The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W. R. Bion

Abstract

The work of W. R. Bion changed the shape of psychoanalytic theory in fundamental ways, one of the most important of which was Bion's insight into the nature of normal projective identification. No other psychoanalytic theorist has Bion's ability to represent the horrors of psychic abandonment and the converse, the absolute necessity of the presence of another mind for psychic survival. Through a discussion of Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919 (Bion, 1997), Attacks on linking and A theory of thinking (1993), this paper explores the link between war, masculinity, the maternal and Bion's sensitivity to the significance of everyday interpersonal contact. It is argued that Bion's apocalyptic experiences as a teenage tank commander gave him shattering insight into the extent to which mind is inter-mind, self is inter-self. Bion's life writing has the quality of survivor insight: 'And only I am escaped alone to tell thee' (Job 1: 14-19), as he returns repeatedly to the events of the day when he 'died ', 8 August 1918. His insight into the elemental passions nature of love, hate and mindlessness are borne of his experiences on the battlefield, and exquisitely crystallized in his repeated explorations of an encounter with a dying soldier.

So That Our Dreams Will Not Escape Us: Learning to Think Together in Time of War

“…Bion was a decorated hero of the First World War who was separated from his home and family the age of eight (Souter, 2009). 1 He defined thinking as process that comes into being to contain thoughts which arise in the frustration of absence (Bion, 1961).…”

“…Just as psychoanalytic theory, from Freud (1919) and Bion (Likierman, 2008;Souter, 2009) to the present day, has contributed to understanding the effects of war and its accompanying violence on cognitive capacity; psychoanalytic theory may contain the information that is needed to reverse those effects (Fonagy and Target, 1998;Schore, 2003;Allen, 2006;Bragin and Bragin, in press). Psychoanalytic studies suggest that there are ways that war-affected students could be helped to tolerate what are now intolerable affects, sufficiently so that their minds could begin to be useful again, to think about the world, learn at school and create a hopeful future.…”

Making Meaning Together: Helping Survivors of Violence to Learn at School

“…Bion was a decorated hero of the First World War who had been separated from his home and family the age of 8. 2 He used his life experiences and his experience as an Army psychiatrist (Souter, 2009) to develop a theory of thinking. He defined thinking as a process that comes into being to contain thoughts that arise in the frustration of absence (Bion, 1961).…”

Epilogue: Responses to the Work of Antonino Ferro: Ferro’s Bion, Our Ferro

“…He was trained as a classical Kleinian and no matter how far his own genius took him beyond that orientation, his clinical work and thinking remained rooted in and reflected his origins and formation. Others (Brown, 2012;Souter, 2009;Szykierski, 2010) have described the formative influence that his war experiences have had on his theory of mental functioning. References to Kant, Plato, and the Mystics infuse Attention and Interpretation (Bion, 1970) and the parallels between his own thinking about what we now call intersubjectivity and epistemology can be seen to parallel the intellectual ferment produced by what were then the newly emerging theories of quantum mechanics and Einsteinian Relativity in physics and by Wittgenstein and the great English philosophers at Oxford and Cambridge, who were Bion's teachers and contemporaries.…”