An Introduction to W. R. Bion's 'A Memoir of the Future'

In the last years of his life Bion gathered unusual manuscripts handwritten in his tidy lettering that assumed the form of a trilogy. Finely typed and edited by his dedicated wife, they were named A Memoir of the Future. Many of the themes of this book were already evident in Transformations and Attention and Interpretation. These earlier books provide many of the theories whose practical counterpart finally found a form in the trilogy: as Bion himself noted, "the criteria for a psychoanalytic paper are that it should stimulate in the reader the emotional experience that the writer intends, that its power to stimulate should be durable, and that the emotional experience thus stimulated should be an accurate representation of the psychoanalytic experience that stimulated the writer in first place." Was Bion true to his word? It is perhaps left to the reader to answer this question. The present book is an attempt to indicate the view that Bion's attempt was to present the burning flame itself - rather than presenting static photographs of the fire.