Wilfred Bion

Wilfred Bion's unpublished lectures at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in April in 1967 represent a unique opportunity for students either new to or continuing in the study of the author's unique psychoanalytic vertex. Here one can both read - and hear - the author's clear exposition of his clinical and theoretical thinking to an audience of primarily Freudian trained American analysts, most of whom were new to his ideas. The first lecture sets out the author's ideas on 'memory and desire' in a paper that set the benchmark in the origins of contemporary Kleinian clinical technique. The author discusses the various factors that facilitate optimal listening receptivity in the analyst, for example how one differentiates the 'K' link vis-a-vis 'transformations in O.' In the second lecture, the author defined projective identification, container/contained and 'beta elements'- and how these ideas serve as an orienting template for the analyst's understanding of 'proto-mental' states of mind, either in psychotic, borderline or neurotic patients. He clarifies these ideas while engaging with the queries of renowned American analysts, such as Ralph Greenson.

'Aguayo and Malin have dug into the past to produce a fascinating insight of a moment in psychoanalytic history. Bion's emigration to America was a geographical expression of his internal journey, and this book captures that inner transatlantic sojourn as he prepared for his expedition. What he searched for was the core to psychoanalytic work, the human functioning out of which a psychoanalyst fashions his specific practice. Bion had begun some years before to think of "intuition" as the required alternative to sense perception, and later he formulated it in his own enigmatic systematised form in Attention and Interpretation. Here he is poised, on a cusp, trying to capture the nature of, and conditions for, psychoanalytic intuition. In these seminars he is both exhorting the practice of intuition over symbolic interpretation, and is at the same time practising something like a spontaneous intuitive grip on his audience as he works. It is full of inconsistencies, mistakes, incongruence, misapprehensions, and above all creative thinking. And perhaps that is the real mixture that makes intuition - in contrast to the formed but distancing effect of his written texts. Of all Bion's later published lectures and seminars this is the prize. It shows Bion struggling to present something really new.'- R.D. Hinshelwood, Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and author of Research on the Couch'These lectures capture Bion's thinking at a unique time in his theoretical and personal development and give the reader a firsthand glimpse of his immersion in a new psychoanalytic culture - the community of psychoanalysts in Los Angeles. This book is a fascinating page-turner that recounts through Bion's animated lectures and the audience's responses the story of his American reception in all its richness, controversy and liveliness. These lectures begin by offering a snapshot of a point in the evolution of Bion's idea about the need for the analyst abandoning memory, desire and understanding as essential to analytic technique, which he links to Freud's concept of free floating attention. The talks move on from this engaging start to cover his theory of projective identification, the container/contained and then gradually the introduction of the concepts of reverence, awe, the relationship between his ideas of the "mystic" and the "establishment" that he expanded upon in his later writings. This is a wonderful book, lovingly edited by Drs Aguayo and Malin, that is essential reading for all therapists, analysts and students interested in Bion's profound influence on contemporary psychoanalysis.' - Lawrence J. Brown, author of Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious: An Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian Perspectives

Wilfred R Bion

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