‘GETTING TO KNOW MY FATHER, WILFRED BION’
When: Monday 28th April 2025, 7:15pm – 8:45pm
Speaker: Professor Julian Bion, OBE
Chaired by: Laura Chaisty
WMIP CPD group are pleased to be able to offer a talk from Professor Julian Bion, son of influential psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. Julian will describe his father’s life and character, reflect on experiences of his father and the impact he had on him as child and adult.
Julian Bion was Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at University Hospitals Birmingham from 1987 until 2017. He continues to support UHB in the role of Freedom To Speak Up Guardian. He has received numerous national and international awards, and was appointed OBE in 2018.2001:
THE LIFE OF WILFRED BION
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion was born in 1897 in Muttra (Mathura) in the Northwestern Provinces of India, at the apogee of the British Empire. He was brought by his mother Rhoda to England in 1906 at the age of 8.
In 1917 he joined the newly formed Tank Battalion and experienced front-line warfare for two years. Following the war, he resumed his education and qualified as a doctor in 1930. He obtained a training post at the Tavistock Clinic for seven years, where he was Samuel Beckett’s therapist from 1934-6. He joined the Army as a psychiatrist in 1940 and worked at the Northfield Military Hospital in Birmingham where he developed the innovative (and to the military, subversive) technique of using rank-free group activities for therapy of soldiers suffering from ‘shell shock’.
Following WW2 he underwent training analysis with Melanie Klein, focusing on the study of groups. He subsequently moved to non-group psychoanalytic practice, revising his ideas in later papers. In an attempt to bring a degree of objectivity to the process of psychoanalytic thought, he developed a conceptual framework, The Grid, published in 1963.
In 1968 he moved to Los Angeles, feeling the need for a less constraining professional climate. It was here that he wrote his most imaginative work, A Memoir of the Future. Having returned to England in 1979; he died two months later in Oxford, having developed acute myeloblastic leukaemia for which he refused therapy.
FEES
£45 for Professionals
£35 for WMIP members
£30 for Students
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