MemoriaFuturo

Introduction “A memoir of the future”

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It is owing to Claudio Neri’s inspired intuition that we were able to plan this fascinating issue of Funzionegamma on Bion’s Memoir of the Future (hereafter MoF). Inspired for many reasons. Firstly, as a result of the literature’s curious scarcity of works on the Trilogy; and then, because the paradigm prompted by Bion is becoming increasingly well known among psychoanalysts – and moreover in a version that places Italian authors in the forefront; and finally, because focusing on MoF means Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Beyond Containing: World War I and the Psychoanalytic Theories of Wilfred Bion

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Abstract

This article considers Bion’s writings about World War I, from the returning soldier of 1919 to the psychoanalyst in his seventies. It asks how and why his memories of the war shifted over time, and explores the connections between his experiences as a tank commander in the war and his clinical work forty years later. Bion’s psychoanalytic thought shared much with British contemporaries such as Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby in putting early domestic relationships and the maternal relation at the center, but it also bore traces of his war. On the Western Front during 1917-18 Bion was exposed to the kinds of psychotic states he would later observe in his patients. At the same time, concepts such as containing, Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Bion’s paper on arrogance. Reading his personal disaster

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Abstract

Bion’s paper ‘On arrogance’, written in 1957, came at a cross-roads in his life.  Evidence from his various writings is used to demonstrate a change at this time in Bion’s attitudes to himself and to others.  In consequence, Bion’s paper could be read as an insightful exposition of what underlay his own contempt and Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Bion’s Journey Between Bodies to Minds

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Abstract

Bion developed many theories in his life, moving from one to another across a number of causurae.  Beginning with a psychological ideas arising during his medical training as a Doctor, and the influence of the surgeon Wilfred Trotter.  Then later influenced by the social approach of John Rickman to the psychology of groups, and subsequently his psychoanalytic training with Melanie Klein, when he reviewed his psychosocial ideas in terms of psychoanalytic concepts.  And finally his concern with how psychoanalysts communicate their Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Memoir of the future and the defence against knowledge

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Abstract

The Author seeks to show how psychoanalytic work  consents the continuous opening of different possible worlds and the Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Memoir of the future and memoir of the numinous

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Abstract

Starting from the comparison between Jung’s Red Book and Bion’s Memoir of the future thrilogy, the author suggests hypotesis that similarly to what happens for the individual personality – where the eruption of underground experiences confronts us with the emergency of parts of the mind that have not fully come into being or have been precociously miscarried, as they did not found any space within the mind of the object – there also seems to be models and theories that did not find enough space in  Freud’s mind and in the mind of the scientific community that he Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Living in a world with or without memory of the future

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Abstract

The American architect Chipperfield, director of the 13th exhibition of architecture (Venice 2012), in order to correct the extravagant ruptures and homologations which infest contemporary architecture, proposed as “common ground” of the exhibition the triple dimension of continuity, context and memory, specifying that the future of every nation is in its memory, a concept which has become true, in another context, in the words of a common citizen who, eagerly asking for the restoration of a sixteenth-century building damaged by an earthquake, Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Current ideas of Bionian thought on thought

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In this paper the model of “Motivational Darwinism” is discussed. Starting from Bion’s concept of protothought, the author elaborates upon possible relationships between emotional and symbolic representations that arise from experience. The psychoanalytical interpretation is presented as a vitalising summary of emotion and Read more

MemoriaFuturo

“Psychoanalysis, I believe” in wonderland. Reading and Literature in A Memoir of the Future

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Abstract

Instead of calling his trilogy Memory of the Future, Bion has chosen to call it A Memoir. The word used for the Italian translation, memoria, is more ambiguous and omits the distinction. In English the title alerts the reader as to what is to come – a memoir – that is, an account of personal recollections. If we investigate what exactly a memoir is as a literary genre, identifying one of the distinctive traits of the memoir as a “commitment to the real”, and adds that such a genre indicates the fundamental human activity of narrating our life story on its own terms.
Just what constitutes reality and truth, and what might right be considered “facts”, is one of the chief arguments that underpin the dialogues between the characters of the Memoir and which involve the reader so deeply. It may seem paradoxical, but I reckon we can surmise that Bion wrote these books for reasons akin to this “commitment to the real”, even if the reality to which he felt committed is neither historical nor material but mental reality, emotional truth, and the “facts” and “actual events” under discussion are far more complex Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Wilfred’s Razor. A reading of W.R. Bion’s A Memoir of the Future

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The Author claims that Memoir of the Future is a text which develps with aesthetic and narrative methods the conceptual reform that had already out forward in Experience in groups and in Learning from Experience. The epistemological continuity between the Bionian texts is seen as a realization of the theoretical precautions and the methodological preoccupations which have been peculiar of the nominalism and the British empiricism: the avoidance of speculative excesses and the Read more

MemoriaFuturo

The late Bion

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In February 1968, aged over 70, Wilfred Bion moved to California and worked there for a decade, active until shortly before his death.  Only recently have we been able to know more about this period of his life that corresponds to a deep theoretical development that makes the theory and technique of psychoanalysis pivot on the concept of experience of O. The memoirs of his American patients, Grotstein (2007) and Gooch (Culbert-Kohen, 2011) introduce us to Bion at work in his analytical room and show us his “disciplined and focused” Read more