Introduction to W.R. Bion's 'A Memoir of the Future'
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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.
Paulo Cesar Sandler, MD, MSc, MhFAB, is a Training Analyst at the Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanalise de Sao Paulo, Psychiatrist at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (IMREA) at the Hospital das Clinicas, Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Sao Paulo, and author of several books in Portuguese. He has written many papers and book chapters, some of which have been published in English and French. He has translated most of Bion's books and papers into Portuguese and has organized several international meetings on the work of Bion. Dr Sandler currently teaches in a post-graduate course at the University of Sao Paulo, and at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis of the SBPSP, giving courses about the work of Freud, Klein and Bion. He has worked in private psychoanalytic practice since 1974, having previously worked with psychotics in a traditional in-patient clinic, as well as in group-oriented community psychiatry, including epidemiology of mental disorders, in the local Public Health School.