Category: Thoughts on trauma. Tags: Bion. When one thinks of trauma theorists, not only does the name of Wilfred Bion rarely spring to mind. One almost never thinks of him. Yet, Bion, who along with Melanie Klein and D. Winnicott remade psychoanalysis, is the analyst most concerned with trauma. Klein created object relations theory. Winnicott and Bion developed it in its most distinctive variations. Bion presents his encounter with trauma in a series of autobiographies.
We must make the connection to his theory. Throughout his adult life, from a diary written for his parents, to several volumes of autobiography, to a memoir written forty years after the event, Bion refers to his experience as a teenage tank commander in World War I.
His autobiographies have the quality of survivor testimony, with the associated emotional numbness, low self-esteem, grief and guilt. Amiens refers to the events near the Amiens—Roye road on August 8, , in France. A runner, Sweeting, accompanies Bion into battle, and amidst explosions Sweeting and Bion take cover in a shell crater, the young boy, as Bion calls him, pressing up against him.
Mother, Mother, Mother. As Sweeting keeps begging him to write his mother, Bion began to vomit repeatedly. I wish he would shut up. I wish he would die. Eventually the dying man is carried away by two medical orderlies, and Bion writes.
Other theorists, such as Freud and Klein, made love and hate central. To this Bion adds knowledge, particularly the inability to know. The inability to know results from the failure to have found someone, generally in early life, willing and able to contain unbearable feelings, feelings that cannot be put into words, but have more the quality of fragments of feelings.
