The Experience of the First World War in Wilfred Bion’s Autobiographical Writings

Abstract

All his life, Wilfred Bion attempted to devise a narrative form for an account of the traumatic experiences he went through as a tank commander in the First World War. The body of his autobiographical works, which consists of texts written in different stages of his life and remain fragmentary, documents his desperate efforts to wrest a biography of his own from the most appalling tendencies of world history. As a whole, it testifies for and is the result of a lifelong attempt to understand something incomprehensible, to express something unspeakable, to restore something destroyed. It represents something akin to the primal history of the psychic catastrophe that Bion failed to escape from as long as he lived. The article first provides an overview of these autobiographical and literary writings against the background of a brief account of the external facts of Bion’s life. It then undertakes a narrative analysis of the sequences in which Bion tries to find a narrative form for the arguably most terrible event of the entire war which not only was a deeply traumatic experience remaining with him throughout his life, but also resulted in what he felt to be his psychic death. Taken together, these sequences impressively show the painful work of gradually dissolving or at least coming to terms with the psychological catastrophe of a paralyzing trauma, the causes of which reach far beyond the individual and the private. The article sets out to contribute to the still unwritten inquiry into the genetic context in which Bion’s autobiographical, literary, and theoretical writings figure, together with the concepts and writing strategies embodied in them.

Keywords:

• Wilfred Bion
• trauma
• First World War
• autobiography
• biography
• narrative analysis

Notes

1 The information available about Bion’s life has so far been largely limited to his own writings, materials, and statements, as well as those of his wife Francesca Bion (e.g. F. Bion 2014 [1994]) and his daughter Parthenope Bion Talamo (2015, p. 299–302). The depictions of colleagues, students, and successors that have been created since then remain, as helpful and insightful as they are, almost entirely within the framework that Bion himself so sketched out. A biography of Bion, which, with the help of archive material, drew an independent, historical-critical—i.e. also source-critical—portrait, is an unredeemed desideratum.

2 See e.g. Boris 1986; Brown 2005; Likierman 2012; Sandler 2003; Symington & Symington 1996; Szykierski 2010. Szykierski (2010, p. 948) states: “A close reading of the Diary and other autobiographical writings allows one to trace the haunting questions that form the roots of the evolution of a unique metapsychology.” Souter (2009, p. 796) goes a step further by declaring that “[t]he conjunction of the autobiography and the theory makes available to the reader the radical ordinariness of much of Bion’s thinking, and the extent to which it was a brilliant and heroic response to the circumstances of his life. This is not to diminish the nature of his achievement as a psychoanalytic thinker, but rather the reverse. As with all leaps of insight, it takes a special intellectual power and emotional tenacity to perceive and elucidate the shape and structure in the painful formlessness of ordinary life.”

3 Not only the landscape is transformed into a battlefield, but also the people who move through it lose form and shape. A passage from Bion’s A Memoir of the Future, to which the shock is also inscribed linguistically, reads like this: “Boo-ootiful soup; in a shell-hole in Flanders Fields. Legs and guts … must ’ave bin twenty men in there—Germ’um and frogslegs and all starts! We didn’t ’alf arf I can tell you. Let bruvverly luv continue. No one asked ’im to fall-in! No one arsed ’im to come out either—come fourth, we said and E came 5th and ’e didn’t ½ stink. Full stop! ’e said. The parson ’e did kum, ’e did qwat. ’E talked of Kingdom Come. King dumb come” (Bion 1991a, p. 53f.).

4 See “Bion’s” dream in the “Commentary” to his war diary: “I have described the trickle of dirty water that was the geographical fact” (Bion 2015, p. 201).

5 Tarantelli here quotes Blanchot 1986, p. 32.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dominic Angeloch

Dominic Angeloch is currently a Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. He is also the Managing Editor of the German psychoanalytic journal “Psyche.”