Conversation: Bion and Winnicott: Discussions with Presenters and Participants

This is the transcript of the Online event of the ASantamaria Association on April 23, 2023. The transcript was edited for clarity.

Jani Santamaría

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

My name is Jani Santamaría. I am a training psychoanalyst and a child and adolescent analyst living in Mexico City. The Antonio Santamaria Foundation was created as a non-profit, freestanding, independent psychoanalytic association, in memory of my father who honored and always loved psychoanalytic learning. His commitment to the future of psychoanalysis was unceasing throughout his life.

Today, we are pleased to welcome colleagues from over thirty countries and our five distinguished panelists.

I would like to share with you that when I asked our presenters for the titles of their works, there were some similarities in the titles, so I considered to ask each one for a somewhat more specific title. Then I changed my mind because it would have been contrary to Winnicott's and Bion's philosophy of life, and both always favored spontaneous gestures in becoming and being.

As we know, Winnicott and Bion were contemporaries, born a year and a half apart. Both saw war service at the end of the First World War, although with very different experiences. They had a lot in common, but interestingly, did not refer to each other in their published work. Today, we hope to make up for those missing connections.

In the first part of our program, we will first have the presentation of Angela Joyce, affiliated with the Psychoanalytic Society of London, then the papers by Dominique Scarfone, affiliated with the Canadian Psychoanalytic

Society, Montreal, and Howard Levine, the Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series. After their presentations we will have time for comments and