Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life
Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic Field Theory Book Series

Drawing on the influential contributions of Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer to psychoanalysis, Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life explores and addresses the clinical implications of their work, both through revisiting several of their conceptions and illustrating them with detailed clinical material from the analyses of children, adolescents, and adults.

Psychoanalysis strives towards truth; this is its essence. However, emotional truth is often unknowable and not amenable to verbal communication. This ineffable mental realm is at the heart of both Bion and Meltzer's psychoanalytic endeavours.

Bion's writings reflect a developmental stage in the evolution of psychoanalysis, extending clinical work to mental realms that were seemingly unreachable. Donald Meltzer further infuses Bion's thinking with his own original notions of beauty and aesthetics, imbuing Bion's profound thinking with a poetic and lyrical tenor.

Writing in a clear and lucid manner, Avner Bergstein integrates Bion's sometimes highly theoretical thinking with everyday clinical practice, facilitating his dense and condensed formulations and making them clinically accessible and useful. Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life is written for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists who are attracted to Bion and Meltzer's radical thinking.

Preface 1 The psychotic part of the personality: Bion's expeditions into unmapped mental life 2 Transcending the caesura: Reverie, dreaming and counter-dreaming 3 Beyond the spectrum: Fear of breakdown, catastrophic change and the unrepressed unconscious 4 On boredom: A close encounter with encapsulated parts of the psyche 5 Attacks on linking or a drive to communicate? Tolerating the paradox 6 The painful vicissitudes of the patient's love: Transference-love and the aesthetic conflict 7 Obsessionality: Modulating the encounter with emotional truth and the aesthetic object 8 The ineffable References

Avner Bergstein is a faculty member, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst with the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. He works in private practice with adults, adolescents and children and has worked for some years at a kindergarten for children with autism. He is the author ofnumerous papers and book chapters elaborating on the clinical implications of the writings of Bion and Meltzer. His papers are translated into several languages including German, French, Spanish and Portuguese. He conducts reading seminars internationally focusing on the writings of these two authors.