Bion and Being (Ebook)

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. Author Biography Annie Reiner, PhD, PsyD, LCSW, is a senior faculty member and training analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC) in Los Angeles. Her work was profoundly influenced by the ideas of Wilfred Bion, with whom she studied in the 1970s. Her writings appear in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is author of ‘Bion and Being: Passion and the Creative Mind’, an examination of Bion’s concept of O through philosophy, theology and the arts, and ‘The Quest For Conscience and the Birth of the Mind’. Dr Reiner is also an accomplished poet, playwright, and painter, with four books of poems, a book of short stories, and six children’s books which she also illustrated. She maintains a private practice in Beverly Hills, California.