Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Francesca Bion, Wilfred Bion's wife and original editor. I have worked closely with her in detecting and correcting those errors that escaped the editing process in some of the works when they were first published and in deciding the order of the works for the fifteen volumes.

Wilfred Bion was, from the 1950s to 1979 when he died, a major contributor of new ideas to psychoanalysis. Without Francesca's intervention, it is certain that much of his work would not have been published – remaining only as Bion's working notes, possibly to have been disposed of after they had served him as required during a particular period. The posthumous ones – Cogitations, for example, which contains notes that make explicit much of the ‘bridging work’ left out, behind the scenes, in his published work – would not have seen the light of day. Even the papers written between 1943 and 1952, collected and combined in 1961 as Experiences in Groups would have remained disparate, fragmentary contributions, read by a few, had Francesca not played a major role in getting them published together.

I would also like to thank Oliver Rathbone of Karnac Books, the primary publisher of Bion's work. Oliver has been a driving force for this project and has given invaluable support in making resources available for it. I would also like to thank Eric and Klara King of Communication Crafts, specialists in book and journal project management, for their invaluable and patient help in rendering this work into a form for publication. Their long experience in working on books by Bion has greatly facilitated the production of the Complete Works. I thank them for their dedicated, conscientious and meticulous work. They remained undaunted by the enormity of the task; I am sure that nobody else could have done such a good job.