The Pocket Dictionary of Bion: Essential Concepts of Thinking, Containment and Psychoanalytic Experience

Wilfred R. Bion changed psychoanalysis by asking how raw emotional experience becomes thinkable. The Pocket Dictionary of Bion offers a precise, accessible map of one of the most original bodies of work in modern psychoanalysis.

Written in clear American English, the book presents 225 alphabetized entries on work groups and basic assumptions; psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality; alpha-function, alpha-elements, beta-elements, reverie, containment, and container-contained; love, hate, knowledge, and minus links; preconception, frustration, selected fact, and the Grid; transformations, invariant, vertex, catastrophic change, hallucinosis, and O; and the late discipline of attention without memory or desire. It also introduces Bion's principal books, wartime and institutional contexts, and major interlocutors.

Every entry combines definition, theoretical or historical context, cross-references, and a critical clinical note. The book explains rather than mystifies Bion: alpha-elements are not substances, containment is not control, reverie is not mind-reading, and O is not supernatural certainty. It is Volume 7 of The Pocket Psychoanalysis Library from ABRAFP International Press.