"Reappraising John O. Wisdom's Critique of W.R. Bion's Learning from Experience at a meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society-17 October 1964."

The paper takes up Wisdom's (1964) little known but significant critique of Bion's book, Learning From Experience. While Wisdom appreciates Bion's clinical and theoretical innovations, he criticised the at times confusing structure of themes that were not sufficiently segregated, the extraneous use of mathematical notation, and the scientific/deductive part of Bion's monograph. In deploying a crucial distinction from Wisdom's critique, one that separates the scientific/deductive aspect of Bion's work from its clinical/inductive trajectory, the author offers an approach to reading Bion's complex text.

THE STUDY AND TREATMENT OF MOTHERS AND INFANTS, THEN AND NOW: MELANIE KLEIN'S "NOTES ON BABY" IN A CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC CONTEXT.

This paper draws on Melanie Klein's (unpublished) observational notes of her infant grandson, written primarily in 1938 and 1939. Apart from moving glimpses into a young family's life, the notes contain astute observations of an infant's behavior and emotions. Compared with Klein's published writings, the style is less theoretical and polemical. Later, in his latency years, Klein's grandson was in analysis with Marion Milner, who in 1952 published a paper drawing on the treatment. The present paper focuses on (1) how observations and treatment of the same child and his family by clinicians in close relationships with each other (Klein, Milner, and Winnicott) fertilized reciprocal influence but also brought into question the validity of Klein's observations, and (2) the relative merits and contributions of various modalities in understanding the infant's psyche, including experimental research, direct observation, parent-infant psychotherapy, and reconstructions from older patients-as occurs, for example, in psychoanalysis.

RETHINKING THE ROLE OF SMALL-GROUP COLLABORATORS AND ADVERSARIES IN THE LONDON KLEINIAN DEVELOPMENT (1914-1968).

The authors historically situate the London Kleinian development in terms of the small-group collaborations and adversaries that arose during the course of Melanie Klein's career. Some collaborations later became personally adversarial (e.g., those Klein had with Glover and Schmideberg); other adversarial relationships forever remained that way (with A. Freud); while still other long-term collaborations became theoretically contentious (such as with Winnicott and Heimann). After the Controversial Discussions in 1944, Klein marginalized one group of supporters (Heimann, Winnicott, and Riviere) in favor of another group (Rosenfeld, Segal, and Bion). After Klein's death in 1960, Bion maintained loyalty to Klein's ideas while quietly distancing his work from the London Klein group, immigrating to the United States in 1968.

Bion's Notes on memory and desire--its initial clinical reception in the United States: a note on archival material.

While Bion's 1967 memory and desire paper reflected a crucial episode in his clinical thinking during his epistemological period, it was also central to his evolution as a Kleinian psychoanalyst who worked with seriously disturbed adult patients. The author explicates and contextualizes these claims with a new archival document, the Los Angeles Seminars delivered by Bion in April 1967, and the full-length version of Notes on memory and desire. Bion here instigated a radical departure from years of theory-laden work when he made his clinical work and ideas accessible to a new audience of American Freudian analysts. While this new group was keenly interested to hear about Bion's clinical technique with both borderline and psychotic patients, there were varied reactions to Bion's ideas on the technical implications of the analyst's abandonment of memory and desire. Both the Los Angeles Seminars and Notes elicited responses ranging from bewilderment, admiration to skepticism amongst his audience of listeners and readers. These materials also however allow for a more complete and systematic presentation of important ideas about analytic technique - and while his ideas in this domain have been long valued and known by many psychoanalysts, this contribution stresses the crucial aspect of the reception of his ideas about technique in a particular American context. American analysts gained a much more explicit idea of how Bion worked analytically, how he listened, formulated interpretations and factored in the analyst's listening receptivity in the here-and-now. The author concludes with a consideration of the importance of Bion's American reception in 1967.

The role of the patient's remembered history and unconscious past in the evolution of Betty Joseph's 'Here and now' clinical technique (1959-1989).

The author historicizes one aspect of Betty Joseph's ongoing technical contributions in terms of its originating London kleinian context. Early on she drew upon both the patient's remembered history and unconscious past, linking these experiences in past-to-present transference interpretations in order to effect psychic change. In evolving the technique of 'here and now' analysis, Joseph came to emphasize a communicative definition of projective and introjective identification as well as the significance of enactments while marginalizing the use of part-object anatomical interpretative language. She gradually set aside directly linking the patient's past with the present, compelled now by making direct contact with her patients. She now tracked how difficult patients acted in and responded to interpretations from moment to moment. The author maintains that the explicit and implicit conceptual work of Wilfred Bion as well as Joseph's continuous group workshop for analysts led to an increased understanding of the patient's projective impact on the analyst's countertransference responses, and thereby increased the analyst's capacity with 'difficult to treat' narcissistic spectrum patients described by her colleague, Herbert Rosenfeld. In recent work, while Joseph continues to elucidate what patients recall about their early past, she formats her understanding in terms of a direct analysis of the structure of the patient's projected internal object relations in the transference. The analyst works with the patient's communications and enactments, with a greater emphasis on a more 'inside-to-outside' understanding of transference in contrast to the earlier 'past-to-present' work associated with both Freud and Klein. This investigation concludes with one example of Betty Joseph's significant impact on contemporary kleinian technique by taking up some of Michael Feldman's work. Now the analyst listens to the 'past presented,' the patient's projected internal world, as well as tracks how the patient hears and subtly mishears interpretations for defensive, equilibrium-maintaining purposes, as the analyst attempts to effect psychic change by widening the ego's perceiving functions.

On understanding projective identification in the treatment of psychotic states of mind: the publishing cohort of H. Rosenfeld, H. Segal and W. Bion (1946-1957).

A publishing cohort of Kleinian analysts - Rosenfeld, Segal and Bion - implemented Klein's (1946) notions of projective identification and the 'paranoid ' and 'schizoid ' positions in the understanding of a group of psychotic disorders. The author differentiates Klein's (1946)Notes on some schizoid mechanisms paper from its revised version of 1952, maintaining that it was Rosenfeld's clinical work during this period that helped to centralize Klein's redefinition of projective identification. The stage was set for Segal 's contribution in terms of 'symbolic equations,' where the psychotic's attack on the breast left him incarcerated in internal torment and persecution, where things-in-themselves were confused with what they symbolically represented. Segal in turn linked psychotic to normal, paranoid-schizoid to depressive positions, where by means of projective identification and symbolic imagination, the patient could arouse feelings in the analyst related to sadness, guilt and loss. Bion assumed that psychotic pathology reflected disordered thinking, when the severely disturbed used language as a mode of action. The psychotic was profoundly confused between the use of thought and action in the natural world - where thought was required, he preferred action and vice versa. Bion also drew upon projective identification in a new, broader way, so that analysis could now become more of an intersubjective, bi-directional field of projective and communicational influence between patient and analyst. The paper concludes with the impact of the work of Rosenfeld, Segal and Bion and variations on the technique of analyzing psychotic states in terms of the patient's early history, transference and countertransference.

Reassessing the clinical affinity between Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott (1935-51): Klein's unpublished "Notes on baby" in historical context.

The author investigates the clinical affinity between Klein and Winnicott (1935-46) asa way to historically situate Winnicott 's later criticism of Klein's 'temperamental' inability to understand the impact of the environment on the infant's development. By setting out Klein s theories at the time when Winnicott began supervision with her in 1935, a context is established for the analysis of an unpublished 1937 manuscript by Klein ('Notes on baby'). The author argues that this direct and extensive infant observation demonstrates Klein's sensitivity to the familial environment. While Winnicott as a paediatrician showed enthusiasm for Klein s ideas, he also demonstrated a difference of opinion in emphasising the maternal environment of provision after his wartime evacuation experiences with London children. The factors leading to their mutual distancing are outlined as follows: (1) the post-Controversial Discussion atmosphere of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1944. The new non-aligned psychoanalytic 'middle group' allowed Winnicott to take a pick and choose attitude towards available analytic theories; (2) Winnicott us new clinical practices and theory differed from Klein 's, leading to a widening gap between 1946 and 1951. Winnicott's new theory and practice simultaneously represented his technical marginalisation of Klein s emphasis on the direct analysis of the patient s destructiveness by the time he delivered the 'Transitional objects' paper in 1951.