Bion

365 Quotes

Nicola Abel-Hirsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429683787
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

This is a book of 365 quotes from the work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. Something of an enigma, Bion often doesn't write in the way one would expect of a psychoanalyst, but is being read ever-increasingly around the world, in and outside the psychoanalytic community. Certain of his comments are often quoted, whilst swathes of his work lie almost untouched. How to make some of the detail of this work available? What he writes is often dense in the way the structure of a poem can be, and the book has the format of a 'poem a day' collection – providing a way into his complete work one quote at a time. Alongside commentaries by Abel-Hirsch are thoughts on Bion's work drawn from papers by other analysts from the UK, the Americas, and Europe. The book is structured in a way that will inform and interest the general reader as well as giving something new to psychoanalysts and others who already know his work well.

Part I
Autobiography

Chapter 1
The Long Weekend: 1897–1919 (Part of a Life)

Introduction

The Long Weekend and Bion’s second volume of his autobiography, All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life, were written when he was in his seventies, but as the record of Bion’s first 50 years, the quotes have been put at the beginning of the book.

The Long Weekend begins with his childhood in Muttra in the United Provinces of Northwest India, where Bion’s father was an irrigation engineer. The first four quotes are about India. In the fifth quote he has arrived in a boarding school in England, where he was sent at the age of 8, never to return to India.

From the age of 8, Bion grew up in groups. After being sent to boarding school, it was more than three years before he saw his mother again “and then, momentarily, did not recognise her” (Francesca Bion, 1994, pp. 91–92).

Bion left school in 1915, just before his eighteenth birthday, and joined the Royal Tank Regiment. The Long Weekend quotes about these years have been put together with his other writings on the war in Chapter 2: “Bion’s War”.

Quotes

1. Ayah, and Mother’s lap
2. Arf Arfer
3. Tiger
4. India
5. Arrival at boarding school
6. Wiggling
7. Holidays: the Hamiltons
8. Holidays: the Archers
9. Munden
10. Sublimation

[1] Ayah and Mother’s lap

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 to 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.

(CWB I, p. 13)

Many years later Bion commented about a woman who had “married a man who had risen from the ranks. She had therefore lost caste and had become, like my dear ayah, an untouchable” (CWB II, p. 50).

Parthenope Bion Talamo

“Bion certainly absorbed a very great amount of Indian culture, much more than most of the, shall we say, colonialist children of the time did, precisely because of the work that his father did—he was a civil engineer who built some of the first railways in India and very long irrigation canals (1,600–1,700 kilometres) whose plotted course, like the railways, often passed through uninhabited areas (including the jungle).

So the family followed the construction site and moved month by month, as the construction site moved; practically a small European nucleus and a very large number of Indians so my father, when he was little, certainly for example spoke Hindustani fluently, something that he later forgot completely. A colleague from Bombay told me he heard Bion speaking in the last year of his life, giving a lecture in which he spoke about the Bhagavad Gita: speaking about sacred texts he had a very strong English accent, but when he quoted even a phrase of Hindu-stani he had no accent; so there was certainly a level, a stratification that had become entirely unconscious, of an Indo-European language that had been completely forgotten.”

(1996 [2011] pp. 429–430)

[2] Arf Arfer

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; it’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 practice. Arf, arf, arf….

(CWB I, pp. 16–17)

[3] Tiger

That night Arf Arfer came in terror “like the King of Kings”. The hunt had killed a tiger and the body had been brought to our camp. His mate came to claim him and for the next two nights the camp was circled by fires and torches burning bright to keep her out. With her great head and mouth directed to the ground so as to disguise her whereabouts she roared her requiem. Even my fear was swallowed up in awe as almost from inside our tent there seemed to come a great cough and then the full-throated roar of the tigress’s mourning. All that night and the next it continued while even our brave dogs shivered and snarled and cowered. No sooner had the sun set to release the orchestra of the tropical night than we were aware of the added diapason.

“She won’t eat us Daddy? You are sure she won’t?”

We slept safe in their tents for those nights. On the third night her vigil was short. She went away before midnight and came no more.

(CWB I, pp. 22–23)

[4] India

None the less I loved India. The blazing, intolerable sun – how wonderful it was! The mid-day silence, the great trees with leaves hanging motionless in the breathless air, the brain-fever bird with its rising reiterated call, “Brain-fever, brain-fever, brain-fever …”, then silence again.

I discovered it was a marvellous place to play trains. The intense heat conspired to produce masses of fine white dust. Nonchalantly I kicked it up and was rewarded by a great cloud that rose into the air. I did it again. Before I had time to think I was racing around, kicking up huge clouds of … steam … in front of me like a huge “Ee Ay Ah” locomotive. The Devil entered into me: The Devil, unlike Arf Arfer, was a great friend of mine. “Go on! Do it again”, he said. “Lead us not into temptation”, I learned to pray, but only rather half-heartedly. Temptation, unlike heaven, was such fun. The immense speed at which I was travelling, the intoxicating sulphurous fumes of smoke which belched out from the pistons in front of me – glorious! And much superior to electric city with its old slug of buttered locomotive.

“What have you been doing?” my mother asked. “Just look at you! White … from top to toe!”

I couldn’t “look at me” but I saw what she meant. I was a bit dusty. She, poor woman, thought I had come in for a drink, but in fact it was the great E.I.R. express locomotive come to have its tank filled in its record-making run across India and there was not a moment to lose. I tried to make her understand that I had to go at once. It took her some time to make me understand – even now I can hardly believe it – that I was never to do it again. Never!….

Later, when the monsoon came, I found she was curiously blind about that.

“What rain?” I asked, not hopefully, as I stood before her “soaked to the skin” as she called it. It made it worse that I felt she was laughing – inside.

“You’re laughing”, I said. “No”, she said looking very stern. So she wasn’t sad; and she wasn’t laughing either.

(CWB I, pp. 36–37)

[5] Arrival at boarding school

The train worked steadily, sometimes painfully over the stiffer gradients of the Western Ghats till it drew in to the terminus at Bombay. The railway station, like other architectural monuments of the British Raj, was a mixture of tawdry provincialism and Imperial domesticity which even in retrospect can evoke in me nostalgic feelings of great poignancy. I came in time to believe that these feelings were the substitute for what others called “homesickness”. But I had no home for which I could feel sick – only people and things. Thus, when I found myself alone in the playground of the Preparatory School in England where I kissed my mother a dry-eyed goodbye, I could see, above the hedge which separated me from her and the road which was the boundary of the wide world itself, her hat go bobbing up and down like some curiously wrought millinery cake carried on the wave of green hedge. And then it was gone.

Numbed, stupefied, I found myself staring into a bright, alert face. “Which are you – A or B?” it said. Other faces had gathered.

“A”, I said hurriedly in response to the urgency I felt in their curiosity.

“You’re not! You jolly well say “B”. You know nothing about it!” This was only too true.

“B”, I said obediently.

“You dirty little liar!” said the first one. Appealing passionately to the rest, “He just said he was A. Didn’t he?” That I had to admit.

“You can’t go back on that”, said the advocate of B. “You must stay B or you’ll be a beastly little turn-coat!” he cried heatedly.

“All right. I’ll stay B.”

A fight developed. I heard the first one shouting, “He is a beastly turn-coat; and a liar anyway. We don’t want him. Do we chaps?” The crowd had grown to formidable proportions, say, six or seven. “No”, they shouted.

“Don’t mind them”, said the second boy. “You stick to B.” And I did – for the rest of my life – though it took a long time before I discovered, and even then did not understand, that the main school was divided into Houses. School House, being bigger than all others, was divided into School House A and School House B-rivals. That was the immediate issue which had been solved by my becoming for ever B.

The storm subsided as if it had never been of the slightest interest to anyone. B, not A; not A – B; that was what I had to remember.

At last the ghastly day ended and I was able to get under the bedclothes and sob.

(CWB I, pp. 43–44)

[6] Wiggling

England….

The day Thou gavest Lord is ended. Bed at – nearly – last. But first we had to say our prayers. Each knelt in prayer at the end of his bed…. Shod wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• A list of the 365 quotes
• PART I Autobiography
• PART II Papers, books, notes, letters
• PART III International lectures, seminars and supervisions
• PART IV A Memoir of the Future
• PART V Epilogue
• Timeline
• Bibliography
• Index