DEFAULT_SET: An Introduction to W.R. Bion's 'A Memoir of the Future': Facts of Matter or a Matter of Fact?

In the last years of his life Bion gathered unusual manuscripts handwritten in his tidy lettering that assumed the form of a trilogy. Finely typed and edited by his dedicated wife, they were named "A Memoir of the Future". Many of the themes of this book were already evident in __Transformations__ and __Attention and Interpretation__. These earlier books provide many of the theories whose practical counterpart finally found a form in the trilogy: as Bion himself noted, "the criteria for a psychoanalytic paper are that it should stimulate in the reader the emotional experience that the writer intends, that its power to stimulate should be durable, and that the emotional experience thus stimulated should be an accurate representation of the psychoanalytic experience that stimulated the writer in first place." Was Bion true to his word? It is perhaps left to the reader to answer this question. These books are an attempt to indicate the view that Bion’s attempt was to present the burning flame itself – rather than presenting static photographs of the fire. This book intensifies the stuff of W. R. Bion's contributions by offering us an evocative, enticing work which constantly forces the reader to face up to a most important issue: the attempt to read Bion demands patience and tolerance, as if it were an exercise. This book explores the W. R. Bion's capacity in the'potential space'when fantasy becomes imagination. It looks at what can be called Political Meritocracy—Bion's term for it was The Establishment—and Technical Meritocracy.