The Experience of the First World War in Wilfred Bion’s Autobiographical Writings

Abstract

All his life, Wilfred Bion attempted to devise a narrative form for an account of the traumatic experiences he went through as a tank commander in the First World War. The body of his autobiographical works, which consists of texts written in different stages of his life and remain fragmentary, documents his desperate efforts to wrest a biography of his own from the most appalling tendencies of world history. As a whole, it testifies for and is the result of a lifelong attempt to understand something incomprehensible, to express something unspeakable, to restore something destroyed. It represents something akin to the primal history of the psychic catastrophe that Bion failed to escape from as long as he lived. The article first provides an overview of these autobiographical and literary writings against the background of a brief account of the external facts of Bion’s life. It then undertakes a narrative analysis of the sequences in which Bion tries to find a narrative form for the arguably most terrible event of the entire war which not only was a deeply traumatic experience remaining with him throughout his life, but also resulted in what he felt to be his psychic death. Taken together, these sequences impressively show the painful work of gradually dissolving or at least coming to terms with the psychological catastrophe of a paralyzing trauma, the causes of which reach far beyond the individual and the private. The article sets out to contribute to the still unwritten inquiry into the genetic context in which Bion’s autobiographical, literary, and theoretical writings figure, together with the concepts and writing strategies embodied in them.