ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author first encountered Wilfred R. Bion through the supervision of Harold Boris, when he was a neophyte psychiatric resident learning to lead an intensive, five-days-per-week therapy group on a 10-patient, psychoanalytically oriented in-patient service. A second problem that troubled him early in his career was the gap that existed between the reality of analytic practice and his assumption that if analysts were thorough enough in their analysis of resistances, then the necessary analytic data would appear in the associations of their patients. His convictions were strengthened and his understanding deepened by his subsequent encounters with the Bion-based writings of Antonino Ferro, whose work also introduced me to the analytic field theory of the Barangers. Bion posits a psychoanalysis that is not afraid of the idiosyncratic and the extraordinary and runs the risk of being perceived as dangerous to the Establishment and the status quo.
