First published in 1982 by Fleetwood Press
Reprinted 1985
Reprinted in 1991,2005 by
Karnac Books Ltd.
118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT
By arrangement with Francesca Bion and Mark Paterson
Copyright © 1982 by The Estate of W. R. Bion
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 85575 000 5
Printed and bound by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne
www.karnacbooks.com
‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain
that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the
watchman waketh but in vain.’
Psalm 127. i
Table of Contents
Cover
Copy Right
Content
FOREWORD
PREFACE
INDIA 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
ENGLAND 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
WAR 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
FOREWORD
Wilfred Bion was born in Muttra, in the United Provinces of India, in 1897. Many generations of his family (of Huguenot descent) had served in India—as missionaries, in the Indian Police, and in the Department of Public Works. At the age of eight he was sent to England to attend preparatory school, never again to return to India. All his life he retained a strong affection for the country of his birth; he died in November 1979 two months before a planned visit to Bombay.
His autobiography was left unfinished, but the years covered by this book form a distinct period which ended with demobilization just before he went up to Oxford to read History. He felt then that he had to start life again, building on unsure foundations. He regarded himself as uneducated, out of touch with the world outside school and the army, and demoralized by his experience of war. Nevertheless his outstanding athletic ability in rugger and swimming saved the day—just as it had done during his schooldays.
Although he felt that the war had left him unable to take advantage of the opportunities offered at the university, he always recalled with gratitude the talks he had with H. J. Paton, the philosopher. By 1924 it was clear to him where his interests lay—in psychoanalysis. He started medical training at University College Hospital, London, won the Gold Medal for Surgery, qualified in 1930, and then went on to psycho-analytic training. At University College Hospital he had contact with another outstanding man, Wilfred Trotter, the surgeon and author of Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. Both Paton and Trotter played a very great part in his intellectual development.
After the Second World War, during which he served as the Senior Psychiatrist on the War Office Selection Board, he devoted the rest of his life to the practice of psycho-analysis. He became one of the foremost original thinkers in this field, and also in that of group behaviour, lecturing widely and writing prolifically—many papers and some fourteen books, most of which are now required reading in training institutes.
He was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Tavistock Clinic, London, in 1945; Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis from 1956-62; and President of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962-65.
In 1968 a request that he work in Los Angeles provided the opportunity to escape from what he called ‘the cosy domesticity’ of England. The vast open spaces of the western United States awoke in him memories of his childhood in India: the culture, however, was altogether new to him. It released him from the confines of traditionalism and enabled him to entertain his ‘wild thoughts’; his mind was as wide open to new impressions during the last decade of his life as it had ever been in youth. So it was that in the alien, vital, dangerous but superficially idyllic environment of California he was stimulated to write the trilogy, A Memoir of the Future, a psycho-analytically orientated autobiographical fantasy—the most controversial and least understood of his works.
The qualities of courage and leadership, already evident by the time he was twenty years old, stood him in good stead as a psychoanalyst. He made plenty of enemies, as original thinkers always do, but no amount of hostility ever deflected him from his determination to be true to himself and to his beliefs.
Although he originally intended to stay only three or four years in California, he did not return to England until 1979. He died two months later in Oxford, with the ‘dreaming’ spires’ visible from his hospital bed.
Those who were fortunate enough to be touched by his wisdom and affectionate concern were never quite the same again. We who knew him well will carry something of him with us for the rest of our lives.
Francesca Bion
Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
1982
PREFACE
In this book my intention has been to be truthful. It is an exalted ambition; after many years of experience I know that the most I can claim is to be ‘relatively’ truthful. Without attempting any definition of terms I leave it to be understood that by ‘truth’ I mean ‘aesthetic’ truth and ‘psycho-analytic’ truth; this last I consider to be a ‘grade’ of scientific truth. In other terms, I hope to achieve, in part and as a whole, the formulation of phenomena as close as possible to noumena.
Many names are mentioned; experience shows that it is impossible to prevent conjecture from replacing gaps with ‘facts’. The ‘facts’ are not of my choosing; they can be so fashioned to serve any aim that the speculator might have. Anyone can ‘know’ which school, regiment, colleagues, friends I write about. In all but the most superficial sense they would be wrong. I write about ‘me’. I do so deliberately because I am aware that that is what I should do anyhow. I am also more likely to approximate to my ambition if I write about the person I know better than anyone else—myself.
The book, therefore, is about the relationships of one man and not about the people, communities, groups whose names are mentioned. If I could have resorted to abstractions I would have done so. Such a procedure, without any preparation, would leave the reader grappling with meaningless manipulations of jargon.
INDIA
1
OUR ayah was a wizened little woman who, in so far as I connected age with her at all, was assumed by my sister and me t
o be very old, much older than our father and mother. We were very fond of her, perhaps more fond than of our parents. On second thoughts, perhaps not. My mother was a little frightening. For one thing she might die because she was so old. She was not so old as our ayah; my sister and I agreed that she was not less than, say, two or maybe three hundred years old, and though this was a ripe age she did not seem likely to die. Our mother, on the other hand, was peculiar; it felt queer if she picked me up and put me on her lap, warm and safe and comfortable. Then suddenly cold and frightening, as it was many years later at the end of school service when the doors were opened and a cold draught of night air seemed to sigh gently through the sermonically heated chapel. Sermons, the Headmaster, God, The Father Almighty, Arf Arfer Oo Arf in Mphm, please make me a good boy. I would slip off her lap quickly and hunt for my sister.
In the evening we would stand together by the travelling harmonium while my mother, in the light of an oil lamp, carefully picked out tunes which my sister and I joined her in singing, about the green hill—so green compared with parched burning India of the daylight that had just finished—and its tiny jewelled city wall. Poor little green hill; why hadn’t it got a city wall? It took me a long time to realize that the wretched poet meant it had no city wall, and longer still to realize he meant—incredible though it seemed—that it was outside the city wall.
I went into this question thoroughly—and others like “Is golden syrup really gold?”—with my mother, and later with my father, but without being satisfied by either. I concluded that my mother didn’t really know; though she tried very hard she seemed as puzzled as I was. It was more complicated with my father; he would start but seemed to tire when I did not understand the explanation. The climax came when I asked my question about golden syrup for the ‘hundredth time’. He was very angry. “Wow!” said my sister appreciatively.
Later, when I wanted to know what ‘persona non grata’ meant, I kept it and similar problems to myself. I developed a sixth sense about the ‘hundredth time’ long before I learnt enough mathematics to count up to one hundred. Even then I seemed to have established such a gulf between applied and pure mathematics that I could not satisfy myself—then or now—of the connection between one hundred and ‘the hundredth time’.
I went away snivelling. My sister, after having said, “Wow!”, wasn’t much use and by the time I had reached my mother I had forgotten what I had come for. Anyhow, she was ‘busy’. This was another word like ‘hundredth time’ which it was as well to regard as precautionary. My mother was proved by my sister also to be, like so many grown-ups, ‘peculiar’. She went one day and stood firmly ‘at ease’ in front of her. Then enunciating her words very clearly and precisely, she said, “Lavatory, lavatory, lavatory”. The effect was gratifying to me though, thinking over the matter, disappointing. She did not get her ears boxed. My mother said, “I’ve a good mind to…”, but she did not achieve fulfilment.
When it was all over I took my sister into a corner and worked the thing out properly. “You’re a very, very naughty little girl” I said, keeping as closely as I could to my mother’s intonation. Then I, very carefully, boxed her ears.
The result was cataclysmic. “Whatever is the matter?”, I said in amazement at the incredible volume of sound she could command. My mother appeared with a frightened ayah close behind, then the kitmegar who was soon kicked out by the ayah. My sister by now had recovered what I can only call her composure to the point at which her screams were not inhibited, as mine were, by curiosity; she devoted herself whole-heartedly to bawling. She was sitting up pointing with an imperious figure straight at me.
“You wretched boy!” said my mother extremely angrily, “What have you done?”
Deafened and now thoroughly frightened, I said, “Nothing!”
“Nothing?” said my mother furiously, “Why, look at her!”
I did. 1 had to admit to myself as 1 looked at (I would almost say ‘down’, as one could of a pointing revolver) the furious child and her accusing finger, that my disavowal was extremely implausible,
Arf Arfer—as I knew him from now on—had turned up. Someone else had been ‘busy’ and was therefore also in an explosively unstable condition. My mother was shaking me.
“I don’t know what to do with the boy” she said.
“Let me have him”, said my father sternly.
“Oh God, not that!”, I felt wordlessly, mindlessly.
“These children!”, said my mother. Then, in an unguarded moment, she addressed my sister as well as me. “You’re both as bad as each other!”
Up to that point I had fancied that her screams were abating. “Renew a right spirit within me”, but if that was my unspoken prayer it had been wrongly addressed. Her screams were renewed. We were separated.
My father sat me kindly and patiently on his lap. Encouraged, my screams—or were they hers?—dinned less intensely in my ears. I began to collect myself. After much patient questioning I was able to remember why I hit her.
“She was being naughty”, I said with a sudden dawning of memory. “She…and…so…” I faltered. I could not remember what she had been naughty about, or how.
“Yes? Go on”, said my father patiently.
I could not. I had no idea.
The storm burst; he turned me bottom up and gave me ‘a good beating’. But this I did not know about; I only heard of it as I heard him telling my mother later. He was still angry and his eyes were turned fiercely on me.
From that day on I hated them both “with all my heart and all my soul for ever and ever. Amen”. A few minutes? Seconds? Years? Later I had forgotten all about it; so had they. But as no doubt they suspected I had learned my lesson and so had my sister. So had my parents for they too seemed uneasy, especially when I shrank from them and kept as far away from my sister as possible. “Why don’t you two play together?”, my mother would ask in a puzzled way.
2
THE great advantage of the ayah was that although grown up she could be dealt with. When my sister was furiously angry she would try to distract her. From what? I do not know—for reasons which I have forgotten I was extremely circumspect in dealing with my sister.
The long call of a Sarus crane gave the ayah an opening. “Oh, listen” she said in synthetic rapture “to the pretty Dickie Bird”. My sister stopped screaming at once, magically, then exploded in rapturous laughter. “Dicky bird, dicky bird!”, she said with adequate scorn as soon as she could speak again. Sycophantically I joined her, being careful not to become too involved. I had no idea what it was all about, but at least the hateful child had got her socks on.
In a sunny room I showed my father a vase of some yellow flowers for him to admire the skill with which I had arranged them.
“Yes”, he said, “very good”.
“But do look Daddy.”
“I am; if s lovely.” Still I was not satisfied. “It’s very pretty isn’t it?”
“Yes”, he said, “it is.”
“I’m not lying Daddy. I did it all myself.”
That stopped him in his tracks. He was upset. “Why did you say that?”
“What Daddy?”
“I never expected you to be lying.”
“Well, I wasn’t”, I replied becoming afraid that Arf Arfer would appear. Arf Arfer was very frightening. Sometimes when I heard grown-ups talking they would indulge in bursts of meaningless laughter. “Arf! arf! arf!” they would go. This would happen especially when my sister or I spoke. We would watch them seriously, wide eyed. Then we would go into another room and practise. “Arf, arf, arf!”, I would say. More shrilly she would join in, “Arf, arf, arf!”, and in the end it would make us laugh because it sounded so silly.
Sometimes it would be puzzling to know why the grown-ups were so big and why they spoke as if we were ‘silly’. Then my sister would clasp her hands behind her back and, straddling her legs in front of one of them, peer into his face and say, “Arf, arf!” very loud and clear. A man
with a large reddish face, like my balloon when the air was leaking out of it, looked down at her. He looked angry and I was afraid he was going to turn into Arf Arfer. I dragged her away. “Don’t do that—it’s naughty”. For a terrible moment I was afraid she was going to scream. She changed her mind. “Arf Arfer in Heb’n”, and she began to laugh. That was a great relief and I began to laugh too—till I suddenly remembered. I turned serious and got out of it; or tried to. But she wanted me to stay. “Arf arfer!”. I was alarmed; I did not want her to go on; I did not want to think it was funny. Arf Arfer was not to be trifled with.
Sometimes in my dreams I thought I heard Arf Arfer arfing. It was a terrible frightening noise. Once I saw jackals sitting in a circle while one gave the ‘fiaow’ call. It was bloodcurdling. ‘That’s Arf Arfer” I thought.
Arf Arfer was related, though distantly, to Jesus who was also mixed up with our evening hymns.
‘Geesus loves me this I know, For the Bible tells me so’. I could not be bothered with the Bible at this time in the evening because it was dark and frightening and the animals had started howling. They started all at once, together, when the sun went down. I felt Gee-sus had the right idea, but I had no faith in his power to deal with Arf Arfer. Nor did I feel sure of God whose attribute seemed to be that he gave his ‘only forgotten’ son to redeem our sins. By this time I had become wary of probing too deeply into the doings of these night-time things; secretly I felt the green hill city and Geesus were ill-treated.
I came across them as I nightly said my prayers kneeling in front of my father, my eyes fixed on his watch chain swaying on his waistcoat. “Pity my Simply City”. After a long time I ventured to ask my mother what had happened to my Simply City. She seemed puzzled, and as I was too scared to say how I had come by it she was not able to enlighten me. Once I thought I had found the trail when my father told me that if I was good I should have a railway engine worked by ‘electric city’. This excited me so much that I asked him a mass of questions about ‘electric city’. He was delighted at such an astonishing emergence of intelligence where he had long given up expecting to find any. He believed I was excited by the thought of the engine and was amazed that I was actually enthralled by electricity—so much so that after a time he began to wonder why I could not pronounce it correctly.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 1
