Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO (/biːˈɒn/; 8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.

When in command of his tank in an attack he engaged a large number of enemy machine guns in strong positions, thus assisting the infantry to advance.

When his tank was put out of action by a direct hit he occupied a section of trench with his men and machine guns and opened fire on the enemy.

Having qualified in medicine by means of the Conjoint Diploma (MRCS England, LRCP London) in 1930[13] Bion spent seven years in psychotherapeutic training at the Tavistock Clinic, an experience he regarded, in retrospect, as having had some limitations.

The entire group at Tavistock had in fact been taken into the army, and were working on new methods of treatment for psychiatric casualties (those suffering post-traumatic stress, or "shell shock" as it was then known.)

He produced a series of highly original and influential papers (collected as "Second Thoughts", 1967) on the analysis of schizophrenia, and the specifically cognitive, perceptual, and identity problems of such patients.

Bion's theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, revealed both correspondences and expansions of core ideas from both Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.

[17] Later he abandoned the complex, abstract applications of mathematics, and the Grid, and developed a more intuitive approach, epitomised in Attention and Interpretation (1970).

He was one of the first to analyse patients in psychotic states using an unmodified analytic technique; he extended existing theories of projective processes and developed new conceptual tools.

The degree of collaboration between Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion and Herbert Rosenfeld in their work with psychotic patients during the late 1950s, and their discussions with Melanie Klein at the time, means that it is not always possible to distinguish their exact individual contributions to the developing theory of splitting, projective identification, unconscious phantasy and the use of countertransference.

33, 42) have pointed out, these three pioneering analysts not only sustained Klein's clinical and theoretical approach, but through an extension of the concept of projective identification and countertransference they deepened and expanded it.

In Bion's clinical work and supervision the goal remains insightful understanding of psychic reality through a disciplined experiencing of the transference–countertransference, in a way that promotes the growth of the whole personality.

[21] Bion's work has left a strong impression on a number of contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, including Antonino Ferro, Thomas Ogden, or Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros.

Furthermore, if we note how assumptions pass unchallenged as statements of fact, and are accepted as such, it seems clear that critical judgment is almost entirely absent.

Bion considered that "the three basic-assumption groups seem each in turn to be aggregates of individuals sharing out between them the characteristics of one character in the Oedipal situation".

"[37] Bion used as his starting point the phenomenology of the analytic hour, highlighting the two principles of "the emergence of truth and mental growth.

[39] The evolution of emotional experience into the capacity for thought, and the potential derailment of this process, are the primary phenomena described in Bion's model.

These are objects that can be evacuated or used for a kind of thinking that depends on manipulation of what are felt to be things in themselves as if to substitute such manipulations for words or ideas... Alpha-function transforms sense impressions into alpha-elements which resemble, and may in fact be identical with, the visual images with which we are familiar in dreams, namely, the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has interpreted them.

[44] Bion saw psychotic attacks on the normal linking between objects as producing a fractured world, where the patient felt themselves surrounded by hostile bizarre objects—the by-products of the broken linkages.

[45] Such objects, with their superego components,[46] blur the boundary of internal and external, and impose a kind of externalised moralism on their victims.

[50] Successful application of alpha-function leads to "the capacity to tolerate the actual frustration involved in learning ("K") that [Bion] calls 'learning from experience'".

"The complexities of the emotional link, whether Love or Hate or Knowledge [L, H, and K – the Bionic relational triad]"[53] produce ever-changing "atmospheric" effects in the analytic situation.

"[57] Looking for the source of such hate (H), Bion notes in Learning from Experience that, "Inevitably one wonders at various points in the investigation why such a phenomenon as that represented by −K should exist.

"Reversible Perspective" was a term coined by Bion to illuminate "a peculiar and deadly form of analytic impasse which defends against psychic pain".

As his thought continued to develop, Bion came to use Negative Capability and the suspension of Memory and Desire in his work as an analyst, in order to investigate psychic reality - which he regarded as essentially 'non-sensuous' (1970).

[65] Hence his injunctions to the analyst to eschew memory and desire, to "bring to bear a diminution of the 'light' – a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight.

[66] In stating this he was making connections to Freud, who in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome had referred to a mental counterpart of scotopic, "mole like vision", used to gain impressions of the Unconscious.

He was also making links with the apophatic method used by contemplative thinkers such as St John of the Cross, a writer quoted many times by Bion.

"[70] In his unorthodox quest to maintain such "mental space", Bion "spent the final years of his long and distinguished professional life [writing] a futuristic trilogy in which he is answerable to no one but himself, A Memoir of the Future.

"[70] If we accept that "Bion introduced a new form of pedagogy in his writings...[via] the density and non-linearity of his prose",[71] it comes perhaps to a peak here in what he himself termed "a fictitious account of psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream ... science fiction".