Wilfred R. Bion – författare

A Memoir of the Future, Bion''s unorthodox attempt to cast psychoanalytic speculation in fictional form, is composed of three semi-autobiographical novels: The Dream (1975), The Past Presented (1977), and The Dawn of Oblivion (1979). Presented here for the first time in one volume, they appear together with the Key to A Memoir of the Future, a glossary of terms and concepts compiled by Wilfred and Francesca Bion.

All My Sins Remembered is the continuation of Wilfred Bion''s autobiography, The Long Week-end. Although it is by no means a full account of his thirty years following the First World War - and he wrote no more - his memories of that period contrast vividly with the impression we gain of the following thirty years of his life through his letters. The Other Side of Genius gives us a glimpse of this remarkable man as his family knew him: those who met him only through his professional work will find here the same characteristic threads of humour, concern for truth, and flashes of insight that were the hallmark of his work in psycho-analysis.OXFORD: ''Thus opened for me a period of unparalleled opportunities to which I remained obstinately blind. I was overwhelmed before I started by the aura of intellectual brilliance with which Oxford was surrounded''.

Cogitations, the last of the posthumous publications, is a collection of occasional writings representing Bion''s attempts to clarify and evaluate both his own ideas and those of others by casting them in written form and frequently addressing them to an imaginary audience. Covering a period between February 1958 and April 1979, Cogitations delves into a wide range of material - psychoanalysis and science, mathematics and logic, literature and semantics. Some form a background to Bion''s theoretical development, showing the doubts and arguments leading to the ideas expressed in his books, others highlighting and detailing some of the more abstract points in them, and some exploring topics destined for books that were to remain unwritten.

Second Thoughts is a collection of papers on Schizophrenia, Linking and Thinking, and is a commentary upon them in the light of later work. Originally composed between 1950 and 1962, it derives its title from the lengthy critical commentary which Bion attached to these case histories in the year of publication, 1967, and represents the evolutionary change of position marked in his three previous books and brought to further refinement in the present work.

Taming Wild Thoughts brings together previously unpublished works from two different periods of the author''s life which are linked, as the author says in her introduction, by the concept of classifying and conceptualizing thought. The first paper, "The Grid", dates from 1963 and is a discussion of great clarity about one of the author''s most widely-used conceptual tools; it predates his more discursive paper of the same title (published in Two Papers) by several years. As a teaching paper on this topic, this version of "The Grid" is without parallel, and will doubtless be of great value to all students of his work. The second part of the book consists of transcripts of two tape-recordings made by Bion in 1977. They underline his interest in "wild" or "stray" thoughts; and they provide an insight into his extraordinary sensibility at the time of A Memoir of the Future.

Transformations continues the investigation of various aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice which the author commenced with Learning from Experience (1962) and pursued in Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963). In this third work published in 1965, the author examines the ways in which the analyst''s description of the original analytic experience, mediated by theory, necessarily transforms it in the course of effecting an interpretation.

Bion''s War Memoirs is perhaps the most exceptional piece of autobiography yet written by a psychoanalyst. The first section of the book is documentary, consisting of the entire text of the diaries which the author wrote as a young man to record his experiences on the Western Front in 1917-1919, and this volume also includes the photographs and diagrams with which he illustrated his recollections. The diaries are followed by two later essays, in which he reflects upon his wartime experiences. The author has long been renowned as one of the great psychoanalysts, his career spanning much of the twentieth century and making him one of the most influential names in the field. The author''s war diary, which he kept with him during combat, covered his years fighting in France during the First World War. He was just twenty years old when he began writing it. War Memoirs constitutes the final part of the author''s autobiography.