Prior to the 1987 edition of Clinical Seminars and Four Papers, these four papers had not been published in a book of Bion's work. The first two, ‘Emotional Turbulence’ and ‘On a Quotation from Freud’, were included in Borderline Personality Disorders, a collection of papers given at an international conference in Topeka in March 1976 and published by International Universities Press, New York. The other two papers, ‘Evidence’ and ‘Making the Best of a Bad Job’ (the last paper Bion wrote), originally appeared in the Bulletin of the British Psychoanalytical Society. I am grateful to I.U.P. and to the Editor of the Bulletin for their permission to reprint.

Francesca Bion

Abingdon, Oxfordshire

August 1987