The Long Weekend 18971919 Part Of A Life Bion Wilfred R by Bion, Wilfred R 9781855750005, 1855750007 instant download after payment.

In 1968 a request that he work in Los Angeles provided the opportunity to escape from what he called ‘the cosy domesticity’ of England. The vast open spaces of the western United States awoke in him memories of his childhood in India: the culture, however, was altogether new to him. It released him from the confines of traditionalism and enabled him to entertain his ‘wild thoughts’; his mind was as wide open to new impressions during the last decade of his life as it had ever been in youth. So it was that in the alien, vital, dangerous but superficially idyllic environment of California he was stimulated to write the trilogy, A Memoir of the Future, a psycho-analytically orientated autobiographical fantasy—the most controversial and least understood of his works.

The qualities of courage and leadership, already evident by the time he was twenty years old, stood him in good stead as a psychoanalyst. He made plenty of enemies, as original thinkers always do, but no amount of hostility ever deflected him from his determination to be true to himself and to his beliefs.

Although he originally intended to stay only three or four years in California, he did not return to England until 1979. He died two months later in Oxford, with the ‘dreaming’ spires’ visible from his hospital bed.

Those who were fortunate enough to be touched by his wisdom and affectionate concern were never quite the same again. We who knew him well will carry something of him with us for the rest of our lives.

Francesca Bion

Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

1982