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in the other IPA regions. One may count the number of class hours offered on Bion by those North American institutes certified by the International Psychoanalytical Association that post their training programs online. In those institutes, the number of seminars covering his work range between none and eighteen. Most offer around four to six classroom sessions over the four or five years of training (the institute offering eighteen seminars is an outlier). If an institute’s curriculum reflects its psychoanalytic values, one may say that North America acknowledges Bion’s work, but does not emphasize it. Relatively few North American analysts would state that they work primarily in accordance with Bion’s approach. Additionally, how one defines terms such as “Bion’s approach” or “Bion’s theory” inevitably reflects one’s personal study and interpretation of his work, which Bion encouraged explicitly. Bion had visited Los Angeles for a set of seminars and supervision the previous year, in 1967. He moved there in 1968, even though his work had little practical influence in the United States. Bion had become very well known in the UK as a leader of the Klein group, and had served as President of the British Psychoanalytical Society, but he detested the politics and difficulties associated with the job. More than that, many of his colleagues began to doubt his adherence to Kleinian ideas as he presented his newer ideas to his colleagues. Invoking Prometheus, Grotstein described why Bion “fled” Britain: “Some say that before he came to Los Angeles, Bion’s liver was metaphorically eaten by vultures in London” (Grotstein 2007, p. 20). Much of the problem centered on Bion’s concept of O — the starting symbol of Bion’s theory of transformations — which he first presented to the society in 1963 (Bion 1963b). Bion quickly found himself marginalized at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, which manifested the prevalent North American psychoanalytic culture of American ego psychology, which itself was deeply averse to Kleinian ideas. He was sought out as an analyst only by a small number of candidates and colleagues. Several of Bion’s analysands began teaching his work locally, but it was his analysand, James Grotstein, whose contributions eventually seeded North America with Bion’s ideas. Recent North American psychoanalytic dictionaries divide Bion’s writings into three periods: the early period, when he explored the functioning of groups; the middle period between mid-50’s and mid-seventies of theory building; and final period when he expressed himself in a literary form (Auchincloss and Samberg, 2012, p. 24). However, as with the international community, ‘Bion-informed’ North American analysts mostly use Bléandonu’s method of dividing Bion’s work into four periods: the early, pre- psychoanalytic group period; the psychosis period, extending from 1950 through 1959; the epistemological period of theory building, from 1962 through 1970; and the later period, which encompasses the international seminars, several short papers, and a three-part novel (Bléandonu 1994). Bléandonu subdivides the epistemological period chronologically into two parts, the later part commencing with Bion’s book, Transformations (Bion 1965). Internationally, some psychoanalysts use only those of Bion’s concepts published up until about 1963 or 1965, while others use all of his work. Analysts internationally have adopted the term “late Bion” to denote his work from Transformations onwards, until his death in 1979. In this context, Transformations (1965) may be viewed as marking both the transition between middle and “late” Bion, as well as origin of the differences between the two groups of analysts working with his concepts. Consequently,
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