These two talks given in 1977 and 1978 in New York and Sao Paulo respectively are an edited version of discussions and spontaneous contributions made by Bion, in the main without notes. This is a new 2019 edition, edited and introduced by Meg Harris Williams.
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (1897–1979) was born in India in the days of the British Raj, and was sent to school in England at the age of eight. During the First World War he joined the Tank Corps and served in France where he was awarded the DSO. After the war he read History at Queen’s College, Oxford, studied medicine at University College London, and then turned to psychoanalysis, to which he devoted the remaining fifty years of his life. He had analyses with John Rickman and then Melanie Klein. During the Second World War he and Rickman were in charge of the psychiatric rehabilitation wing at the Northfield military hospital. He was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965 and moved to California in 1968, returning to England two months before his death in 1979.
Bion’s books include: Experiences in Groups (1961), Learning from Experience (1962), Elements of Psycho-analysis (1963), Transformations (1965), Second Thoughts (1967), Attention and Interpretation (1970). He also wrote the autobiographical A Memoir of the Future (3 volumes, 1975–79), The Long Week-End, and All My Sins Remembered. In addition to many papers, there are several collections of his talks and seminars.
