A Brief Note on Bion's Los Angeles Seminars and the Problems of Memory and Desire

I tried for ages to read and understand W.R. Bion. His writing seemed so different from the very straightforward and concrete clarity of Winnicott or Coltart and others associated with the British independent tradition. Unlike them, he seemed to write in a cryptic, almost obscurantist way some of the time, reminding me much more of Lacan than of any anglophone analysts. 

When I finally did have some success in reading and appropriating some of what he has written, it proved to be enormously helpful for, e.g., treating schizophrenia, about which I wrote a bit here. His notion of "attacks on linking" is one I find myself calling upon and seeing more and more. Understood in the context of mentalization or metacognition, attacks on links in one's own mind become very problematic even outside of the psychotic patients Bion was focused upon. 

I also finally tracked down and read the original essay from which his claims about starting each session "without memory or desire" are so often extracted and often unhelpfully quoted. I wrote about that essay and book, Attention and Interpretation, here. 

Since writing that piece almost 2 years ago, I have had occasion to read his Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision, and at the very end is a reprint of the essay, "Notes on Memory and Desire" and then a slew of commentators taking issue with it, followed by his response. 

Respondents are therapists from England, Mexico, & the US. Their responses range from saying they find Bion's essay and idea utterly incomprehensible to a rather ambivalent and obviously shaky attempt to agree with him. One says perhaps we should merely regard the paper as "provocatively nihilistic" and that Bion's brevity and "aphoristic" style makes him very difficult to understand. 

Another said he was irritated by Bion, and ready to dismiss his idea but then a long analysis (7+ years, and this a second analysis for this patient) wwas stalled until the analyst abandoned his desires for the patient to get better and his memory of the treatment being in a quagmire, whereupon "to my astonishment, within a week, the analysis was revitalised with totally new and important insights appearing."

Others are much more critical and dismissive of Bion. 

He respond to them all graciously, admitting that his use of "memory and desire" was too ambiguous and he attempts to define these terms more precisely, but recognizing he's probably not going to do a good job of it. He also seems strongly to suggest doing all this only under supervision: "I must warn psychoanalysts that I do not think they should extend this procedure hurriedly or without discussion with other psychoanalysts." At this point he quotes Freud in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, May 25, 1916: “I know that I have artificially blinded myself at my work in order to concentrate all the light on the one dark passage.” 

Finally Bion says nobody should abandon memory and desire who is uncomfortable doing so. I think here he recognizes that his own approach is very sui generis, making him manifestly uneasy with giving recommendations to others. That impression comports with what Michael Eigen and Nina Coltart have both said of him. Coltart, in the last interview she gave just months before her death, and published in Anthony Molino's delightful Freely Associated, said he was a "law unto himself" and that seems very clear here!