You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In Los Angeles during the 1960s, a small group of analysts interested in British object relations theory began inviting Kleinian analysts Donald Meltzer, Hanna Segal, and Herbert Rosenfeld to give informal seminars and supervisory sessions on a yearly basis. Following this, in 1967, Wilfred Bion came to present a series of seminars on psychotic states.
The publication of Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision has reactivated interest not only in Bion's work on psychosis, but also, and even more so, in his technical stance. Mazzacane points out that this book can be read through many different analytic lenses—that each analyst can and should read the seminars in a unique way.1
Bion was seventy when he gave these seminars. He was a leading figure in the British Psychoanalytical Society, where he was known for his vast clinical acumen on psychosis and for his methodological interest in expanding psychoanalytic theory, and he had published three important books on theoretical ideas. During the same year as the seminars, he published a book of his early papers on psychotic states, written between