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BronzinoBionFoulkes

How Foulkesian was Bion?

Abstract

If we want to enrich our ideas, we must study the problems of holding together caring and hating, the individual and the social. We each need to face the difficult emotional significance of the issues of group therapy, and group life. We need to remember it is an easy option to go for one position or the other. We do that for comfort rather than for truth. We need to establish the tension as a creative one. If influences that drove Bion and Foulkes, and their followers, towards polarised positions are valid, it is important for us now to understand how we each position ourselves. If we are to follow Malcolm’s initial plan of ‘ongoing dialogues between Foulkesian and other group-as-a-whole approaches’, we Read more

BronzinoBionFoulkes

Bion and Foulkes, a mythological encounter, only, but it is already enogh

Abstract

We can affirm that Bion’s summit and his impact on dialectics between alfa and beta elements constitute the most authentic and complete theory of Foulkes’ summit: the group-analytical theory that a number of people have blamed him for not being able to or not knowing how to elaborate. Which certainly doesn’t mean that psychoanalysis and group-analysis should coincide; rather, it means that the “group dynamics” described by Bion are part of the latter, to belong to its basic matrix, and that Bionian analysis, in the depth of the psychoanalytic Read more