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Bion in Brazil: Supervisions and Commentaries

Author(s) : Wilfred R. Bion, Editor : Jose Americo Junqueira de Mattos, Editor : Gisele de Mattos Brito, Editor : Howard B. Levine

About the Author(s)

Wilfred R. Bion (1897 -1979) was born in India and first came to England at the age of eight to receive his schooling. During the First World War he served in France as a tank commander and was awarded the DSO and the Legion of Honour. After reading history at Queen's College, Oxford, he studied medicine at University College London, before a growing interest in psychoanalysis led him to undergo training analysis with John Rickman and, later, Melanie Klein. During the 1940s his attention was directed to the study of group processes. Abandoning his work in this field in favor of psychoanalytic practice, he subsequently rose to the position of Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis (1956-62) and President of the British Psychoanalytical Society (1962-65). From 1968 he worked in Los Angeles, returning to England two months before his death in 1979.

A pioneer in group dynamics, he was associated with the 'Tavistock group', the group of pioneering psychologists that founded the Tavistock Institute in 1946 on the basis of their shared wartime experiences. He later wrote the influential Experiences in Groups, an important guide for the group psychotherapy and encounter group movements beginning in the 1960s, and which quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields. Bion's training included an analysis with Melanie Klein following World War II. He was a leading member in the Kleinian school while in London, but his theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, eventually revealed radical departures from both Kleinian and Freudian theory. While Bion is most well known outside of the psychoanalytic community for his work on group dynamics, the psychoanalytic conversation that explores his work is concerned with his theory of thinking and his model of the development of a capacity for thought.

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José Américo Junqueira de Mattos graduated from the Institute of Psychoanalysis of the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of São Paulo. He was one of the five founding member of the Psychoanalysis Group that later became the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of Ribeirão Preto, and has been a Training Analyst in both Societies. He has published several papers published both in Brazil and abroad. Since the beginning of his career he has been interested in the ideas of Bion, who was his analyst.

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Gisèle de Mattos Brito is a full member of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of São Paulo, and also a full member and Training Analyst with the Psychoanalytic Study Group of Minas Gerais.

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Howard B. Levine is a member of the faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England East, a member of the faculty and supervising analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and is in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is a founding member of the Group for the Study of Psychoanalytic Process and the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc.

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