1st Edition
Time and the Unconscious Daring and Creativity in Wilfred R. Bion
Bion’s unfashionable thought is a challenge for our times in which anaesthesia and mass thinking prevail. The themes this book addresses are time and the unconscious.
In the present/past, the here and now reveals its relationship with the unredeemable time, which conditions our behaviour and is at the root of a state of hallucinosis in the form of a short-sighted view that is distorted by deep-seated wounds. This book also highlights the resonances with contemporary epistemology and physics that underlie the new paradigm of psychoanalytic field theory. The topic of the unconscious raises questions about its origin and the difference between the Bionian and the Freudian unconscious. In Bion we see an evolutionary, process character emerge, with a double movement of repetition and expansion within a single system in unstable equilibrium, for which there is no conscious feeling that does not also carry with it the shadow of the unconscious.
Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical concepts this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers and anyone who wishes to understand more fully what it means to be human.
Introduction: Why does one choose a theory? First Part: Present/Past 1. Inaccessible states of the mind 2. The inaccessible and the uncontainable in the clinic 3. Recognising unrepresentable pain 4. Time and Space. Walking across the Time, between Freud and Bion 5. Stray thoughts. Philosophy and Neurobiology in dialogue with Bion's theory of time and thinking Second Part: Conscious/Unconscious 1. The problem of the Bionian Unconscious 2. (Mythical) origins of the Unconscious 3. Representation (Vortsellung) and Presentation (Darstellung) 4. Intuition and reality of O 5. At-one-ment, Atonement, Incarnation
Biography
Goriano Rugi, M.D., psychiatrist, psychotherapist, is a member and training analyst of the Italian Institute of Group Psychoanalysis (I.I.P.G. IIPG). He teaches at the I.I.P.G. School of Specialisation in Milan and at the European Research Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Padua. He is a trainer and supervisor at various institutions. He lives and works in Verona. His best-known works are Transformations of Pain (2015), Diagnosis and Mental Disorders (2018) and Time and the Unconscious (2023), Milan, FrancoAngeli.
‘For a long time, Wilfred Bion's thinking was considered eccentric, even foreign or paradoxical, in comparison with that of classic psychoanalysis, or it has been used in a sloganistic manner by extracting the most original concepts and turning them into catchwords that are incredibily distant from his initial communicative intentions. Rugi manages to bring him back into the scene by clarifying the origins, which concern bionian’s complete production in its entirety, and relating it in a consistent and careful manner to that of Freud’s. The result is a book that is both an excavating and an opening, highly useful and indispensable “Memory for the Future.”'
Lorena Preta, is an ordinary member of the SPI and the IPA, head of the international research group Geographies of Psychoanalysis, and former director of the magazine Psiche and of Spoleto Scienza
‘Rugi approaches the concepts of Time and the Unconscious through his own process of dreaming Bion’s thinking. He aims to make it accessible not only to specialists, but also to a wider audience. He invites us to find out about the internal coherence in the unexpected continuity between the earliest insights into groups, and the latest thoughts on factual transformations. This exploration does not always remain static, but turns on itself; expanding, specifying, and delineating from different points. Rugi’s description of Bion clinical material provokes a process of identification and the passion of discovery.'
Antònia Grimalt, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst for the Spanish Society (SEP-IPA), editor of Bion, Intuition and the expansion of psychoanalytic theory and Bion and Intuition in the clinical setting, by Routledge
‘A timely and valuable text as through two fundamental themes of psychoanalysis, time and the unconscious, it clarifies the Freudian roots of Wilfred R. Bion's thinking, and highlights the profound differences and the richness of a new paradigm that is still evolving.'
Sarantis Thanopulos, ordinary member of the SPI with training functions, is the current President of the SPI
'Time and the unconscious to which we could add pain which, being the price of our feeling, supports the ability to think... Pain... also as a sign of approaching inaccessible areas of the mind...... Rugi does not postpone, does not smooth, does not standardise, rather he proceeds with his clear, precise, at times meticulous style, but not for this reason simplistic, reductionistic... careful not to slip into the definitional, avoiding "the satanic Jargonieur", in order to give hospitality to wild thoughts, to free associations with art, poetry, cinema, quantum physics, psychoanalytic theory, the analysis room.'
Alessandra Tenerini, Vanessa Zurkirch
'This new and beautiful book by Goriano Rugi fits into fertile research territory that deals with the developments that Bion's work has influenced contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Starting [...] from Meltzer [...] Grinberg, Sor, Tabak de Bianche, many contributions have [...] made it possible to understand the revolutionary scope of the ideas offered by Bion's thought in integrating an (O)ntological perspective with the Epistemological one [...] Rugi launches his challenge to go beyond what has already been said about Bion's thought, to grasp its out-of-dateness and creativity in a Nietzschean way.'
Mauro Manica
'The text deals with time and the unconscious [...] but at the same time Rugi speaks, in a never superficial way, of psychoanalysis, pain, memory, desire, perception, body, of reality and of the real versus the imaginary, of representation, mind and brain...but also of fear of the truth...all the themes dear to every psychoanalyst... The book, while continually comparing itself with Freud...also covers authors of literature, art...and the comparison...of Bion's texts with...the theorisations that come from philosophy, neurobiology, physics, mathematics, thus allowing further light to be shed on the most complex and articulated areas of the Bionian model.'
Ambra Cusin
