A Beam of Intense Darkness

James Grotstein, M.D. (1925–2015) was clinical professor of psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, and training and supervising analyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Center of California, Los Angeles. He was on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and past North American vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. A world-renowned and prolific contributor to psychoanalytic literature, he is considered one of the foremost scholars and elucidators of the work of Wilfred Bion, who was also his analyst.

1. An introduction 2. What kind of analyst was Bion? 3. What kind of person was Bion? 4. Bion's vision 5. Bion's legacy 6. Bion's metatheory 7. Bion on technique 8. Clinical vignette encompassing Bion's technical ideas 9. Bion, the mathematician, the mystic, the psychoanalyst 10. The "Language of Achievement" 11. Bion's discovery of O 12. The concept of the "transcendent position" 13. The quest for the truth, Part A: the "truth drive" as the hidden order of Bion's metatheory for psychoanalysis 14. The quest for truth, Part B: curiosity about the truth as the "seventh servant" 15. Lies, "lies," and falsehoods 16. The container and the contained 17. "Projective transidentification": an extension of the concept of projective identification 18. Bion's work with groups 19. Bion's studies in psychosis 20. Transformations 21. Learning from experience 22. Points, lines, and circles 23. The Grid 24. Fetal mental life and its caesura with postnatal mental life 25. What does it mean to dream?" Bion's theory of dreaming 26. Dreaming, phantasying, and the "truth intellect" 27. "Become" 28. P-S to D 29. L, H, and passion 30. Faith 31. Bion's discovery of zero ("no-thing") 32. Epilogue