King Lear is a timeless exposition of humankind\'s attempt to find meaning amidst the ceaseless turbulence of existence. This entails navigating the disintegrating pulls of nature and harmful human action that exist alongside affiliative, life-promoting gestures shown toward one another. As the predictability and safety afforded by social and two-dimensional psychic constructs collapse, several characters in this play are forced to reckon with the untamed, less organized realms of the mind and natural world. This leads to movements toward psychic paralysis and disintegration, as well as toward growth and interpersonal healing, dynamics that hinge on the characters\' internal structuring.

All his life, Wilfred Bion attempted to devise a narrative form for an account of the traumatic experiences he went through as a tank commander in the First World War. The body of his autobiographical works, which consists of texts written in different stages of his life and remain fragmentary, documents his desperate efforts to wrest a biography of his own from the most appalling tendencies of world history. As a whole, it testifies for and is the result of a lifelong attempt to understand something incomprehensible, to express something unspeakable, to restore something destroyed. It represents something akin to the primal history of the psychic catastrophe that Bion failed to escape from as long as he lived. The article first provides an overview of these autobiographical and literary writings against the background of a brief account of the external facts of Bion\'s life. It then undertakes a narrative analysis of the sequences in which Bion tries to find a narrative form for the arguably most terrible event of the entire war which not only was a deeply traumatic experience remaining with him throughout his life, but also resulted in what he felt to be his psychic death. Taken together, these sequences impressively show the painful work of gradually dissolving or at least coming to terms with the psychological catastrophe of a paralyzing trauma, the causes of which reach far beyond the individual and the private. The article sets out to contribute to the still unwritten inquiry into the genetic context in which Bion\'s autobiographical, literary, and theoretical writings figure, together with the concepts and writing strategies embodied in them.

While catastrophizing has traditionally been pathologized within psychoanalytic traditions, in this paper I suggest that cataclysmic realities of climate change call upon all of us to cultivate catastrophic thinking. Our new climatic normal demands of us not only new concepts and language, but also a new sort of thinking, building on Wilfred Bion\'s ideas that to think is to use our mind\'s capacity to be in touch with internal and external realities. I suggest that sometimes people are able to learn from their experiences of trauma in ways that disrupt the culturally dominant anenvironmental orientation, that is, an orientation that brackets out the more-than-human environment. Instead, they develop a capacity to think catastrophically about and to be permeable to the more-than-human environment. What I call their \"traumatized sensibility\" can offer guidance as we come to co-exist with and respond more consciously to our hotter planet.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is currently ravaging health systems across the world. Psychiatric trainees are at risk of exposure to patients with COVID-19 given their clinical roles in emergency and inpatient psychiatric settings. This article represents a case study of group dynamics in which we reflect on our own experience as psychiatric residents at a Boston-area hospital system in the era of COVID-19 and apply Wilfred Bion\'s concepts of the \"work group\" and the \"basic assumption group\" processes of group operation. We assess dynamics between trainees and administrative leadership both at baseline and in the current pandemic. Since navigation through crises is more effective if group leadership recognizes and responds to basic assumption behaviors, we propose suggestions to enable health system administration to successfully lead health care organizations through periods of societal turmoil. We posit that these principles apply across settings, specialties, and provider types. In addition, we use our observations to indicate future directions for expanding Bion\'s theories in the contemporary context.

With the publication of Wilfred Bion\'s text \'Learning from Experience,\' psychoanalysis was afforded a new schema for understanding the processes and implications involved in an infant\'s contact with their caregivers. As a result, our conception of some of the most fundamental phenomena of psychic life was significantly enriched. By proposing his theory of alpha-functioning, Bion mapped out how meaningful connexions to the internal and external worlds become established in the mind. In contrast, and through working clinically with psychotic patients, Bion revealed how these ties can catastrophically come undone. It is with these ideas, as well as their links to a corresponding set of neuroscientific constructs relating to the Markov blanket and principally developed by Karl Friston, that this paper is concerned. Through an investigation of the psychic functioning originally dubbed \'dream-work-alpha,\' the paper\'s first section focuses on how Bion conceived of the creation of a \'contact-barrier\' that allows for the differentiation of consciousness from an unconscious mind. Casting the ramifications of this organisation in sharp relief, the psychotic disorganisation of the contact-barrier is then explored. The discussion subsequently broadens to incorporate contemporary theories from free energy neuroscience that bear significant and illuminating relations to the psychoanalytic ideas espoused by Bion over half a century ago. Finally, through posing a series of three questions with accompanying discussions, a superimposition of these theoretical schemas is attempted. These suggestions directly address, (1) whether there is an intimate connexion between the interoceptive contact-barrier and the exteroceptive Markov blanket, (2) whether a disobjectalising of the contact-barrier may be reflected as a tear in the functional fabric of the Markov blanket, and (3) what the clinical implications are of working at the level of the projected surface. Ultimately, the aim of the paper is to expose relevant points of contact within and between the varying conceptual frameworks; frameworks that ultimately derive from disciplines that are both concerned with examining the underlying mechanisms of the mind-brain.

While Bion\'s 1967 memory and desire paper reflected a crucial episode in his clinical thinking during his epistemological period, it was also central to his evolution as a Kleinian psychoanalyst who worked with seriously disturbed adult patients. The author explicates and contextualizes these claims with a new archival document, the Los Angeles Seminars delivered by Bion in April 1967, and the full-length version of Notes on memory and desire. Bion here instigated a radical departure from years of theory-laden work when he made his clinical work and ideas accessible to a new audience of American Freudian analysts. While this new group was keenly interested to hear about Bion\'s clinical technique with both borderline and psychotic patients, there were varied reactions to Bion\'s ideas on the technical implications of the analyst\'s abandonment of memory and desire. Both the Los Angeles Seminars and Notes elicited responses ranging from bewilderment, admiration to skepticism amongst his audience of listeners and readers. These materials also however allow for a more complete and systematic presentation of important ideas about analytic technique - and while his ideas in this domain have been long valued and known by many psychoanalysts, this contribution stresses the crucial aspect of the reception of his ideas about technique in a particular American context. American analysts gained a much more explicit idea of how Bion worked analytically, how he listened, formulated interpretations and factored in the analyst\'s listening receptivity in the here-and-now. The author concludes with a consideration of the importance of Bion\'s American reception in 1967.