Ebook: Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles seminars and supervision

Wilfred Bion's unpublished lectures at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in April in 1967 represent a unique opportunity for students either new to or continuing in the study ofthe author'sunique psychoanalytic vertex. Here one can both read - and hear -the author'sclear exposition of his clinical and theoretical thinking to an audience of primarily Freudian trained American analysts, most of whom were new to his ideas. The first lecture sets outthe author'sideas on 'memory and desire' in a paper that set the benchmark in the origins of contemporary Kleinian clinical technique. The author discusses the various factors that facilitate optimal listening receptivity in the analyst, for example how one differentiates the 'K' link vis-a-vis 'transformations in O.' In the second lecture, the author defined projective identification, container/contained and 'beta elements'- and how these ideas serve as an orienting template for the analyst's understanding of 'proto-mental' states of mind, either in psychotic, borderline or neurotic patients. He clarifies these ideas while engaging with the queries of renowned American analysts, such as Ralph Greenson.;Chapter First Seminar--12 April 1967 -- O and the Problem of Language--Memory and Desire--Clinical Examples--The Analyst's Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions--Audience Questions -- chapter Second Seminar--14 April 1967 -- Projective identification, container/contained--the problem of language--clinical example--audience questions--the mystic and the establishment -- chapter Third Seminar--17 April 1967 -- Bion's treatment of a psychotic patient--Bion's comments on a case presented by a member of the audience -- chapter Fourth Seminar--19 April 1967 -- Bion's treatment of a borderline psychotic patient--audience questions--visual and auditory hallucinations in disturbed patients and Christian mystics -- chapter Psychoanalytic Case Presentation-- 13 April 1967 -- The utility of abandoning memory and desire in a case marked by masses of information from the patient and the case presenter.