"This book will change how you think about thinking. Naomi Wynter-Vincents tremendously enlivening study draws on significant, consequential affinities between Bions ideas and the work of literary writers. We come to understand how Bion thought and how he considered thinking. In the process, we benefit from clear, searching accounts of his idiosyncratic and highly influential psychoanalytic inventions (alpha-function, beta-elements, bizarre objects, O, and the Grid, to name a few). Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism reminds us how exciting, inventive, necessary and sometimes maddening thinking can be, and how courageous and important a thinker Bion is for us today." - Sarah Wood, Reader in English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Kent (retired), Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice
"Wynter-Vincent has written a luminous and deeply compelling book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in creativity, literature and psychoanalysis. It is both a wonderfully clear introduction to Wilfred Bions work, and a series of enthralling encounters that puts his thinking in contact with Freud, Stevie Smith, B.S. Johnson, Jean Rhys, J.G. Ballard and other writers, to remarkably illuminating effect." Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex.
'Wynter-Vincent has written a luminous and deeply compelling book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in creativity, literature and psychoanalysis. It is both a wonderfully clear introduction to Wilfred Bions work, and a series of enthralling encounters that puts his thinking in contact with Freud, Stevie Smith, B.S. Johnson, Jean Rhys, J.G. Ballard and other writers, to remarkably illuminating effect.'
Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex
'This book will change how you think about thinking. Naomi Wynter-Vincents tremendously enlivening study draws on significant, consequential affinities between Bions ideas and the work of literary writers. We come to understand how Bion thought and how he considered thinking. In the process, we benefit from clear, searching accounts of his idiosyncratic and highly influential psychoanalytic inventions (alpha-function, beta-elements, bizarre objects, O, and the Grid, to name a few). Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism reminds us how exciting, inventive, necessary and sometimes maddening thinking can be, and how courageous and important a thinker Bion is for us today.'
Sarah Wood, Reader in English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Kent (retired); Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice
Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism is psychoanalytic literary criticism at its most nuanced and self-reflective. Even when Wynter-Vincent suggests that Bions oeuvre offers a discursive account of moments in literature that border on the inexplicable and the bizarre [] she scrupulously eschews a tendency to posit these literary texts as straightforward Bionian allegories, lacking a formal and aesthetic specificity of their own. Indeed, her close readings uphold those ground rules of literary criticism that are often overlooked in reductive psychoanalytic readings of literature.
Jivitesh Vashisht, Junior Anniversary Fellow at IASH, Edinburgh, and the Brotherton Fellow at the University of Leeds. To read this review in full, please see the following: Jivitesh Vashisht, Psychoanalysis, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2022; https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbac015
