ABSTRACT
In April 1967 Wilfred Bion participate four seminars and a group supervision to members of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and to interested others. One of the many interesting things about these seminars is that Bion is revisiting his work with psychotic patients. At the time of his visit, there was interest in Los Angeles in the possibility of analytic work with psychotic patients. The transcripts are precious for many reasons, perhaps mostly because they document a transformational moment in Bion’s life and thinking. Bion advocated eschewing memory and desire in the context of believing that “something was going wrong in the work in England – not only mine”. Much of what Bion interprets is to do with reality and the patient’s anxiety about it, rather than with unconscious conflict. Ralph Greenson comments that he would not include some of the patient’s behaviour and some of Bion’s interventions as being analytic.
