Time and the Unconscious

Bion’s unfashionable thought is a challenge for our times in which anaesthesia

and mass thinking prevail. The themes this book addresses are time

and the unconscious.

In the present/past, the here and now reveals its relationship with the

unredeemable time, which conditions our behaviour and is at the root of a

state of hallucinosis in the form of a short-sighted view that is distorted by

deep-seated wounds. This book also highlights the resonances with contemporary

epistemology and physics that underlie the new paradigm of

psychoanalytic field theory. The topic of the unconscious raises questions

about its origin and the difference between the Bionian and the Freudian

unconscious. In Bion we see an evolutionary, process character emerge,

with a double movement of repetition and expansion within a single system

in unstable equilibrium, for which there is no conscious feeling that does

not also carry with it the shadow of the unconscious.

Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical concepts this book is essential

reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers and anyone

who wishes to understand more fully what it means to be human.