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I cannot have as much confidence in my ability to tell the reader what has happened as I have in my ability to do something to the reader that I have had done to me. I have had an emotional experience; I have confidence in my ability to recreate that emotional experience, but not to represent it.
When writing about Bion, there is always the danger of squeezing the life out of his concepts — a danger Bion notes to exist whenever we use sensory language to speak of emotional experience. My hope in reviewing this book is to be able to convey something of the excitement inherent in these seminars — an excitement which may be more palpable for us, 47 year later, because of our increased exposure to the work of Bion in the intervening years. It takes a long time, a changed ear, or, rather, another sense altogether to hear Bion.
Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision is the introduction of Bion and his thinking to a predominantly ego psychology audience at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute in 1967. The event was conceived in a study group comprised of four young graduates of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1960s. Bernard Bail, Marvin Berenson, James Grotstein and Arthur Malin invited Bion to address the Los Angeles Institute. The four seminars contained in this book are transcriptions of tape recordings made by Arthur Malin over four days in April of 1967. Following these seminars, Bion, at age 70, terminated the administrative and leadership positions he held in London to live and work in Los Angeles.
In addition to these four seminars, the book includes an introduction, by the editors, Joseph Aguayo and Barnet Malin, which establishes the historical context for the seminars and a short and very sweet foreword by James Grotstein. An appendix contains Bion's original and complete paper, “Notes on Memory and Desire,” with the written responses of five analysts and