Annie Reiner, PhD, PsyD, LCSW

Meeting Bion's Challenge: Daring to Imagine
The Selected Fact: A Clinical Case Study

   May 24-25, 2025

Kinzie Hotel

20 West Kinzie Street, Chicago 

& ZOOM

Dr. Annie Reiner is a senior faculty member and training analyst at The Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC) in Los Angeles. Her work was greatly influenced by Wilfred Bion, with whom she studied in the 1970's.  She lectures throughout the world, is published in numerous journals and anthologies, and is the author of four psychoanalytic books, including—The Quest for Conscience & The Birth of the Mind (Karnac 2009), Bion and Being: Passion and the Creative Mind (Karnac 2012), Of Things Invisible to Mortal Sight: Celebrating The Work of James S. Grotstein (Karnac, 2017, and most recently, W.R. Bion’s Theories of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2022). Based on these writings, Dr. James Grotstein ranked her “...high among Bion scholars.”  Her latest book, The Poetry, Art, and Science of Psychoanalysis in Bion’s O (Routledge, projected publication date, January 2025).

Dr. Reiner is also a poet, painter, and a singer, and in addition to her psychoanalytic writings, she is the author of a book of short stories, four books of poems, and six children’s books which she also illustrated. She supervises and maintains a psychoanalytic practice in Beverly Hills, California. 

Synopsis - Saturday Morning Presentation - May 24, 2025

Meeting Bion’s Challenge: Daring To Imagine

Bion’s ideas presented psychoanalysts with many challenges, the most mysterious of which is his concept of “O.” In this lecture, Dr. Reiner examines Bion’s association of O with the mystic, a word he used interchangeably with “genius” and “exceptional person.”  In doing so, Bion broadens the idea of O to include the creative or free thinker in any field, rather than the implicit connection only to traditionally religious ideas of the term mystic. Bion’s perspective is a kind of “secular mysticism,” reflecting a deeply intuitive state that is as likely to be used in science and art, as in religion. One challenge it presents to the psychoanalyst is to how to develop toward this kind of intuition. It brings with it further challenges of suspending ego functions of memory, desire, and understanding in order to facilitate access to an ontological level of truth not previously addressed in psychoanalysis. Dr. Reiner will examine to what extent we have met these challenges, and to what extent the mystery, confusion, and controversies surrounding O obstruct our capacities to do so.

Synopsis - Saturday Afternoon Presentation - May 24, 2025

Mystic Intuition and the Language of Dreams

In this preliminary discussion of Bion’s most mysterious concept of O, Dr. Reiner provides a sense of this controversial and often misunderstood idea, along with a discussion of some of the reasons why it is so often misunderstood. She examines the distinction Bion makes between his idea of the mystic and its usual association with traditional religious thought. He described O as a waking dream state, called it,  “a peculiar state of mind... [where] the margin between being consciously awake...and being asleep, is extremely small”.  (Bion, 1978, p. 41).  However, he viewed this “peculiar state of mind” as the central psychoanalytic perspective, central to clinical work. Dr. Reiner explores the inherent difficulties in making contact with this state of mind, that is facilitated by the discipline of Bion’s well-known idea of the analyst’s need to suspend ego functions of memory, desire, and understanding.   Clinical examples will help in illustrating these essentially metaphysical ideas.Sunday seminar 

Synopsis -Sunday seminar -May 25, 2025

O in Mysticism, Poetry, and Psychoanalysis

Dr. Annie Reiner will discuss in more depth the many aspects of Bion’s most controversial concept of O, representing absolute truth, the infinite, and the Godhead. A discussion of the notion of God in organized religion, versus that which Bion and others have called the ‘Godhead’ helps to differentiate the two.  Bion’s description of O as the domain of the mystic has often been confused with traditional religion that is felt to be anti-scientific, when in fact it is a kind of secular mysticism, as germane to psychoanalysis, art, and science as it is to religious thought. Dr. Reiner quotes Einstein:  

The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest mainspring of scientific research.” (Einstein, 1954, p. 117)

For Einstein, as for Bion, the “cosmic religious experience” differs from the belief in religious dogma, or an anthropomorphic God, as it reflects the natural experience of awe and wonder in the face of a vast and inexplicable universal order that we cannot fully comprehend. 

These and other ideas from Dr. Reiner’s newest book, The Poetry, Art, and Science of Psychoanalysis In Bion’s O, will be explored to help shed light on Bion’s mysterious waking-dream state of O. 

It is the most important function of art and science to awaken [the cosmic religious] feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it. (Einstein, 1954, p. 48)

1 Einstein, A. (1954). Ideas and Opinions, New York: Dell Publishing Company. 

2 Einstein, A. (1950). Out of My Later Years. New York: Philosophical Library. 

Reading:

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning From Experience. New York: Basic Books.

Bion, W. R. (1970).  Attention and Interpretation. London, Karnac

Bion, W. R. (1974). Bion’s Brazilian Lectures I. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Imago Editora Ltda.

Reiner, A. (2022). W.R. Bion’s Theories of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction, London: Routledge 

Reiner, A. (2022). Limitations of Language in the Psychic Realm. In W.R. Bion’s Theories of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (Chapter I, pp. 1-3), London: Routledge, 2022.

Reiner, A. (2022). The Selected Fact. In W.R. Bion’s Theories of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (Chapter 3, pp. 28-39), London: Routledge, 2022.

“What language are we speaking?: Bion and early emotional development. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81(1) 6-26 (March 2021).