‘Half alive, half dead’ boys: sexuality and censorship in Wilfred Bion’s ‘The long weekend’

ABSTRACT

This paper traces Wilfred Bion’s disrupted sexual development from young child in India to schoolboy in England, as described in his autobiography ‘The long weekend’. It discusses the meaning of Bion’s baffling descriptions of sex at his Hertfordshire boarding school, where he puts the topic front and centre, yet affords it a peculiar kind of censorship, via an understanding of the moral and religious way that boys’ sexuality in segregated boarding schools was viewed and dealt with during the Edwardian era. The paper explores the stifling impact this had on Bion’s creativity. It also describes how Bion’s personal qualities of courage, his capacity to observe and his interest in the truth, helped to counterbalance the destructiveness that had led him to reject relationships. The emotional deprivation, bleakness and aggression he recalls are viewed as being of interest to child psychotherapists working with contemporary adolescent sexual difficulties.

KEYWORDS:

• Bion
• autobiography
• biography
• sex
• sexuality
• adolescents
• adolescence
• masturbation

Acknowledgments

I would especially like to thank Barbara Harrison, Margot Waddell and Michael Rustin for their supervision, advice and encouragement whilst undertaking my research, and also my examiners who provided detailed, stirring and thoughtful feedback on my original thesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Indian girls and women employed by British families to care for their children were known as ayahs. They were a common feature in many British households by the late nineteenth century in India.

2. In my thesis, I propose that it is the agonising waits between his mother’s visits and the way his feelings of abandonment led him to feel uncertain as to where she was in his mind, that are expressed by means of the vagueness of the timeline.

3. I understand Bion’s term ‘web of undirected menace’ to describe a pre-Freudian state where psychoanalytic understanding is unavailable, resulting in a destructive society and set of relationships, where any given person caught in the web is at risk of suffering its harmful effects at any time.

4. It is easy to collapse into a moral zone with sexuality, something that Bion seems very eager to convey in his book, knowing from first-hand experience the impact of this on developing boys’ minds.

5. The reader will note the moral intonation contained in the term ‘good beating’.

6. Bion’s maternal grandparents were, likely, missionaries or ‘off-missionary’, as Bion calls them (1985, p. 88).

7. ‘The lie’ is likely also to be a reference to the common, romanticised teaching of war to public schoolboys at the time, as Peter Parker points out in his book ‘The old lie’ (Parker, 1987).

8. It is worth noting that Bion’s thought is not so far-fetched, given that not long before the lecture, a boy from his dormitory who he was fond of, Freddie Sexton, had died suddenly from undiagnosed appendicitis.

9. Bion takes this up briefly in the section ‘England’, fast forwarding time in the text to recount how a disturbed young soldier in his battalion began to distress one of the few females they were in contact with, a matron, by shouting ‘fuck’ over and over again (p. 107).

10. Importantly, Bion also portrays Colman as having a mind he engaged with and is therefore one of the few men who provided a helpful form of masculine identification for him.

11. Onanism remains an archaic term for masturbation, the moralism of the story still deeply ingrained in society. Indeed, various religions still refer to masturbation as a sin.

12. The reader will note the similarity of the description of Mrs Thompson (Bion, 1982, p. 117) to his earlier portrait of his mother (p. 13).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Smith

Dr Tim Smith is a child and adolescent psychotherapist currently working for NELFT NHS Foundation Trust and in private practice. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic. His interest in autobiography stems from listening to the ways children, adolescents and young adults find to tell the stories of their experiences. He trained initially as a composer at The Royal Academy of Music and then in music therapy at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.