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.
Many years ago, I attended a conference in London to honor the work of Betty Joseph, called “Here and Now.” It was a wonderful and lively gathering featuring several papers, one given by Edna “Red” O'Shaughnessy, which is included in this volume. As part of the discussion, four outstanding British women psychoanalysts spontaneously relayed various memories of their work with Wilfred Bion: Betty Joseph, Hanna Segal, Irma Brenman Pick, and O'Shaughnessy. They discussed their recollections of how Bion supervised, the kinds of things he might and might not address. I felt pleased and excited to be a witness to this discussion—a moment that was at once so vividly rooted in the present and yet so filled with the impact of history.
The life—the vitality of centrally important psychoanalytic figures—was present in these recollections. It is also present in this book, a collection of O'Shaughnessy's essays and papers written over the past forty-five years. O'Shaughnessy writes the Kleinian tradition; the lessons of Rosenfeld, Bion, Klein, and Joseph are written into her thinking and into her work.