Brief Observations on Memory and Desire

In 1967, Wilfred Bion published “Notes on Memory and Desire,” in which he famously advocated “eschewing” both memory and desire as obstacles to the analyst's unfettered engagement with the patient. In the years since, this short piece has helped clinicians abandon rigid theoretical precepts and clinical agendas in favor of a more direct focus on the patient's emotional experience.

At the same time, however, there seems to be a blind unquestioning of Bion's advice in the analytic community generally. Even now, 45 years after the essay's publication, it is not uncommon to hear someone declaim, “Abandon memory and desire,” with an air of irrefutable authority. More experienced clinicians usually add, with a wink, “Of course, that's not really possible.”

I take that observation seriously. Bion's counsel works well as a spur to theoretical humility and wisely cautions against clinging inflexibly to intrusive agendas. From a contemporary intersubjective standpoint, however, I struggle with a number of somewhat arbitrary dichotomies I find

embedded in his formulations. These problematic epistemological assumptions raise significant questions about the real-world possibility of Bion's approach, as well as the validity of his underlying theoretical suppositions.

Bion begins by stating, “Memory is always misleading as a record of fact, since it is distorted by the influence of unconscious forces” (1967, p. 272). He then proposes similar thoughts about desire. In this way, he divides experience neatly between those processes “distorted” by unconscious forces, and “facts,” which are theoretically distortion-free. Such a presupposition, however, as Gadamer (1966) explains it, is belied by the intrinsic embeddedness of all psychological processes in historical and relational contexts that create delimiting horizons, so that no “fact” is recei