Bion’s book, Transformations, is seen as enigmatic, difficult to understand and is the most challenging of all his works. Participants in this program will have the opportunity to read a paper by Dr. Brown in advance of the program that reviews and contextualizes Bion’s Transformations. The program will begin with a synopsis of Transformations by Dr. Brown with an emphasis on the clinical applications of these ideas, which will be followed by a general discussion. Dr. Brown will also present a clinically oriented paper, “Three Unconscious Pathways to Representing the Analyst’s Experience: Reverie, Countertransference and Joke-Work,” that will illustrate some of the clinical relevance of Bion’s book. Following the paper presentation, there will be a Discussant and a general conversation with the audience.
Dr. Brown is a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute (BPSI) in both Child and Adult psychoanalysis and is a supervising child analyst there. He is also on the faculty of BPSI and the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is on the Editorial Board of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and is President of the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies. He was Co-Chair of the Bion in Boston International Conference held in 2009 and also co-chaired the Bion in Marrakech meeting in 2013. His book, Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious: An Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian Perspectives, was published in 2011 and he also co-edited two other recent books He has another book in progress, Contemporary Psychoanalysis: The Theory and Technique of Transformations to be published by IPA Publications and Karnac. He is the author of many papers dealing with such topics as the Oedipus complex, trauma, countertransference dreams, the analytic setting, aspects of Bion’s work, and autistic spectrum disorders in children.