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.
This slim volume is a record of four seminars and a group supervision session that Wilfred Bion provided to members of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and interested others in April 1967. The editors recovered tape recordings of these presentations made by the father of the second editor. Joseph Aguayo is a historian of Bion and Klein as well as a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California. Barnet Malin is a training and supervising analyst at the same institute and at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. This book begins with a forward by James Grotstein, an analysand, mentee, and prominent proponent of Bion's thought. This transcription of Bion's seminars and supervision is a work of love by individuals with various profound connections to Bion and his work. Malin describes the “welcoming attitude, open curiosity, and vigorous, respectful debate between analysts holding very different perspectives” (p. vii). Like many, I admire Bion's work and feel it is very important, but I have difficulty understanding it. I find Bion's work to be densely written, and I often find it hard to conceptualize his ideas. What I understand about it convinces me that I want to incorporate more of it in my growth as an analyst. I was delighted when a friend told me that Bion is much easier to digest in his published seminars than his own books, and that the Los Angeles seminars had just been published. I found this to be true. I feel the best I can do in this review is to summarize some of what Bion says in these seminars and supervision and offer my own reflections according to what I understand.
Bion gave these seminars and supervision the year before he moved to Los Angeles. The editors' introduction is so useful that I will borrow freely from it, sometimes without using quotation marks. In the introduction, the editors describe the formation of a study group, which led to an invitation to British analysts to visit Los Angeles in t