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Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces the work of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion (1897-1979), and the immense potential of his ideas for thinking about literature, creative process, and creative writing.
List of contents
1. Selected Facts: Introducing the work of Wilfred Bion 2. Freud's 'excessively intense' idea: the
Project for a Scientific Psychology 3. Pompey's thought-worm: Stevie Smith's
Novel on Yellow Paper 4. Restoring the lost container: B.S. Johnson's
The Unfortunates 5. With and without Bion: supplementing an uncanny reading of Mary Butts 6. Jean Rhys' bizarre telescope: a Bion-emic/-etic Reading of
Wide Sargasso Sea 7. Efficient psychosis: notes towards a Bionian Ballardian breakdown 8. Becoming ray: Transformations in Nicholas Royle's
Quilt 9. Dream I Tell You: Bion's
A Memoir of the Future 10. Is writing (an) Alpha-Function?
About the author
Naomi Wynter-Vincent holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, University of Sussex, and University College London. She completed her PhD at the University of Sussex. She has presented her work on Wilfred Bion at conferences in the UK, Italy, Finland and Brazil. Naomi works in private practice in London and Luton as a therapist and coach.
Summary
Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces the work of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion (1897-1979), and the immense potential of his ideas for thinking about literature, creative process, and creative writing.
Additional text
'Wynter-Vincent has written a luminous and deeply compelling book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in creativity, literature and psychoanalysis. It is both a wonderfully clear introduction to Wilfred Bion’s work, and a series of enthralling encounters that puts his thinking in contact with Freud, Stevie Smith, B.S. Johnson, Jean Rhys, J.G. Ballard and other writers, to remarkably illuminating effect.'Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex
'This book will change how you think about thinking. Naomi Wynter-Vincent’s tremendously enlivening study draws on significant, consequential affinities between Bion’s ideas and the work of literary writers. We come to understand how Bion thought and how he considered thinking. In the process, we benefit from clear, searching accounts of his idiosyncratic and highly influential psychoanalytic inventions (alpha-function, beta-elements, bizarre objects, O, and the Grid, to name a few). Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism reminds us how exciting, inventive, necessary and sometimes maddening thinking can be, and how courageous and important a thinker Bion is for us today.'Sarah Wood, Reader in English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Kent (retired), Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice
