PS<->D

I would like to present this meeting with a small «unpublished object» by W.R. Bion which seems to illuminate a facet of his way of working and which perhaps makes one of the problems in which he was much immersed towards the end of his life more explicit. The problem is that of how to make the emotions which permeate the abstract formulations of psychoanalytical theories come alive for the reader or the listener.

This sort of problem has been present in Bion's work from «Second Thoughts» onwards, when he states that: «The subject matter with which psychoanalysis deals cannot employ any form of communication which can cater for the requirements of a problem in the absence of the problem». It seems to me that this statement implies Bion's desire to make the subject of the discussion emotionally present for the reader so that it is then possible to discuss it at once with an immediate awareness of the emotional aspects. It seems, too, that this sort of interest lies behind the choice of the atypical style of the trilogy «A Memoir of the Future» and is the principal reason for the alternation of strongly emotionally evocative parts with others of critical comment and reflection. This work, by the way, has hardly been mentioned during this meeting, and is probably part of what has still to be throughly digested, as Meotti says, before it can become available for being forgotten. In any case I think that this problem had already received a different sort of solution which was not a purely literary one, on a very reduced scale