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As Horace said, Vixere Victoria ante Agamemnona multi, and yet the poet had not turned up; so the recording tape was a blank! They disappeared into the shade—unwept! For want of a poet. What a joke!
In dedicating this book to “my ancestors”, I mean primarily the poets and other teachers or parent-figures who have become incorporated into my own internal objects. This is the sense in which Bion means it when he uses the refrain “ante Agamemnona multi”.1 Such figures are remembered through internal transformations by the individual's poetic faculty, so the poet has to “turn up”. At the same time, however, for anyone who has got this far in the book (including myself), there may be a certain interest and relevance in saying something specifically about my debt to some of those people—in particular my family—who have a now historical existence in the field of Kleinian psychoanalysis and from whom I learnt whatever I know about it. Needless to say, there is a significant overlap between the two types of ancestor, but they can be observed from different vertices.