Bion’s traumatic experiences as a tank commander in the First World War are well-known to psychoanalysts and a number of authors have examined their formative influence on his later, psychoanalytic work (Souter, 2009, Roper, 2012, Brown, 2012). The seminar builds on these contributions and more recent research into the important role that autobiographical writing had for Bion, enabling him to repeatedly re-examine his wartime experiences and the emotional consequences that his time in combat had on him.

The afternoon will consist of two papers:

‘Antecedent Guilt Underlying Bion’s Haunting by Cries of ‘Mother’ From His Dying Comrade During the Battle of Amiens (1918)’, David Simpson (British Psychoanalytical Association& Society)

Based on a study of Bion’s autobiography, The Long Week-End (1982), David Simpson proposes new links between Bion’s wartime experience and his troubled relationship to his mother. He considers the death of Bion’s runner Sweeting at the Battle of Amiens, whose cries for his mother continued to haunt Bion throughout his life. Simpson proposes that Sweeting’s cries for his mother were especially distressing for Bion insofar they implied the existence of a parent who might be able to comfort him in his distress. By contrast, Bion lacked such a benevolent internal figure. Instead, his relationship to his mother was dominated by feelings of shame and guilt. Simpson develops Wordsworth’s (1805) concept of ‘the spot of time’ to demonstrate how Sweeting’s death consequently provided a focus, not only for the psychological trauma that Bion experienced in the First World War, but also his guilt and sense of failure that had their roots in his difficult early relationship to his parents.

Fear? Dread? They are just psychiatric terms! You should try the thing-in-itself: The Experience of Terror from ‘Nameless Dread’ to ‘Sub-Thalamic Fear’ in Bion’s Literary and Theoretical Writing, Tobias Jenkins (King’s College London)

Tobias Jenkins considers Bion’s time outside his tank, when he was deployed as infantry in the trenches near Messines, after the German Spring Offensive of 1918. Bion’s accounts of this period show him close to the point of breakdown. Jenkins demonstrates how Bion’s descriptions of his state of mind at that time have much in common with his clinical accounts of extreme emotional disturbance. Bion placed the concept of ‘nameless dread’ at the centre of his understanding of psychotic states. Jenkins argues that what links Bion’s clinical and autobiographical writing is the attempt to find words for this feeling of intense and incommunicable fear. He considers passages from The Long-Weekend and Bion’s 1919 War Diary (1919 [2015]) in relation to Bion’s clinical writing, before turning to Bion’s experimental novel A Memoir of the Future (1975-1979), to show how, in it, Bion develops the concept of ‘sub-thalamic fear’ in order to account for how terror of such magnitude might persist, unthought and unthinkable, below the level of the mind.