Background and Setting

A figurative and free-ranging psychoanalytic novel was not something Bion would have felt free to write and – more to the point – to publish had he and his wife, Francesca, not moved to Los Angeles, which they did in 1968. Once there, Bion set about adjusting to the new culture, establishing links with the analysts who had invited him, and setting up an analytic practice.

Publication and Series

He also began work on a book, which he called The Dream, published in 1975. Two years later he added The Past Presented, and in 1979 – with the addition of The Dawn of Oblivion – the novel had become a trilogy. In 1991, at the instigation of Francesca Bion, the three were finally published in one volume, with corrections, together with an enlarged version of A Key to A Memoir of the Future, which had first been published in 1981.

Francesca Bion’s Perspective

Francesca Bion has described the Memoir as a fictionalised, dramatised presentation of a lifetime’s experiences, filled with a crowd of characters; voicing the many facets of his own personality and thought; at the same time we recognise ourselves among the dramatis personae.