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Even the simple act which we describe as ‘seeing someone we know’ is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end … each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.
Bion's original presentation of his ideas on memory and desire, given on 16 June 1965 at a Scientific Meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society, was not published at the time because he gave it without notes, apologizing to his audience at the beginning and undertaking to provide a written version at some point. He said that if he had written down at that stage what he wanted to say about the two terms of the title that were the subject of his paper, he felt it would have made little sense. He preferred to speak it before expressing it in written language. In 1967 he published the bare bones of the paper as a two-page article, “Notes on Memory and Desire”, in the Psychoanalytic Forum; it was reprinted in Melanie Klein Today, Volume 2: Mainly Practice (1988), edited by Elizabeth Spillius, and was also appended at the end of the 1994 edition of Bion's Cogitations. When Bion presented that cut-down, gnomic account, several analysts took part in the discussion of it, but only Bion's responses were published at the time. It is notable that in response to questions concerning the role of one of the terms he addresses in the paper, memory, Bion made a distinction between the kind of memory that interferes with analytic receptivity and a different kind, more akin to a suddenly recalled dream, which “swims into view”. For this phenomenon Bion preferred the term evolution.