This book examines the importance and continued relevance of A Memoir of the Future in understanding and applying Bion’s work to contemporary psychoanalysis. Bion continued to innovate throughout his life, but the Memoir has been largely overlooked.
Focusing on A Memoir of the Future is not only of deep interest in terms of the author’s biography, or even only in function of a better understanding of his theoretical concepts, but can also be considered, for all intents and purposes, the final chapter of an ingenious creative enterprise While by some it was thought as the evidence of Bion’s presumed senility, this book challenges that perspective, arguing that it represents the last challenge he issued to the psychoanalytic Establishment. In each chapter, the authors explore this notion that A Memoir forms an essential part of Bion’s theory, and that in it he establishes a new ‘aesthetic’ psychoanalytic paradigm.
With an international list of distinguished authors, this is a key book for any analysts interested in a comprehensive understanding of Bion’s work.
Psychoanalysis is indebted to Bion for some of its most original moments. He took it to its limits, establishing a dialogue with other disciplines and integrating the arts and sciences. This dialogue generated innovating questions that transformed the psychoanalitical technique. Bion conceived of the mind as a universe expanding, and psychoanalysis as a powerful, disruptive idea. His hypotheses significantly developed psychoanalytical clinical practice through its transformative model of mental growth. Bion extended our understanding of protomental and pre-natal phenomena, the mysterious transformations in hallucinosis, and the role of psychoanalytical intuition.
Psychoanalysis needs to include and incorporate emotional experiences that cannot immediately be apprehended by the senses, just as post-Newtonian physics has come to access infrasensorial phenomena. The Copernican revolution that Bion introduced is implied in his ideas of catastrophic change, transformation, and 'at-one-ment', which imply a new conception of analysis - not only as a process towards knowing oneself but also to be in 'at-one-ment' with what one is becoming. The chapters containing theoretical and abstract notions are followed by discussions of contemporary film, used as clinical illustration. The final chapter, concerning the primitve mind in Bion, has an original approach with its elaboration of the concept of 'tropisms'.
This book aims at providing further contributions inspired by Bion's paper Attacks on Linking (1959) by a distinguinshed group of scholars who have focused on different aspects of his propositions.
Contributors: Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Rachel B. Blass, Ronald Britton, Catalina Bronstein, Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros, Elizabeth Lima da Rocha Barros, Antonino Ferro, Jay Greenberg, Monica Horovitz, Clara Nemas, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Rudi Vermote
The discovery, translation into English, and publication of these previously unpublished recordings of Bion’s clinical supervisions in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with commentaries by leading Brazilian psychoanalysts, gives readers the opportunity to experience for themselves his clinical and theoretical thought as it emerges and evolves through a series of fascinating case discussions.
This book consists of a dialogue between a young psychoanalyst, Luca Nicoli, and a renowned teaching analyst, Antonino Ferro. It touches upon many of the key areas of contemporary psychoanalysis: setting, technique, theory, as well as post Bionian models and the "BFT" - the famous Bionian Field Theory devised by Ferro.
Using a friendly, informal style, Ferro and his colleague Nicoli challenge the certainties of orthodoxy, leading the discourse toward the unknown and the as yet undiscovered. Both young and experienced analysts will find not only practical advice in this book but also challenges to their own theoretical and emotional assumptions in the unexplored, ever-changing encounter with the patient. Reading this guide is guaranteed to make them reassess their working methods.
This book explores the concept of “pre-conceptual trauma”, drawing in particular on the pioneering research of Wilfred Bion. A comparison is established between two different groups of individuals: five well-known dictators and five famous creative individuals. The authors have defined “pre-conceptual traumas” as ubiquitous experiences that all human beings go through during the first years of their lives, when a temporary absence changes into a permanent presence, determining the outcome of what any individual might do or perform in the future. Pre-conceptual traumas split the mind into two dialectical and correlated states: the "traumatized" (conflictive or pathological), and the "non-traumatized (developmental or normal).
In Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The retreat in film, Carla Ambrósio Garcia introduces the rich potential of the thinking of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for film theory. By so doing, she rethinks the space of the cinema as a space of retreat, and brings new insights into the representation of retreat in film.
Presented in two parts, the book seeks to deepen our understanding of the film experience and psychical growth. Part I places Bion’s view on the importance of the epistemophilic instinct at the heart of a critique of the pleasure-centred theories of the cinematic apparatus of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Gaylyn Studlar, proposing an idea of cinema as ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’. Garcia then moves from Bion’s epistemological period to his later work, which draws on mysticism, in order to posit an emotional experience in the cinema through which the subject can be or become real (or at one with ‘O’). Part II examines representations of retreat in four European films, directed by Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, and Manoel de Oliveira, showing them to articulate a gesture of retreat as an emotionally turbulent transitional stage in the development of the psyche – what Bion conceptualizes as caesura.
Through its investigation of the retreat in cinema, the book challenges common understandings of retreat as a regressive movement by presenting it as a gesture and space that can also be future-oriented. Bion in Film Theory and Analysis will be of significant interest to academics and students of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and film and media studies, as well as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
The premise of this book is that films, like other works of the imagination, may be elucidated by applying methods derived from psychoanalysis, and that doing so will result in a deeper and richer appreciation of the film's meaning. The book explores a number of feature films that lend themselves particularly well to this process. Both in his introduction and throughout the text, the author comments on the method and discusses continuities, similarities and differences among the films.
The book is structured according to the central themes of the films, including time and death, love and lust, secrets, and human identity. Some of the films are relevant to more than one of these thematic elements. The introductory essay explores the themes, their representation in the films, and the ways in which they may be elucidated by a psychoanalytically informed critique. Brief paragraphs between the sections of the book facilitate the transitions.
In an appendix, there are three essays titled 'Mise en Scene,' 'Whatever Flames Upon the Night,' and 'Mad Doctors.' They are relevant to the similarities among movies, dreams and clinical psychoanalysis. From divergent perspectives, they discuss the ways in which acts of representation are fundamentally transgressive and thereby affect alterations in consciousness for those who witness them.
Wilfred Bion (8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) has been twinned with Jacques Lacan as "inspired bizarre analysts...who demand not that their patients get better but that they pursue Truth". 'Bion's ideas are highly unique', so that he 'remained larger than life to almost all who encountered him'. He has been considered by Neville Symington as possibly "the greatest psychoanalytic thinker...after Freud".
Born in India in 1897, W. R. Bion first came to England at the age of eight to receive his schooling. During the First World War he served in France as a tank commander and was awarded the DSO and the Legion of Honour. After reading history at Queen's College, Oxford, he studied medicine at University College, London, before a growing interest in psychoanalysis led him to undergo training analyses with John Rickman and, later, Melanie Klein. During the 1940s his attention was directed to the study of group processes, his researches culminating in the publication of a series of influential papers later produced in book-form as Experiences in Groups. Abandoning his work in this field in favour of psychoanalytic practice, he subsequently rose to the position of Director of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis (1956-1962) and President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society (1962-1965). From 1968 he worked in Los Angeles, returning to England two months before his death in 1979.
The unfinished film of Bion's Memoir of the Future
The unfinished movie, “A Memoir of the Future”, is based on Wilfred R. Bion’s autobiographical works, particularly A Memoir of the Future, which was a fictional portrayal of psychoanalytic experience, a dream of psychoanalysis, a psychoanalytic dream.
"For Bion, the psychoanalytic encounter was itself a site of turbulence, 'a mental space for further ideas which may yet be developed'." In his unorthodox quest to maintain such "mental space", Bion "spent the final years of his long and distinguished professional life...[writing] a futuristic trilogy in which he is answerable to no one but himself. A Memoir of the Future."
Video footage of Bion's seminar at the Tavistock Centre, dating back to the mid- to late-1970s.
If we accept that "Bion introduced a new form of pedagogy in his writings...[via] the density and non-linearity of his prose", it comes perhaps to a peak here in what he himself termed "a fictitious account of psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream...science fiction". We may conclude at least that he achieved his stated goal therein:
"To prevent someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space".
‘Comparing my own personal experience with the history of psychoanalysis, and even the history of human thought, it does seem to be rather ridiculous that one finds oneself in a position of being supposed to be in that line of succession, instead of just one of the units in it. It is still more ridiculous that one is expected to participate in a sort of competition for precedence as to who is top. Top of what? Where does it come in this history? Where does psychoanalysis itself come? What is the dispute about? What is this dispute in which one is supposed to be interested? I am always hearing – as I always have done – that I am a Kleinian, that I am crazy; or that I am not a Kleinian, or not a psychoanalyst. Is it possible to be interested in that sort of dispute? I find it very difficult to see how this could possibly be relevant against the background of the struggle of the human being to emerge from barbarism and a purely animal existence, to something one could call a civilised society’.
Shortly before his death, reported by Francsca Bion
Bion's identification of reverie as a psychoanalytic concept has drawn attention to a dimension of the analyst's experience with tremendous potential to enrich our interpretive understanding. The courage of these authors in revealing their own process of reverie as transformed into the action of psychoanalysis will inspire and foster further investigation of this fruitful yet heretofore infrequently explored area of psychoanalytic discovery.
The contents of this book represent a series of experiments in dramatizing Bion’s Memoir of the Future, the primary one being an unfinished film begun in India in the 1980s and directed by Kumar Shahani, 'epic' artfilm maker, most of whose films have been produced in Hindi. The film was inspired and initiated by Bombay psychoanalyst Udayan Patel, and sponsored by the Roland Harris Educational Trust. The cast of actors included Jalal Agha, Tom Alter, Robert Burbage, Nicholas Clay, Neil Cunningham, Carol Drinkwater, Peter Firth, Nigel Hawthorne, Shona Morris, Jonathan Page (as a child), Angela Pleasence, Juliet Reynolds, and Alaknanda Samarth.
The filmscript and a commentary are here included, together with a narrative poem written for Alaknanda Samarth who played the Ayah of Bion’s childhood, and a playscript written for Tom Alter who played the Father. The play is due to be first performed in Bombay and Delhi in February 2016.
An appendix reprints a psychoanalytic study of the Memoir by Donald Meltzer, who was closely involved in the production of the original film.
The book is illustrated by screenshots from the film and the ebook contains video extracts.
In the last years of his life Bion gathered unusual manuscripts handwritten in his tidy lettering that assumed the form of a trilogy. Finely typed and edited by his dedicated wife, they were named A Memoir of the Future. Many of the themes of this book were already evident in Transformations and Attention and Interpretation. These earlier books provide many of the theories whose practical counterpart finally found a form in the trilogy: as Bion himself noted, "the criteria for a psychoanalytic paper are that it should stimulate in the reader the emotional experience that the writer intends, that its power to stimulate should be durable, and that the emotional experience thus stimulated should be an accurate representation of the psychoanalytic experience that stimulated the writer in first place."
In this second volume of a much needed introduction to Bion's last work, A Memoir of the Future, Paulo Cesar Sandler continues his detailed and insightful "prelude" to a work many readers have found "obscure, complicated and difficult". The first volume was described as "an exhaustive and generous contribution…to the now globalised psychoanalytic community", in which Dr Sandler "tries to share his own apprehension of Bion’s trilogy in order to allow us to perform our own apprehension of it". Using many quotations from the text of the trilogy and drawing on his own extensive clinical experience, Dr Sandler now continues with his stated aim of helping readers towards their own reading of the original text, and draws attention to the many instances where Bion has given hints and tips that analysts will find useful in their day-to-day practice.
In contemporary psychoanalysis, a key concept and aim of clinical practice is to distinguish the boundaries of any mental state. Without this boundary-setting, the patient has nothing but the 'formless infinite' of primitive mental states. Formless Infinity: Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion draws on the work of these two authors to explore how analysts can work with patients to reveal, understand and ultimately contain their primitive mental states.
Riccardo Lombardi discusses the core concepts of the unconscious, the role of the body in analysis, time and death. He displays the clinical implications of Matte Blanco's theoretical extension of Freud's theory of the unconscious, presenting numerous clinical examples of working with psychosis and other severe pathologies.
Formless Infinity is a stimulating teaching text for students, trainers and seasoned mental health practitioners, is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. It is particularly recommended to analysts interested in widening the scope of the analytic practice by exploring the functioning of the deep unconscious, primitive mental states, psychosomatic pathologies and psychotic conditions.
Contents: Introduction. Emotional Experience and Infinity. Symmetric Frenzy and Catastrophic Change: Bion and Matte Blanco. The Unfolding of the Unconscious Body. The Body Emerging from Formless Infinity. Body, Adolescence and Psychosis. Time in Primitive Mental States. Time, Music and Reverie. Stubborn Silences as 'Playing Dead'. Death, Time and Psychosis.
This book engages a truly international group of distinguished Bion scholars, offering a wide variety of contemporary clinical and theoretical explorations and extensions of the seminal work of Wilfred Bion.
Readers will discover personal accounts of contacts with Bion and his ideas, including an extensive report of an analysis with Bion, as well as previously unpublished supervisions that Bion conducted in Brazil in the 1970s, with commentaries by contemporary analysts. The book also includes detailed case reports and theoretical discussions on a wide variety of topics including autism, psychosomatics, representation, field theory, psychosis and truth; and essays on Sense, Myth and Passion, the late papers, groups and aesthetics.
For both experienced analysts and candidates, for those already familiar with Bion and for neophytes,The Bion Tradition should serve as an essential and up-to-date resource for study, thought and exploration.
Bion's War Memoirs is perhaps the most exceptional piece of autobiography yet written by a psychoanalyst. The first section of the book is documentary, consisting of the entire text of the diaries which Bion wrote as a young man to record his experiences on the Western Front in 1917-1919, and this volume also includes the photographs and diagrams with which he illustrated his recollections. The diaries are followed by two later essays, in which he reflects upon his wartime experiences.
Wilfred Bion has long been renowned as one of the great psychoanalysts, his career spanning much of the twentieth century and making him one of the most influential names in the field.
Bion's war diary, which he kept with him during combat, covered his years fighting in France during the First World War. He was just twenty years old when he began writing it. War Memoirs constitutes the final part of Bion's autobiography. It comprised three hardbound notebooks written soon after he had been demobilized from the Army and had begun his studies at Queen's College, Oxford. He wrote it for his parents as compensation for having found it impossible to write to them during the war. It has been aptly described by Winship (1999) as a 'book about the blood and guts of a youth who cut his teeth in the most devastating of circumstances'.
The actions he describes in War Memoirs are terrifying and detailed. They form the basis for his later understanding, as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, of the inner torments faced by the patients he treated. In Band of Brigands: The First Men in Tanks (2009), Christy Campbell, referring to a segment of Bion's descriptions, wrote: 'Bion... looks repeatedly at how sentient human beings continue to operate when everything around them is dissolving into violent chaos'.
Many years later, Bion returned to his youth and penned two pieces reflecting upon his time at war, which make up the second part of this book. These meditations are influenced by his psychoanalytic training, and show how his approach to psychoanalysis was influenced by his wartime experiences. Together, these diaries and essays provide an extraordinarily vivid and moving picture of war and its long-term effects.
The Analytic Field and its Transformations presents a collection of articles written jointly by Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese over the last few years. All revolve around the post-Bionian model of the analytic field (BFT). Indeed, analytic field theory is emerging as a new paradigm in psychoanalysis. Going hand-in-hand with this is an ever-growing interest in Bion in general. Bion mounts a systematic deconstruction of the principles of classical psychoanalysis. His aim, however, is not to destroy it, but rather to bring out its untapped potential and to develop ideas that have remained on its margins.
In its Italian version, the analytic field theory embraces Bion's both rigorous and radical spirit. BFT is a field of inquiry that refuses a priori, at least from its own specific perspective, to immobilize the facts of the analysis within a rigid historical or intrapsychic framework. Its intention is rather to bring out the historicity of the present, the way in which the relationship is formed instant-by-instant from a subtle interplay of identity and differentiation, proximity and distance.
The truth of the analysis is no longer something one arrives at, it cannot be fixed or possessed; it lies rather in the experience, it is the experience. The answer lies in the question - or, rather, asking the question is the feature of this model that most closely corresponds to the idea that what feeds and grows the mind is the weaving of a sustainable meaning, or dreaming reality, just as in the nurturing relationship between mother and child.
On Minding and Being Minded explores links between depictions of lived experience written by Samuel Beckett and the experience of psychoanalytic psychotherapy pioneered in the writings of W.R. Bion. These robust literary and clinical intersections are made explicit within the demanding culture of twenty-first century psychotherapy as patient demand for time-limited, result-driven therapeutic outcomes conflicts sharply with the contours of intensive, long-term psychotherapy.
Bion and Beckett present elements of familiarity to the practicing psychoanalyst which emerge tantalizingly, out of explicit reach, yet become knowable through interpersonal engagement. These stutterings and intimations are thick with meaning, suggestively presented in passing. They hint at how it is for the patient, provoking excitations of thinking; and, like the mental constructions of us all, their articulation conceals deep artistry.
On Minding and Being Minded provides a therapeutic link bridging the single session with multiple session psychotherapy focused upon the dynamic engagement of patient and therapist. This is the social workshop within which Bion's 'learning from experience' occurs. Not only does the analyst supply the requirements for its construction in provision of space, time, and boundary, but also bears in mind the psychoanalytic object itself, its feel, tang, and experiential shape, initially unknowable to the patient.
Relying on and developing the ideas of W.R. Bion, this book observes psychoanalytic thinking through three prisms: person, group and society. The book is divided into four sections.
The first revolves around the individual. Clinical in its emphasis, it discusses Bion's theory of thinking, his reading of the Oedipus myth and his notion of the 'selected fact'. These are illustrated by vignettes highlighting the emotional aspect of thinking.
The second discusses the small group and its unconscious processes. Although Bion's paradigms have greatly influenced psychoanalytic conceptions of small group processes, this section integrates the thinking of Bion with that of Klein, Foulkes, Turquet, Lawrence and Hopper.
The third, focusing on the feelings of despair and helplessness in the face of repetitive, unending war, is inspired by the author's life in Israel. It relates to society at large and the traumatic history of the Jewish people: the Holocaust is still inscribed in the Israeli social-unconscious and this social trauma has considerable impact on the Jewish-Arab conflict.
The final section elucidates key concepts in Bion's thinking, such as Container and Contained, and the Caesura. It is also clinically oriented, demonstrating how these concepts may shape interventions and interpretations in our work with patients.
This book is one of a short series on the teaching of post-Kleinian psychoanalysis, with a companion volume on Teaching Meltzer.
Wilfred Bion always emphasised that he had no desire to implant his thoughts in others but hoped instead to inspire their own process of self-knowledge or ‘becoming’, which can only take place in the conviction that the mind ‘exists’ and is not merely a figure of speech. He spoke of ‘intercessors’ and cited one of his own teachers, Socrates, on the need to distinguish phantoms from real thoughts, intelligence from wisdom.
Like psychoanalysis itself, teaching is a form of learning from experience, conducted in the context of a joint search with students or colleagues, or indeed patients. A good teacher is essentially a student, and ‘What are you when you cease to be a student of psychoanalysis?” as Bion said. Teaching the work of one’s teachers can be an especially fruitful means of internalising them, and an invitation to others.
The contributions in this book are international and varied in their approach, and have been worked out over time, so offer an opportunity for current and future teachers to experiment and analyse their own methods. Style, cultural context, personal bias and interests are all important in making the teaching situation a live and authentic one from which the participants, and likewise the reader, can select what speaks to them.
Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan by Marilyn Charles takes concepts from the psychoanalytic literature and translates them into user-friendly language. Charles focuses on clinical work with more severely disturbed patients, for whom trauma has impeded their psychosocial development, in order to show mental health professionals how they might use different concepts in their own work.
Psychoanalysis is indebted to Bion for some of its most original moments. He took it to its limits, establishing a dialogue with other disciplines and integrating the arts and sciences. This dialogue generated innovating questions that transformed the psychoanalitical technique. Bion conceived of the mind as a universe expanding, and psychoanalysis as a powerful, disruptive idea. His hypotheses significantly developed psychoanalytical clinical practice through its transformative model of mental growth. Bion extended our understanding of protomental and pre-natal phenomena, the mysterious transformations in hallucinosis, and the role of psychoanalytical intuition.
This book consists of a dialogue between a young psychoanalyst, Luca Nicoli, and a renowned teaching analyst, Antonino Ferro. It touches upon many of the key areas of contemporary psychoanalysis: setting, technique, theory, as well as post Bionian models and the "BFT" - the famous Bionian Field Theory devised by Ferro.
This book explores the concept of “pre-conceptual trauma”, drawing in particular on the pioneering research of Wilfred Bion. A comparison is established between two different groups of individuals: five well-known dictators and five famous creative individuals. The authors have defined “pre-conceptual traumas” as ubiquitous experiences that all human beings go through during the first years of their lives, when a temporary absence changes into a permanent presence, determining the outcome of what any individual might do or perform in the future. Pre-conceptual traumas split the mind into two dialectical and correlated states: the "traumatized" (conflictive or pathological), and the "non-traumatized (developmental or normal).
The book is structured according to the central themes of the films, including time and death, love and lust, secrets, and human identity. Some of the films are relevant to more than one of these thematic elements. The introductory essay explores the themes, their representation in the films, and the ways in which they may be elucidated by a psychoanalytically informed critique. Brief paragraphs between the sections of the book facilitate the transitions.
