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This course will introduce students to the writings of Wilfred Bion, the British psychoanalyst who expanded Sigmund Freud’s and Melanie Klein’s metapsychology. Bion developed an epistemological theory of thinking, surmising that the mind grows when it is exposed to the truth of one’s emotional experience. In his many writings and lectures, Bion developed a sophisticated theoretical model that conceptualizes the transformation of emotional experience into the capacity for thought. While in his early writings he is inspired by life sciences and mathematics, in his later writings Bion shifts away from the scientific view to an aesthetic/mystical vertex, drawing on poets mystics and philosophers, such as Keats, Milton, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, Plato, Hume and Kant.