Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision

177 Pages·2013·0.62 MB·English

by  Joseph Aguayo (ed.)

CHAPTERTITLE I
WILFRED BION:
LOS ANGELES SEMINARS
AND SUPERVISION

WILFRED BION:
LOS ANGELES SEMINARS
AND SUPERVISION
Edited with an Introduction by
Joseph Aguayo and Barnet D. Malin
First published in 2013 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2013 to Joseph Aguayo and Barnet D. Malin.
The right of Joseph Aguayo and Barnet D. Malin to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the
Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78049 194 3
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
by Barnet D. Malin vii
ABOUT THE EDITORS ix
FOREWORD
by James S. Grotstein xi
INTRODUCTION
by Joseph Aguayo and Barnet D. Malin xiii
First Seminar—12 April 1967 1
O and the problem of language—memory and desire—clinical
examples—the analyst’s paranoid–schizoid and depressive
positions—audience questions
Second Seminar—14 April 1967 33
Projective identification, container/contained—the
problem of language—clinical example—audience
questions—the mystic and the establishment
v
vi CONTENTS
Third Seminar—17 April 1967 55
Bion’s treatment of a psychotic patient—Bion’s
comments on a case presented by a member of the
audience
Fourth Seminar—19 April 1967 81
Bion’s treatment of a borderline psychotic
patient—audience questions—visual and auditory
hallucinations in disturbed patients and Christian
mystics
Psychoanalytic Case Presentation—13 April 1967 107
The utility of abandoning memory and desire in a
case marked by masses of information from the
patient and the case presenter
APPENDIX
Wilfred R. Bion: Notes on Memory and Desire 133
REFERENCES 151
INDEX 153
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Barnet D. Malin
Joseph Aguayo kindly suggested that I write the acknowledgments
for this volume. We must first acknowledge and thank Francesca and
Nicola Bion, who kindly granted us permission to publish these tran-
scripts. However, we would not have had these seminars and the
supervision today had it not been for my father, Arthur Malin, and
he deserves our greatest acknowledgment for making this project
possible.
Art Malin, being the eager student he has always been, brought a
tape recorder along to these seminars and to the group supervision.
The sound quality of these forty-six-year-old tapes is remarkably
good. Bion’s words and the participants’ comments and questions
sound absolutely vital and fresh, both from the audio and the intel-
lectual perspectives.
We all owe my father a profound debt of gratitude for making and
keeping these tapes, which are now held in the Arthur Malin Audio
Archives.
In addition to their value as archival Bion material, these recordings
register part of the history of psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. They
demonstrate a welcoming attitude, open curiosity, and vigorous,
respectful debate between analysts holding very different perspectives.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We therefore acknowledge with deep gratitude James S. Grotstein
along with Art Malin for their ongoing efforts to learn of and study new
ideas. These two men did so—and continue to do so—not only with
words but also with actions: by forming their study group to broaden
their psychoanalytic horizons, bringing British Kleinian analysts to Los
Angeles to teach them, becoming outstanding and lauded teachers
themselves, and finally, though they went in different directions, by
rethinking and adding to psychoanalytic theory and practice, always
doing so in open dialogue with the psychoanalytic world around them.
We had so many citations of “personal communication” from both
of them for the introduction that we wish simply to acknowledge
them all here. And we especially extend our deep appreciation to
James Grotstein for many years of riveting, informing, and thought-
provoking discussions about his former analyst and mentor, Wilfred
Bion.
We also thank Mark Lindon, JD, for his permission to reprint the
complete article based on Bion’s paper “Notes on memory and desire”
from The Psychoanalytic Forum, which was edited by his late father,
John A. Lindon, MD.
Finally, I would like to thank my colleague and friend, Joseph
Aguayo, for his efforts in making this undertaking happen. His enthu-
siasm and energy fuelled the entire project.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Joseph Aguayo holds UCLA doctorates in both Clinical Psychology
and Modern European History. A training and supervising analyst
at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, he is in full-time private
practice in West Los Angeles. A recipient of a number of research
fellowships from the International Psychoanalytic Association’s
ResearchAdvisory Board, he has merged his clinical and research
interests through numerous publications in the history of Kleinian
and Bionian psychoanalysis. He has published numerous papers from
1997 to 2011 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis—on Klein’s
evolution of child analysis in the context of both controversial and
collaborative relationships with Anna Freud and D. W. Winnicott; the
publishing cohort of Rosenfeld, Segal, and Bion on the treatment and
understanding of psychotic states of mind; and the “here and now”
contemporary Kleinian technique of Betty Joseph. His most recent
publication, “Wilfred Bion’s ‘Caesura’: From Public Lecture to
Published Text” appears in L. Brown and H. Levine, (Eds.) (2013)
Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained (Routledge).
Barnet D. Malin, MD, is a training and supervising analyst at the
Psychoanalytic Center of California and the New Center for Psycho-
analysis in Los Angeles, CA. He is an associate professor of psychiatry
ix