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.

Key words:

• autobiography
• psychoanalytic theory
• war
• W. R. Bion

Acknowledgements

A version of this paper was presented at the Bion Today Conference, University College, London, in June 2005. I gratefully acknowledge the organizing committee, the contributions of the group who attended the session at which the paper was delivered and the chair of the session, Dr Jean Arundale.

Notes

1. A major trauma which Bion writes about very little was the death in childbirth of his first wife in the Second World War, when he was away from home on duty. This event was clearly a personal tragedy with far‐reaching psychological and social effects (Bion notes with bitterness family advice to put the baby up for adoption, for example), and seems to have resonated very painfully with his earlier war experience. While it is possible to speculate about how this sad event might have influenced him, the textual evidence linking autobiography to theoretical writing is simply not available.

2. I am thinking particularly of Bion’s contemporary, D.W. Winnicott (b. 1896), who served on a destroyer in World War 1, and is said to have spent much of his time reading Henry James. He has a markedly more benign view of the environment.

3. See Peter Wollen [internet] Tankishness; Paulo Cesar Sandler [internet] Bion’s war memoirs: A psycho‐analytical commentary.

4. Rather against Melanie Klein’s intentions, this theory was developed by her followers to extend Freud’s sketchy outline of countertransference from a technical glitch, in which unanalysed parts of the analyst could interfere with the analysis, as famously in the Dora case, to include the displacement of rejected or feared parts of the self into the other.

5. Like other Anglo‐Indian children, for example, the much less resilient Rudyard Kipling, who suffered dreadfully when, without any preparation or warning, he was left in care with an abusive foster family (Shengold, 1989). The defiant Mary Craven in The Secret Garden is a fictional example (Burnett, 1986).

6. From this point, the identity of the self, ‘Bion’, becomes problematic. As always in autobiography, it is a mistake to assume continuity of identity between the character in the text and the author. One never knows how full, accurate or fictionalized a representation is being made. The author himself is acutely aware of this, referring to his 60 year‐old writing self as ‘myself’, the young soldier as ‘Bion’. When I am discussing the character ‘Bion’ in the autobiography, I am referring to the autobiographical character, and not to the historical individual.

7. For this reader, the incident compulsively recalls the crucial episode in Joseph Heller’s Catch‐22 when gunner Snowden’s guts are shot out, and Snowden’s repeated ‘I’m cold’; the appalled hero, Yossarian, is subjected to the sight of “whole mottled quarts” of Snowden, including the stewed tomatoes he had had for lunch (Heller, 1969, p. 464).

8. The childbirth educator, Grantly Dick‐Read (1958), was similarly able to bring his experiences of tending the dying at Gallipoli to revolutionize the management of labour with the simple observation that women in pain should not be left alone: like the dying men at Gallipoli and like Sweeting, they manage better if they have another mind to process the terror with and for them.