War Memoirs 1917-1919: Second Edition - Softcover

R. Bion, Wilfred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782203583 ISBN 13: 9781782203582

Publisher: Routledge, 2015

Synopsis

Bion's War Memoirs is perhaps the most exceptional piece of autobiography yet written by a psychoanalyst. The first section of the book is documentary, consisting of the entire text of the diaries which Bion wrote as a young man to record his experiences on the Western Front in 1917-1919, and this volume also includes the photographs and diagrams with which he illustrated his recollections. The diaries are followed by two later essays, in which he reflects upon his wartime experiences.

Wilfred Bion has long been renowned as one of the great psychoanalysts, his career spanning much of the twentieth century and making him one of the most influential names in the field.

Bion's war diary, which he kept with him during combat, covered his years fighting in France during the First World War. He was just twenty years old when he began writing it. War Memoirs constitutes the final part of Bion's autobiography. It comprised three hardbound notebooks written soon after he had been demobilized from the Army and had begun his studies at Queen's College, Oxford. He wrote it for his parents as compensation for having found it impossible to write to them during the war. It has been aptly described by Winship (1999) as a 'book about the blood and guts of a youth who cut his teeth in the most devastating of circumstances'.

The actions he describes in War Memoirs are terrifying and detailed. They form the basis for his later understanding, as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, of the inner torments faced by the patients he treated. In Band of Brigands: The First Men in Tanks (2009), Christy Campbell, referring to a segment of Bion's descriptions, wrote: 'Bion... looks repeatedly at how sentient human beings continue to operate when everything around them is dissolving into violent chaos'.

Many years later, Bion returned to his youth and penned two pieces reflecting upon his time at war, which make up the second part of this book. These meditations are influenced by his psychoanalytic training, and show how his approach to psychoanalysis was influenced by his wartime experiences. Together, these diaries and essays provide an extraordinarily vivid and moving picture of war and its long-term effects.

About this title

About the Author:

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO (8 September 1897 - 8 November 1979) was a British psychoanalyst. Bion was born in India in the days of the British Raj, and was sent to school in England at the age of eight. He left school just before he was eighteen to join the Tank Corps and served in France where he was awarded the DSO, the Legion of Honour, and was mentioned in dispatches. After the war he read History at the Queen's College, Oxford, studied medicine at University College, London, and then turned to psycho-analysis to which he devoted the remaining fifty years of his life, the last twelve being spent in California.

A pioneer in group dynamics, he was associated with the 'Tavistock group', the group of pioneering psychologists that founded the Tavistock Institute in 1946 on the basis of their shared wartime experiences. He later wrote the influential Experiences in Groups, in 1961, an important guide for the group psychotherapy and encounter group movements beginning in the 1960s, and which quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields.

Abandoning his work in the field of group psychotherapy in favor of psychoanalytic practice, he subsequently rose to the position of Director of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis (1956-62) and President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society (1962-65). From 1968 he worked In Los Angeles, returning to England two months before his death in 1979.

Bion's training included an analysis with Melanie Klein and he was was a potent and original contributor to psychoanalysis. He was one of the first to analyse patients in psychotic states using an unmodified analytic technique; he extended existing theories of projective processes and developed new conceptual tools. The degree of collaboration between Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion and Herbert Rosenfeld in their work with psychotic patients during the late 1950s, and their discussions with Melanie Klein at the time, means that it is not always possible to distinguish their exact individual contributions to the developing theory of splitting, projective identification, unconscious phantasy and the use of countertransference. These three pioneering analysts not only sustained Klein's clinical and theoretical approach, but deepened and expanded it, and his work continues to be found clinically relevant today, in the UK, North and South America, and across the world.

His writings include Learning From Experience (1962), Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963), Transformations (1965), Attention and Interpretation (1970), Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura (1977) and two posthumously published volumes of autobiography: The Long Weekend (1982) and All My Sins Remembered (1985).

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1782203583
• ISBN 13: 9781782203582
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320