Wilfred Bion remains the most cited author in psychoanalytic literature after Sigmund Freud. This volume is based on papers presented at the 2009 International Bion Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts. It represents the state of the art thinking of an outstanding international group of Bion scholars and experts.

This book is a collection of papers by leading contemporary psychoanalysts who comment on the continuing important relevance of Freud's (1911) paper, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. The contributors gathered here represent current European, Latin American, and North American perspectives that elaborate the continuing value of Two Principles for present-day psychoanalytic thinking. Each author examines Freud's paper through a personal lens that is colored by the psychoanalytic culture from which he or she comes. In each instance, the writers' chapters...