Notes On Bion's “Memory and Desire”

Bion often protested privately that everything he wrote had been said before and that he merely dared to restate those ideas in a way that might shed additional light on them so as to enhance their value. “Memory and Desire” is one of those ideas. He would frequently cite Freud's letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (May 25, 1916) in regard to the value of selfimposed blindness to memory and desire, as well as to understanding and preconception, two other bette-noirs of his. In his answer to the discussants of his article on the subject in the Psychoanalytic Forum, he cites one passage from Freud's letter. “I know that I have artificially blinded myself at my work in order to concentrate all the light on the one dark passage” (Bion, 1967b, p. 280).

Once during my analysis with him, however, he retrieved the volume with the Freud-Andreas-Salomé letter collection from the bookcase in his office and, to the best of my memory,† translated Freud's letter from the German for me as follows: “When doing analysis, one should cast a beam of intense darkness into the interior so that something that has been hitherto hidden in the glare of the illumination can now glow all the more in that darkness.” That was Bion's rendition, albeit with poetic licence, of Freud's statement, which has become the honored template for his stoic rule of abandoning memory, desire, understanding, and preconception, all seemingly debased (for doing psychoanalysis) derivatives of sense-derived information and opinions. This advice emerged from two sources in Bion's experience. The first was his service in combat in World War I. He painfully learned to distrust messages and advice from superior officers at headquarters far behind the lines. “They were propounding theory to us who were actually in immediate experience with the enemy,” he would say. He distrusted psychoanalytic supervision as an authoritative entity and would only agree to “offering a second opinion” about colleagues' (he considered candidates a