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Full Description
All his life, Wilfred Bion strove to find a narrative form for the traumatic experiences he went through as a tank commander in the First World War. The body of his autobiographical and literary works documents his efforts to wrest a biography of his own from the most devastating processes of world history. As a whole, it is the result of a lifelong struggle to express something unspeakable, to restore something destroyed. What emerges is something like the prehistory of the psychical catastrophe from which Bion was unable to escape until his death. As such, however, these autobiographical fragments also reflect the prehistory of the historical catastrophe under whose spell the world still stands today.
This book is the first comprehensive study of Bion's autobiographical and literary writings. Drawing on the concepts of experience and thinking developed in his theoretical and clinical works, with which they are genetically linked, it discusses Bion's strategies of writing and cognition, and for the first time systematically places a hitherto unexplored part of his work in the context of his entire œuvre.
Following the chronological thread of his life, from childhood in India through youth in England to his experience of the First World War in France and Belgium, the book traces how Bion developed his unique method of writing. Detailed narrative analyses reveal the painful work of coming to terms with the war experiences which had haunted him throughout his life - a crippling trauma whose causes extended far beyond the individual and private. The book thus provides deep insights into Bion's life, his thinking, and his writing, and offers the reader a portrait of the primal catastrophe of the twentieth century and its devastating effects.
Contents
About the author
Introduction
Part I
Experience, cognition, writing—and their failure: Philosophical, psychological, philological aspects
Chapter 1: Night vision
Chapter 2: Dangers of understanding: Virgil's Palinurus as an allegory of cognition
Virgil's Palinurus
Bion's Palinurus
Eclipse of Palinurus
Part II
Wilfred Bion's epistemological poetics
Chapter 3: Wilfred Bion's "late work": Autobiography and "literary turn"
Biography: Childhood in India, youth in England, First World War
On the structure of Bion's autobiographical writings
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 and War Memoirs 1917-1919
All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life
The trilogy of novels: A Memoir of the Future
The presence of the past in a dream that interprets itself
Dream-dream interpretation—"construction"—dream text
"The only thing I am not quite clear about ..."—Bion's theory of the dream
A first step in a new language
Entering into the unknown
Chapter 4: "Psychological impossibilities": Childhood and child's experience in Wilfred Bion's The Long Week-End
Chapter 5 : "A sense of disaster, past and impending": Youth and boarding school life in England before the First World War
Experiences beyond description: "Such cataclysmic disasters cannot be described"
Close reading: The Long Week-End, "England", Chapter 1
"Misery at school had a dynamic quality": Everyday life in the boarding school panopticon
Glory and flannel: "England at war. Myself with nothing but my tiny little public school soul"
Part III
Wilfred Bion's epistemological poetics and the experience of the First World War
Chapter 6: A sub-thalamic fear": Wilfred Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919
Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919 and "a great unsolved puzzle"
Palimpsests
Memory is figurative communication of emotional experience
"I died there": Life after (psychical) death
"The ghosts look in from the battle again": The psychological catastrophe of survival
The "Amiens" report of 1958: Another attempt to describe the indescribable
Crater landscapes
How to describe the indescribable?
The silence in the combat breaks
"Cracking up"
"I shall try to give you our feelings at the time I am writing of ": Outlook
Chapter 7 : Writing the ineffable: The experience of the First World War in The Long Week-End 1897-1919
Experience and narrative
Ypres: Map and territory
Amiens: August 8, 1918
Amiens: Map and territory
Thinking under fire: Measurements in the fog of fear
Sweeting's death
Panorama of working through a catastrophic trauma
Overview of the external events
Sweeting's death: The first text version from the war diary of 1919
Sweeting's death: The second text version in the "Amiens" fragment of 1958
Sweeting's death: The third text version in The Long Week-End
"We will remember them": A tomb for Sweeting
Postscript: (Aesthetic) experience and epistemological poetics
References
Index
