On February 21, 2026, the Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy hosted a seminar titled “Reading Bion Together” featuring Avner Bergstein.
Avner Bergstein is a training and supervising psychoanalyst and a faculty member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. He maintains a private practice working with adults, adolescents, and children and has worked for several years in a kindergarten for children with autism. He has authored numerous papers exploring the clinical implications of Bion’s and Meltzer’s writings, and is the author of Bion and Meltzer’s Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life: Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019). A visiting lecturer at several psychoanalytic institutes, he conducts reading seminars on the works of W.R. Bion. He has received the IPA 2021 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl Prejudice Award and the Holtzman Interdisciplinary Prize for 2024.
The seminar took place in person in Sofia and marked Avner Bergstein’s first visit to Bulgaria. This meeting provided participants with an enriching experience involving an immersion in Bion’s ideas as presented in his article “Language and the Schizophrenic” (Bion, 1955). Bion’s text, as well as excerpts from other texts selected by the seminar leader, served as inspiration for a very close examination of Bion’s clinical thinking. The seminar was attended by candidates in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapists from the SPP, and psychoanalysts from the Bulgarian Psychoanalytic Society.
We look forward to future meetings with Avner Bergstein in Bulgaria!
* Image used for the event poster: Franca Sonnino, Book of the Sky, 2023;
