Editor's Introduction. Unpublished Works

The previously unpublished works by Bion included in this volume comprise four papers and ‘Further Cogitations’ from 1968 to 1969.

The first of the papers has the title, ‘The Conception of Man’. It was written originally as a chapter for a planned book of the same title, to be edited by Arthur Burton, who also edited Psychotherapy of the Psychoses (1961). Bion had been recommended as a possible contributor to the book by John Harvard-Watts – who had, around that time, suggested to Francesca Bion that she might persuade her husband to publish as a book the papers of Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (1961). Burton's book was to have clarified how different thinkers conceived of Man, “in his basic nature and humanity.

In the end, The Conception of Man project did not result in a book, and it seems likely that Bion filed the manuscript of his paper and forgot about it. Interestingly, among the other contributors were to have been Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Szasz, and Alan W. Watts; the latter was the author of The Rise and Development of Zen, a book Bion had found of interest in relation to his ideas on memory, understanding, and desire.

At the heart of Bion's conception of man is the problem of living with emotion. Bion began with the question, commonly asked in a different and more peremptory manner than the use to which he put it in the paper: who do you (or we, or they) think you are? He reminds us that phantasies about who we are have a structuring effect on our personalities and on our behaviour towards other people. It seems so characteristic of Bion that instead of answering the question set him by the book's editor – to describe how he conceives of the human being, or human condition – he begins with the fact that we are beings who

form conceptions of ourselves, conceptions that are instrumental in directing the nature of the relationships in which we take part. This emphasis resurfaced in his fin