Eric J. Miller memorial lecture—his legacy

In the group relations/Tavistock milieu Eric Miller comes as close to an icon as social scientists and psychoanalysts can tolerate ... most of you will know him from his prolific writing and might have learnt, through his books, about his life-long concern with the paradox of being a human. Those of us fortunate to have known him personally, would recognise his many humanly contradictions.
A man of few spoken words, he had mastered the study of phenomena, and I believe touched people so deeply because of his ability to simply be with people without memory or desire in the fully Bionian sense.
In this twentieth anniversary of his death, this memorial lecture is a memoir of Eric, as I remember him from the many teas in the Khaleelee–Miller conservatory, when I came for supervision meetings, from group relations conferences and—applying some poetic licence—from putting together pieces of others' memories of him as they were willing to share them and his field notes as preserved in the Tavistock Institute's archive at the Wellcome Library.