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“Who Is Afraid of Wilfred Bion?” contains updated notes prepared for the opening presentation of a two-day meeting, arranged by the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, 12-13 October 1985 on Bion's work. Other papers at the meeting were on groups, thinking, epistemology, the Grid, the psychotic core, the present London view of Bion, and Bion's creative but classical exploration of unconscious processes. An audiotape of Bion was discussed. The other speakers were Caron, Ganzarain, Gorski, Grotstein, Mason, Patterton, Paul, Vaquer, and Wisdom.
During the past few months I have sweated words trying to overcome my fear of confusion in trying to decide what I want to write about Wilfred Bion. You have begun to read the result.
I could try to summarize all he has written: his analytic articles, his books, his autobiography from age nine to twenty-one, his trilogy, The Memoirs of the Future, which I can assume, or at least hope, you have all read (I could ask how many times?) and whether with each reading you found a new meaning, and made a new interpretation, and had new memories of what you had said to a certain patient, or new thoughts about what you might have said to a certain patient, or of what you are going to say to a certain patient, or of what a certain patient said to you.
No wonder that many fear reading Bion—fear their anger at confusion, bewilderment, enlightenment, curiosity, wondering when more of what he