ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Wilfred Bion’s theoretical and clinical development prior to 1967, the year he gave the first in a series of clinical seminars in the Americas, the Los Angeles Seminars. To recap Bion’s three periods of thought to 1967: there was the group period, the psychosis period and the epistemological period. To summarize the three periods of thought to 1967, Bion tackled the practical problem of how to rehabilitate neurotically incapacitated soldiers by studying intra-group tensions in their hospital facility. Bion carried forth into his third period, or Kleinian phase – and never forgot his group work – as he then took up M. Klein’s proposal that psychotic states of mind were both understandable and treatable. In his fourth and last period, the epistemological period in the early 1960s, Bion took the findings from the previous two periods and expanded the Kleinian conceptual paradigm by completely re-working it.
