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These three papers, Memory and Desire, Negative Capability, and Break Up, Break Down, Break Through, appear as an addendum or afterthought to the Complete Works of W. R. Bion. Their respective dates—1965, 1967, 1975—indicate a potential line of development of Bion’s thought. The first paper was taken from a transcription of a recorded lecture given to the British Psycho-Analytical Society. A later version appeared in The Psychoanalytic Forum (1967) and was reprinted in the book Melanie Klein Today (Spillius 1988). The second paper, also given to the British Society, was revised and served as the basis for the final chapter of Attention and Interpretation (1970). The third paper was presented during Bion’s stay in Los Angeles.
Each paper was presented extemporaneously without typescript or notes. This was Bion’s preferred form of presentation, a decision that not only corresponded to his temperament and aesthetic choice but probably followed from his emphasis on the importance of the immediacy of experience and its location in the here-and-now. We might wonder if he felt that reading a paper would provide his listeners with a less spontaneous presentation of self that risked obstructing or masking the
Howard B. Levine is a member of PINE, The Contemporary Freudian Society and Pulsion, on the faculty of NYU Post-Doc’s Contemporary Freudian Track, on the Editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series and editor of the Karnac book series, French Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Voices, Classical Texts. He is in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.
immediacy of the moment in his thought and emotional experience and might only add additional distance between himself and his audience. We can speculate that perhaps Bion was as concerned with the emotional experience of the lecture as he was with the emotional experience of the analytic hour. None of these short papers have been previo