The scope of this work is to synopsize, synthesize, extend, and to challenge Bion in a reader-friendly manner. Presenting the most important legacy-ideas for psychoanalysis—the ideas that are on the cutting edge of the field that need to be known by the mental health profession at large—it highlights and defines the broader and deeper implications of his works.


A Beam of Intense Darkness presents Bion’s ideas faithfully and also uses his ideas as launching pads for the author’s conjectures about where Bion's ideas point. This includes such ideas as “the Language of Achievement”, “reverie,” “truth,” “O,” and “transformations”–in, of, and from it, but also “ L,” “H,” and “K” linkages (to show how Bion rerouted Freud’s instinctual drives to emotions), “container/contained", Bion’s ideas on “dreaming,” “becoming,” “thoughts without a thinker,” “the Grid,” his erasure of the distinction between Freud’s, “primary and secondary processes “ and the “pleasure” and “reality principles,” “reversible perspective,” “shifting vertices,” “binocular vision,” “contact-barrier,” the replacement of “consciousness” and “unconsciousness” with infinity and finiteness, Bion’s use of models, his distinction between “mentalization” and “thinking,” as well as many other items.