The Tiger Skin on the Bannister (and Other Stories): Internal Dialogues and Parallel Autobiographical Process in a Reading of Wilfred Bion’s The Long Weekend, 1897–1919: Part of a Life

ABSTRACT

This essay presents excerpts from a reading of the section ‘England’ in Wilfred Bion’s autobiography The Long Weekend, 1897–1919: Part of a Life. Findings are now presented alongside a series of the reader’s own memories that were evoked, at varied speeds, both during and after the reading process. Drawing on the fields of infant observation and child psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the essay demonstrates how exercising an observational stance to the reader's own subjective material and subsequent, reflexive internal dialogues contributed to penetrating layers of meaning of the book. Furthermore, it aims to show how a reading of an autobiography unexpectedly enabled a powerful, parallel creative process within the reader.

KEYWORDS:

• Wilfred Bion
• autobiography
• childhood neglect
• adolescence
• infant observation
• memory

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Dr Jocelyn Catty for her incisive and engaging feedback and Professor Barbara Harrison for her encouragement and willingness to read an earlier draft of this essay. I would also like to thank my friend Marcus Richardson for his kind and thoughtful words at an early stage. Finally, I am grateful to my psychoanalyst for the many hours spent alongside me helping me recover the ‘bits and pieces’ of my heart (Hooks 2009, 129)—my own boyhood—and a capacity for ‘freedom of thought’ (Segal 1981).

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. The changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Harris Williams also notes over-identification as potential pitfall of a reading of an autobiography (Harris Williams 2010, xvi).

2 I used a reverie-informed methodology that allowed me to make use of my subjective responses to Bion’s text by exercising alpha function—Bion’s term (1962) used to describe the way a mother makes sense of the infant’s earliest emotional communications.

3 Bion first uses the term ‘abandoned’ (1982, 19) to describe the character of his mother. He implies that she lacked her own care, support and protection—the closest he gets to saying that she was a depressed woman when he was a young child. I use the term here regarding Bion, as I think he conveys in his text that he always felt segregated from her to some extent, even before his mother left him at the prep school.

4 I would have been around eleven-years old when this event took place, a similar age to Bion at the time of his playground riot.

5 Harris Williams also describes Bion’s childhood fears of the female tiger in her own reading of his autobiography (Harris Williams 2010, 8–9).

6 Douglas writes that one intended aim in writing an autobiography may be to align the child self to adult self in an ‘unapologetic battle’ against parental figures (2010, 138). She asks whether this should mean that ‘ethics flies out of the window’ and considers what may be enacted when neglectful figures nonetheless have ‘no right of reply’ (138). She also asks if parents/authority figures have a right to be presented in their more complex personhoods and whether there is a responsibility of the author to try and understand their grown-ups ‘as part of the autobiographical project’ (148).

7 ‘Social memory’ is a term the historian Guy Beiner (2007) favours over ‘collective memory’ given what he feels is the non-reflexive use of the adjective ‘collective’ in many studies on memory.

8 Colman is also alluded to as a pacifist.

9 ‘This became something of a national scandal and The Public Schools Act 1868 was brought in to attempt to reform and regulate seven of the leading English Schools, although difficulties remained widespread’ (Smith 2021b, 303).

10 Bion references Farrar several times in his text, who wrote an infamous children’s morality tale Eric, or little by little (Farrar 1858) aimed at teaching segregated schoolboys about the perceived dangers of masturbation.

11 Fagging was a deeply entrenched and brutalising form of domesticity in segregated boys’ boarding schools that mirrored the class-laden system of having servants, with younger boys serving as fags to their older fagmasters.

12 ‘Swiss milk’ was the name for their tins of condensed milk, not ‘Swizz-milka’—a nickname used to tease him.

13 I argued that Bion refused to call these ‘sublimations’, knowing that the reader would think of the term, as he wished to convey the stifling nature of ‘substitutions’ (religion and sports) which were not for creative purposes (Smith 2021a, 27 & 105; Smith 2021b, 308).

14 I proposed that the ‘lie’ (Bion 1982) is a helpful theoretical concept in itself. I see Bion’s term as referring to an internal, gang-like constellation, originally triggered by traumatic feelings of loneliness and separation. The ‘lie’ canvasses a destructive, narcissistic propaganda that there is no use for relationships, serving to protect an individual from feelings of shame, humiliation, helplessness and vulnerability. It can be understood as the impact of anxiety and deprivation that fortifies destructive impulses within an individual rather than propagating life and creativity (Smith 2021a, 140–141).

15 The curious geographical link to Bion’s Hertfordshire boarding school did not occur to me until I wrote this sentence.

16 The psychoanalyst Michael Mercer notes, after Freud, the ways that ‘anxiety, guilt and pain lead to defences’, referring to this as our ‘human basics’ (2008, 64).

17 Bion uses the term ‘web of undirected menace’ (1982, 59) as a way of avoiding the possible pitfalls of attributing blame, preferring to see those with responsibilities for looking after children in their more complex personhoods, despite their (human) faults. I understand Bion’s term as referring to a time (the early twentieth century) before the proliferation of Freud’s ideas, where psychoanalytic understanding in society was unavailable, and to a destructive set of social relationships (which I see as continuing in ‘modern forms’ as Harris Williams also notes [2010, 2]). Bion does not seek to deny the emotional impact of the web with the use of his term, making it clear that any given person (teacher, parent, or pupil) caught up in it could suffer its harmful effects.

18 Harris Williams writes that she thinks The Long Weekend is really about Bion recalling and piecing together ‘the pattern of his mental development’ (2010, xiv); about his hard won understanding, following two personal analyses of his own, and from many years practising psychoanalysis, of ‘the mark’ his difficult early experiences left on him in the ‘now’ (Bion 1977, 185 his emphasis).

19 There is an interesting paper by Barry Godfrey and Jane Richardson (2009) who describe, using an example from Godfrey’s ‘meanings of violence’ research, how, in a 1980s archived transcription of an oral history of an Australian adult describing her childhood in late Victorian/early Edwardian era (1880–1920), descriptions of her violent separation from her parents seem to act as a metaphor for a wider collective struggle in Australian society. The metaphor is an ‘abandoned Australia’ with its uncertain future in relation to the rest of the world at that time.

20 Using the example of Constance Briscoe’s Ugly (2006), Kate Douglas views ethical considerations, where there have been exceptionally adverse circumstances, as towards the self and one’s own children (2010, 147)—as a potential way of moving on. Without evangelising forgiveness, Douglas argues that those writers who have some empathy for their parents may be able to address tensions with more ‘complex representations of abuse, parenting, and social inequality’ (149).

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Tim Smith

Dr Tim Smith is a child psychoanalytic psychotherapist working for the National Health Service and in private practice in East London, UK. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic where he teaches students for their pre-clinical observational studies. His interest in autobiography stems from many years of listening to the ways children, adolescents and young adults find to tell the stories of their experiences. He has written for the Health Service Journal as spokesperson for the Association of Child Psychotherapists and in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy. 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 before completing his psychoanalytic infant observations and re-training in child psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Tavistock.