Without “Without Memory and Desire”: Listening to Bion as if Black Lives Matter

Abstract

Following the George Floyd protests, psychoanalysts, along with corporations and yoga studios, made statements and offered anti-racism reading lists. But what if there is something about psychoanalysis’ attempts to interpret racism that eludes such secondary process thinking? The occasion for this essay is an encounter with a published 1967 Bion seminar that featured a patient’s dream of black people, in which the author examines examples of patient dreams about black people recorded in psychoanalytic articles from the 1940s to the 1970s. The author also recontextualizes Bion's 1967 seminar in terms of what is not included in the volume: the fact that it took place at the dawn of what came to be known as the “Long, Hot Summer of 1967” of racial unrest in America. Finally, the author briefly reconsiders what it might mean to practice without memory and desire when it is the memory of racism, both in the culture and psychoanalysis itself, which is at stake.