Recollections of Bion's IPTAR Lectures

In the fall of 1977, The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City, contracted with W.R. Bion to deliver a set of lectures to its members and others. They would take place over the course of five consecutive days. Under the same auspices, clinicians might also schedule individual supervision or consultation sessions with Bion. Several did.

Thirty-seven years later, on November 22, 2014, a small group of IPTAR members who had attended Bion's lectures gathered to share their recollections of the experience with an audience of analysts and other Bionians at a conference held in New York City for the purpose of recalling and reviewing Bion's clinical seminars in Los Angeles and New York. I was one of the presenters. The essay that follows was my contribution.

Bion's lectures had been arranged by Saul Tuttman, who was president of IPTAR at the time. He was an analyst, psychologist and psychiatrist whose principal interests, so far as I can recall, were in group therapy. It was perhaps this connection that led him to Bion who was not so well known then as he has since become.

Although there must have been a program committee that planned the event, I don't know who served on it but I doubt they received much gratitude for their efforts after the fact. At the time, IPTAR seemed to be in a transitional phase in which power, prestige, and leadership passed from the so-called “founding mothers” to a coalition of relatively prominent Freudian, male analysts led by Bertram Freedman and a group of his colleagues.

The schedule of Bion's visit called for lectures on each of the five weekdays. The participants could register either for days 1,3, and 5, or 2 and 4. I think I signed up for 2 and 4, but the transcript shows that someone made a comment during lecture 5 that sounded suspiciously like one I would have thought of. It was a quotation from Coleridge's poem “Kubla Kahn” in response to Bion's quoting from Paul Valerie to the effect that

…it is as