non-being: a clinical view , Duality and the myth of Sisyphus: a clinical exploration , Evolving states of wholeness and being , Summary and conclusions