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P. C. Sandler
Karnac Books, London, 2005, 853pp.
This dictionary is an impressive work that offers the reader a comprehensive guide to the often-obscure meanings and terms explored by W.R. Bion. It brings clarity and understanding to the concepts and is a wonderful help for psychoanalysts. It is an enormous task to understand, translate, and organize Bion's work in order to make it accessible for readers and students. Bion was concerned with the exactness of the concepts, and this dictionary is a reference book for Bion's legacy.
Paulo Cesar Sandler is a Brazilian psychoanalyst from Saõ Paulo who translated many of Bion's papers into Portuguese and benefited from Bion's Brazilian conferences. His dictionary is based on a critical reading that offers a genetic view of Bion's ideas, and their roots in Freud and Klein's contributions. As he wrote in his introduction, the general principles of his work were to be faithful to the original text, with the definitions compiled from Bion's writings, the generalizations through classification, and the historicity; each entry is historically developed as it appeared in Bion's work.
Born in India in 1897, W.R. Bion moved to England at the age of eight and resided in a boarding school. During the First World War, at the age of 18, he served in France as a tank commander, faced death many times, and was decorated for his courage. The war trauma experience left a...