CLINICAL
SEMINARS

Brasilia and Sao Paulo 
and

FOUR PAPERS

WILFRED R. BION

EDITED BY 
FRANCESCA BION

FLEETWOOD PRESS 
ABINGDON

PREFACE

In 1975 Wilfred Bion and I were invited by Professor Virginia Bicudo to spend the month of April in Brasilia. During that time Bion worked with individuals and groups, gave three lectures at the university, and took part in three panel discussions at the Buriti Palace to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the city. Panel members, representing the arts and sciences, dealt with aspects of the character of the city and the problems involved in forming and developing a new community. I have included his contributions to these discussions.

In April 1978 we spent two weeks in Sao Paulo - our third visit. Bion held fifty clinical seminars, daily consultations, and ten evening meetings (published in Bion in New York and Sao Paulo). Such a volume of work demonstrates his remarkable vigour and stamina at the age of eighty.

These clinical seminars, at which Bion preferred the number of analysts present not to exceed six, were all recorded. I am grateful to those responsible for having made possible this printed version.

Owing to the variable quality of the recordings, I have been unable to piece together some of the clinical material, and after a lapse of so many years it has proved impossible to retrieve what has been lost. The necessity for translation (in both directions) significantly reduced the amount of ground that could be covered in each hour.

I have chosen to publish only those seminars that are sufficiently complete to form a coherent whole. The necessary editing in transferring the spoken word to the printed page has not in any way altered the content of Bion's contributions or his style of expression. I have adopted the same methods as those I used in the past with his approval.

He had no prior view of the material presented; the patients under discussion were being 'seen' by him for the first time. His responses were, therefore, spontaneous and give a clear indication of how he worked as one of the psycho-analytic pair.

The four papers at the end of the book have not previously been published in a book of Bion's work. The first two, 'Emotional Turbulence' and 'On a Quotation from Freud', were included in Borderline Personality Disorders, a collection of papers given at an international conference in Topeka in March 1976, and published by International Universities Press, New York. The other two papers, 'Evidence' and 'Making the Best of a Bad Job'(the last paper Bion wrote),originally appeared in The Bulletin of the British Psychoanalytical Society. I am grateful to I.U.P. and to the Editor of the Bulletin for their permission to reprint.

Francesca Bion Abingdon, Oxfordshire. August 1987