Bion's Dream

A Reading of the Autobiographies

Meg Harris Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429911477
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'This book offers a definitive reading of Bion's remarkable autobiographical writings from a perspective embedded in the poetry of the ages, that of the Romantics in particular. It is at once learned and, utterly freshly, able to explore the inside story of Bion's life and mind. The volume is a distillation and elaboration of the work of many years. Whilst ostensibly an extended commentary on the autobiographical works themselves, it is also, in its own right, a tour de force, engaging, as it does, with the heart of the matter: with the development of a psychoanalyst, of a life, a self, a mind, thoroughly inward with the "dark and sombre world of thought".'- Margot Waddell, psychoanalyst and consultant child psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic

Chapter One
Remembering^*

The Long Week-End

Wilfred Bion’s The Long Week-End is a fascinating account of one man’s failure to become an individual, to achieve integrity, to make emotional contact with his internal objects. It is remarkable in that it is a well-written, witty, artistic evocation of an apparently unprepossessing subject. It works on the lines of the questions posed in his Memoir of the Future: “Has anyone seen an artist paint a picture ‘about’ or ‘of’ something ugly which was nevertheless beautiful?” (Bion, 1991, p. 128). The genre of the work might be described as a hybrid drawn from Goodbye to All That, Lord of the Flies, and 1984. For although its effect depends on the realistic description of a particular social climate, it has a futuristic quality which makes an essential contribution to its emotional impact. In the religion, prudery, and patriotism of the late Victorian age, one glimpses Big Brother in the form of a series of “false parents”, of perverse ideals of masculinity and femininity and education. These, despite the good and even loving intentions of several of the main characters, succeed in divorcing the child Wilfred from any genuine emotional contact with his parents (literal and metaphorical), or with his cultural heritage. “The parents, staff, all were caught in a web of undirected menace” for “Who could recognise danger in piety, ardent patriotism to school and games heroes?” (Bion, 1982, pp. 47, 92). As a child, Wilfred has yet to learn that the prep-school bully, Morgan, is not unique but an archetype; and “there were plenty more where that one came from, the source of the Morgans of this life” (ibid., pp. 47–50). And Bion occasionally slips in, in parentheses, other remarks to remind us that the sinister “web” of that period continues in modern forms. But the main key to the present and future relevance of the book lies in our seeing it as an account of the failure of growth of an Everyman. As Bion brings to notice in his Preface, “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’”. For, in writing about “me”, he recognizes that he is “more likely to approximate to [his] ambition” of formulating “phenomena as close as possible to noumena” (p. 8).

The book, then, describes the series of misunderstandings and humiliations which transform him rapidly into an “accomplished liar” who can slip neatly into the basic assumptions of a given code of behaviour: a process which enables him to feel less of an “outcaste”—that is, less of an individual. He describes this as the formation of an “exo-skeleton” under the eye of a terrifying, vengeful God, “Arf Arfer”. This method of anti-education prevents him from learning anything from experience, even the experience of war, from which “I learnt nothing—presumably because at 19 I had become too set in my ways” (p. 193). For the setting of the mental sheath cannot serve the mind’s expansion:

neither the discipline of repetitive command, nor the “heaven” of middle class England, nor an exo-skeleton taking the place of a skeleton for an endo-skeletonous animal, can serve; still less in the domain of the mind. [p. 194]

After an anti-climactic year as best pupil and games captain, Wilfred leaves school preparing to “meet my father and mother”, as if for the first time (for they virtually disappear during the school narrative). Instead of a true “meeting”, however, he discovers that his internal self seems to have disappeared; his mother kisses “a chitinous semblance of a boy from whom a person had escaped. But I was imprisoned, unable to break out of the shell which adhered to me”. The metaphor of the fledgeling who is unable to hatch out properly runs throughout the book. In the Memoir, it achieves a kind of completion when the officer “hatches” from his exo-skeletonous tank, as he finally achieves, almost involuntarily, a capacity for thought. “Obsessed by the fear of cowardice”, the young man newly emerged from school looks around for various kinds of cover (“Couvre-toi de gloire” or “couvre-toi de flannelle”?) and, initially rejected for the Army, finds he has “no base on which to stand”. Time and again, the memory of meeting with his mother threatens to undermine the basic assumption group of the moment; but it is only a threat, for she is implicated in the network of deceit, having double standards of love and social acceptability. The conflict for Wilfred is intolerable; he feels, on leaving the Training Camp, that

I was cut off from my base. And the enemy was in full occupation of my mother. “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new”. [Lycidas]. Yes, woods you fool! It is there alone in the jungle that you have to live. [p. 114]

There is “no anaesthetic for those suffering home leave” (p. 115). The pain of the other kind of “warfare”—the “jungle” of lonely internal struggle, the “woods” of Lycidas—is not bearable precisely owing to the double standards, which suggest a kind of unintentional treachery within the Mother. There is no support, no catharsis for the nighttime fears related to the “jungle” of his childhood in India and his “poor little ignorant Indian self” (p. 92), which becomes somehow symbolic of the squashed outcaste potential of emotional contact. As at school, daytime conformity leads to night-time fears: “I say Richards, you were making a row last night! … as if you were being strangled!” (p. 90).

Bion makes clear that the “war” itself is simply the continuation of a pre-existing state of affairs, ad absurdum: “schoolboys of all ages playing soldiers, rehearsing for the real thing, but never learning that war and yet more terrible war is normal, not an aberrant disaster” (p. 113). During the war episode (which makes up the bulk of the autobiography), the False Parents appear frequently in caricature. The caricature is at times so strong that it is easy to dismiss its subject as social or political rather than internal and, consequently, part of that “normal”, ever-continuing warfare. There is, for example, the genteel old lady at the Cheltenham tea-party who finally gets Bion into a corner on his own to put her prize question: “What was it like when you drove your tank over people?” She is associated, in the context of the book, with “Mother England, that old whore” who “crucifies” her sons (pp. 265–266).² There is the Church with its heart-warming stories of soldiers who make the best of the loss of a leg through philosophical observations about “only having one boot to clean now”. There is the Major who sends him on suicidal missions with the fake parental concern of “Don’t risk the lives of your men”, backed by the cosy glow of exclusive man-to-man talks: “Doesn’t do to have these chaps [i.e., non-commissioned officers, the lower orders] hanging around when we have secret stuff to discuss. Now, tell me, what was it like?” (p. 141). Like the Cheltenham lady, he displays the obscene curiosity that is sanctioned and encouraged by impeccable “etiquette”.

Death itself becomes a “crisis of etiquette” when Smith becomes “It” and his rigid limbs refuse to be forced into their shallow grave. Instead of shocking the soldiering schoolboys into contact with emotional reality, the continuous degrading confrontation with actual death serves to reinforce the “sense of unreality”: “I was shocked [to find an acquaintance just killed]. I was shocked to find I didn’t care”. At one point, Bion describes the Dantesque groans of unsalvageable wounded men stuck in the mud where stretcher-bearers dared not reach them: “Like marsh birds, innumerable bitterns mating … not raucuous or crude, gentle. Dante’s Inferno—but how much better we do these things now”. An officer curses the tortured internal babies: “Shut up! Shut up! you noisy sods, you bleeding pieces of Earth”. Bion continues:

But they didn’t. And they don’t. And still the warning voices sound in answer to the sufferers of bereavement, depression, anxiety. “Don’t go off the beaten track. Don’t do as the psycho-analysts do. Haven’t you heard? Pay Stills Your Conscience Here. Don’t go off the beaten Church. Remember Simon Magnus. Leave Your mind alone. Don’t go down the Unconscious Daddy: Let the Gold Mine come up to you.” [p. 143]

Later in the war, when Bion is intimately confronted with death again, his internal reaction is the same attempt to deny emotional “ghosts”. His runner, Sweeting, loses the left side of his chest and keeps imploring Bion: “Mother, Mother … You will write to my mother sir, won’t you?” To which Bion’s unspoken reply is “No, blast you, I shan’t! Shut up! Can’t you see I don’t want to be disturbed? These old ghosts, they never die; they preserve their youth wonderfully … So, so … death-like, isn’t it?” (p. 249). This was the day—8th August—on which Bion says he “died” (p. 265).

The claustrophobic “web of undirected menace” strangles genuine intelligence and emotional reality. There is, as Bion puts it, “no where to run” as the network of interlocking fears holds the individual fast. Success or failure within the system is unrelated to courage; himself recommended for a VC, “I might with equal relevance have been recommended for a Court Martial. It depended on the direction which one took when one ran away” (p. 278). Either way, the individual runs into the basic-assumption web. The web’s definition of “intelligence” is brilliantly captured in Bion’s hilarious account of a staff Intelligence Officer asking him, after a so-called “battle”, “Did you notice when the alluvial changed to the cretaceous?” (p. 138). Here, in the autobiography, there is a suggestion of a mind–body metaphor which is more pronounced in the Memoir, in which different kinds of false protection (cretaceous, like the bony skull) for the vulnerable “alluvial” brains or minds are portrayed. Thus, Bion alludes later to the Intelligence Officer’s question, with: “Certainly the ground was dry and chalky—was that what the intelligent fool called cretaceous? I hoped I was not going to see it change to the alluvial”—that is, see “brains bulge out” as in the Memoir (1991, p. 154). His comment on this “intelligence” system is that “No fool could have arranged the battle I had just seen for myself”.

Conversely, it is a system in which any genuine intelligence requires to be squashed or outcast, thereby creating society’s cripples. In the war, such “breakdown” is represented by “shell-shock”—those who were not killed, yet “not robust enough to get shellshock”, simply “fading away” into safer jobs (1982, p. 236). Outside the war, there are figures such as the tragic Hirst, head of the prep-school, whose wife entered a lunatic asylum immediately after their marriage, a victim of the sexual intimidation which drove the pubescent “wiggling” Bion to watch out obsessively for “the first signs of insanity” (p. 78), and the child Bion to fears (and, indeed, actual threats) of being expelled, like “Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden—by God or some archangel with his flaming sword” (p. 46). In the words of his own father: in a “just war, we must fight with clean hands” (p. 109).

Bion’s childhood Garden of Eden was India, whose black and gold colours have superimposed on them the image of a “green hill”, associated with his mother’s lap and singing “There is a green hill far away” with his sister while their mother played the harmonium:

The parched Indian landscape must have drained all its green into that hill, which retained its city wall like a crown within which were tiny spires and towers huddled together against the foes “without”.

The image of the mother–hill has a certain ambiguity which puzzled the small child: “It took me a long time to realise that the wretched poet meant it had no city wall” (p. 9). Is it safe, or not? Are the children within, or “without” it—do they have it, or not? His mother’s lap felt “warm and safe” at first, then suddenly “cold and frightening”. His mother is also associated with luscious hats, like the one with clusters of grapes which earned her the title of “an abandoned woman” because she wore it to Church (p. 15); or the “millinery cake” hat which was Wilfred’s last image of her, bobbing up and down the green hedge, when she abandoned him at his prep-school (p. 33).

The duality is part of the Big Brother system to which all seem helplessly subject: did she abandon him or he her? In what sense was she “abandoned” herself? Although the child can read her feelings in her face (“I felt she was laughing inside”), there is an unacknowledged embargo upon any genuine expression of feeling that makes his own emotions uncontainable. Thus, in the period before he is due to be sent away to school in England:

My mother just stroked my cheeks and dreamt without fear but with sadness. I couldn’t stand it.

“Moth-er! You aren’t sad are you?”

“Sad?” She would laugh. “Of course not! Why should I be sad?”

Well, why should she be sad? I couldn’t think. It was ridiculous. Sad? Of course not! [p. 21]

The key phrase is “I couldn’t think”. Where there is no language for confronting emotion, thought is impossible. By considering her own feelings outcast, the mother is unable to contain and respond to the child’s. The problem with his relationship with his father is different in so far as he only loved “his image” of the children to start with, not the actual children themselves; he is yet further removed from reality. The mother “knew she had two nasty brats and could tolerate that fact; my father bitterly resented the menace of any reality which imperilled his fiction”. But it is similar, in that the non-communication on which it is based has an inkling of treachery, the same hot–cold feeling. On one occasion, his father “sat me kindly and patiently on his lap” while drawing from him a kind of confession about why he had hit his sister; as soon as the confession is drawn, “the storm burst” and the boy is beaten, resulting not even in pain, but rather in a blank vacancy: “‘Oh God, not that!’ I felt wordlessly, mindlessly” (p. 11). The beating, or rather the treachery, is the genesis of “Arf Arfer”, the God/Father who induces mindless terror.

The problem of the suppression of emotional reality is linguistically expressed; or rather, Bion expresses how it was evaded: how “wordlessly” and “mindlessly” go together. The child mutters the nightly prayer “Pity my Simply City” with his eyes “fixed” on his father’s watch chain (p. 13), as if on the mystery of his father’s glittering sexuality, which is also suggested by the “Electric City” train that is in turn linked by the child, linguistically and mentally, with the imaginary City on the Green Hill, thereby suggesting the male and female link he is trying to make in his mind. Yet his father, instead of helping the child push his fantasy through to the level of thought, negates as evidence of stupidity the metaphorical language which makes the child ask whether “Electric City” is “green like the other one”. In itself this seems to comply with the denial of sexuality imposed by the “web of menace” and reinforced by the particularly rigid, puritanical standards of the household—associated, it seems, with ambivalence about the mother’s Anglo-Indian identity and with the father’s missionary background. Wilfred’s parents took great pains and went to some sacrifice to encourage educational ideas and procure toys on the right lines (such as buying him an electric train); but they were “afraid I would ‘get ideas’ if I were allowed to have contact with any kind of ‘pagan superstition’ at variance with the pure, unsullied belief of our puritan and their missionary forbears” (p. 15). The household is geared against the kind of sexuality that is implied in “getting ideas”—the marriage of sexes, cultures, dream and daytime, fact and metaphor. Wilfred learns to stop asking questions, to keep his mouth shut, and to become adept at lying, at presenting an appearance. It is because the superficial good behaviour, or “not lying”, is, in fact, a “lie in the soul” at a deep level that Wilfred is so guilty and his father so furious when, during the episode of the flower-arrangement, he insists that he is not lying in claiming this image of his mother as all his own work (pp. 12, 34).

Meanwhile, the child’s sexuality develops as it were illicitly in his relation with his mother, who is in part an “abandoned woman” with her love stronger than her pride. It is as if his mother’s secret strain of Indian blood were a key to the secret of his parents’ sexuality and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Dedication
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Remembering
• CHAPTER TWO Counterdreaming: A Memoir of the Future
• CHAPTER THREE The growing germ of thought: the influence on Bion of Milton and the Romantic poets
• REFERENCES
• INDEX