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.

Goriano Rugi, M.D., psychiatrist, psychotherapist, is a member and training analyst of the Italian Institute of Group Psychoanalysis (I.I.P.G.). 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.