BOOKS EDITED
Nuno Torres and R.D. Hinshelwood (Eds; 2013) Bion’s Sources: The Shaping of his Paradigms. London: Routledge.
In this book, Nuno Torres and I gathered contributors who examine carefully where Bion searched for ideas that he could use to do the jobs he needed in the various phases of his career. Bion is not very open about whose ideas he drew upon, and this book collects a number of points of view of where he picked up ideas he brought to fruition in his own work. It is the beginning of an attempt to implant Bion and his ideas within the intellectual and psychoanalytic context in which he worked and wrote.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2022) W.R. Bion as Clinician: Steering between Concept and Practice. London: Routledge.
I wondered much about how he was when actually with his patients. It was driven partly by the first curse I attended in psychotherapy at the Tipstock Clininc where I observed a group therapy for a year conducted by Piere Turquet. But of course later his subsequent views on projective identification, containment and intuition drew me into what I think of as a truly contemporary Kleinian approach. And I decided to document it in this book how that approach developed in my thinking
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (1999) How Foulkesian was Bion? Group Analysis 32: 469-488.
This is the published version of the Michael Foulkes Lecture given to the Group Analytic Society. Both Bion and Foulkes worked at the Northfield Hospital, Bion in 1943-1943, and Foulkes from 1942-1945. Both had been influenced by social field theory, but in different ways. This paper discusses the degree to which Bion’s concent of group mentality (with its three basic assumptions) compared with Foulkes’ concept of the group matrix.
Dimitris Vonofakos and R.D. Hinshelwood (2012) Wilfred Bion’s letters to John Rickman (1939 – 1951). Psychoanalysis and History 14: 53-94.
The turn towards the ideas of Wilfred Bion across the schools of psychoanalysis, and around the world, raises interest in his own development. This series of letters from Bion to his first analyst during wartime Britain, was when Bion was first beginning to ask his own questions about psychoanalysis. He was unsatisfied with his training as a therapist at the Tavistock Clinic in 1933-1934. Though the analysis was interrupted when the wa started, Rickman became a mentor instead, and inspired Bion’s experiments in the War Office Selection Boards, and at Northfield Hospital.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2015) Teaching Bion’s teaching. In Meg Harris Williams (ed) Teaching Bion London: Karnac.
Central to Bion’s work was the basic idea of questioning and getting a group of people to reflect for themselves. Much of his work in his later seminars, and in his writing emphasises that strategy of self-reflection. This raises questions about any didactic form of teaching on a course with a prescribed curriculum. In his last phase of thinking about psychoanalysis, Bion eschewed formal and theoretical learning, and teaching. He favoured a spontaneous, intuitive evolution of one’s thoughts in the clinical work. This chapter questions whether these views should influence the teaching of Bion’s ideas as well.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2018) Intuition from beginning to end? Bion’s clinical approaches. British Journal of Psychotherapy 34:198-213.
This paper considers a striking quality of most of Bion’s work. He increasingly emphasised the importance of intuition and how it diverges from cognitive and logical thought. The paper addresses my early recognition of this theme in Bion’s writing and which he conveys occurred from his days as a medical student, taught by Wilfred Trotter.
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (2015) Containing primitive emotional states: Approaching Bion’s later perspectives on groups. In Levine Howard, Civitarese, Giuseppe (eds) The W.R. Bion Tradition: Lines of Development: pp. 407-419. London: Karnac.
Bion used social field theory as his starting point to describe a group mentality with three alternating basic assumptions. In the final Chapter of his 1961 book (a chapter which evolved from a paper in 1952, shortly after he qualified as a psychoanalyst), and later with the development of his theory of containment and his clinical method, he revised that notion to state the basic assumption is structured in a psychoanalytic way as a dynamic between anxiety and psychological defence.