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Antonio Santamaría was a pioneer and leading voice of psychoanalysis in Latin America. The A-Santamaría Association was set up in his honour by his daughter Jani
Santamaría Linares to continue her father's love of psychoanalytic learning which, from my very positive experience of her, she also inherited in droves.
This is a highly stimulating collection of papers that grapple in a refreshing, sometimes novel way, with Bion's original texts, some 40 years after his death. In her editor's ‘Introduction’ Santamaría Linares describes the book's context: how in 1997, Bion's first daughter Parthenope – a talented analyst in her own right – organised the inaugural International Bion Conference in Italy to mark the centennial of her father's birth. In the spirit of this tradition, the A-Santamaría Association was organising the first Mexican International Bion Conference, due to be held in 2022, when preparations were interrupted, as with all human activity on the planet, by COVID-19. However, within this dark and unusual circumstance, a series of creative online seminars were conceived, bringing together Bion scholars and an audience of interested analysts and psychotherapists from around the world to present and debate their readings and contemporary applications of Bion's work.
Attending myself, I was invited to deliver a seminar of my own, focused on my research on Bion's first autobiography The Long Weekend (1982/2014). Curiously, I noticed I developed a sore throat and felt strangely tired shortly before speaking; though with a glass of water at my side, my presentation went well. Ironically, I received my first positive lateral flow test the following day, almost two years into the pandemic (this despite having worked face-to-face, with the required PPE, in child mental health clinics in London since the outset)! Well, I was lucky enough to suffer only briefly with what were very mild symptoms. It is the papers from this fascinating set of seminars that are publish