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by João Sousa Monteiro (Author)
Through a richly detailed close reading of Wilfred R. Bion's work on dreaming, as scattered across multifarious and largely unworked texts, this book argues that Bion's thinking can form a unified theory of dreams which extends and has further implications as a visionary model of the mind.
The central quality of Bion's visionary model of the mind is the belief that all that is interesting in the human mind pulsates with an unreadably complex dynamic beyond the unknown, the unknowable and the unthinkable. However, rather than interpreting this negatively, the author understands the inevitable unknowability of the human mind as a call to perplexity and wonder which actively encourages the intuition of fundamental insights into who and what determines our internal lives. A major implication of this belief is that psychoanalysis is itself essentially about the unknown, and Monteiro generates informed observations about how this may influence psychoanalytic work.
Providing renewed insight into psychoanalytical understandings of dreams, this book is essential reading for any psychoanalyst wishing to broaden their knowledge of the importance of Wilfred R. Bion's dream work.
Author Biography
João Sousa Monteiro has been a psychoanalyst in private practice in Lisbon. He has worked under the supervision of Donald Meltzer, meeting him in Oxford every month for 13 years, and twice monthly for the last few years. Meltzer supervised all his clinical cases during these years. He authored Long-term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer: The Tragedy of Triumph (Routledge, 2019), which describes in great detail the supervision of a particularly demanding analysis over 12 years. João has made five radio programmes on psychoanalysis, four of which are in conversation with distinguished analysts, including a co-founder and former president of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Society. Four books came from these programmes, one of which he authored, and the other three he edited.
