ABSTRACT
"Memory and desire" was one of Bion's late papers, written at a time when he had begun to suffer small strokes. After publishing this paper, Bion published only one major analytic work, Attention and interpretation, and six very brief, relatively minor papers in the decade before his death in 1979. Bion begins the paper with a series of direct statements that point out the unreliability of memory and desire as mental functions suitable for the analyst's use in his critical thinking and scientific judgment. Memory is always misleading as a record of fact since it is distorted by the influence of unconscious forces. It is important to note that Bion is unequivocal about the necessity to abstain from memory and desire. It is important to keep in mind that Bion is focusing in "Memory and desire" on one aspect of analytic methodology: the analyst's work of becoming intuitively at one with the patient's psychic reality.
