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Antonino Ferro (Italy) presided over this double panel made up of four analysts: Joseph Aguayo (USA), Lawrence Brown (USA), Barnet Malin (USA), and Rudi Vermote (Belgium), and two discussants, Robert Hinshelwood (UK) and Ferro himself. Hinshelwood served as discussant for Aguayo and Malin's papers, both of which focused on Bion's later period of work, in Los Angeles.
Hinshelwood noted that this was an historical moment due to the book just released by Aguayo and Malin (2013), Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision. These taped seminars and supervision, given to members of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute in 1967, reflect the development of Bion's ideas from the ‘middle’ to ‘late’ period of theory building, the transition from ‘K’ to ‘O’. Hinshelwood noted Bion's use of intuition, the concept of ‘O’, and what that might mean. Most important here was being able to hear audio recordings of Bion's remarkably plain and direct English.
Aguayo posed the question of whether Bion was developing a divergence or an evolution of Kleinian technique, a focus of controversy for many years. Aguayo thought there was a theoretical caesura in Bion's analytic stance. Bion incorporated Klein's technique, then transformed it, defining new work to be done beyond the borders of current practices. Bion advocated that the analyst allow for a ‘penumbra’ of associations, loose definitions, urging analysts to develop their capacity for a disciplined sort of fresh listening receptivity in an unsaturated field.
Malin's paper included several taped clips of Bion's supervision of a group of young analysts. Malin highlighted the deliberate structural incompatibility between ‘K’ and ‘O’ regarding language and non-language based mental states. The audio tapes show Bion's efforts to demonstrate that the analytic stance of attending first to transformations in O (rather than those in K) profoundly alters the nature of psychoanalytic attention and interpretation. Bion worked hard to draw