A Brief Personal Memoir of Wilfred Bion

I first met Bion in 1949, knew him socially for some years and then, in the course of analytic training, went to him for supervision of my second case some nine years later and continued this for several years after qualification. In the course of supervision, as in some of his writing, he tended to emphasise the importance of not making undue efforts to remember specific ideas, but would say instead: ‘Let the patient remind you’. I have found this comment pertinent to his own ideas and, in over thirty years of analysing, supervising and teaching, I have found myself both with patients and perhaps particularly with students reminded more often of things that Bion has said than any other single source of my inspiration. It is because I have found myself in this way so often reminded of Bion that I have been moved to write this short paper, not with any idea of a systematic evaluation but rather anecdotally to describe some of his perceptions that have come most frequently to my own mind in the course of both treating patients and teaching students.

My experience was that Bion's technique as a supervisor differed sharply from others; in particular from those supervisors who combined an insistence that their students should not take notes during sessions with a requirement that in supervision they should attempt rigorously to reproduce the minute by minute, word by word detail of the session. Whether this is still widely practised I do not know but even then it seemed to me that such a requirement was perhaps impossible to the point of absurdity. In contrast Bion would sometimes say: ‘Don't take notes, keep a diary and on those days when you curse the day you ever heard of psychoanalysis put that down in your diary’. He reminds me of a lecturer in philosophy at Oxford (Gilbert Ryle) who would tell his students that if he caught anyone taking notes in his lectures he would send them out for inattention.

I was never quite able to put his advice about the diary into practic