Night Vision: Wilfred Bion's Epistemological Poetics and the Experience of the First World War

All his life, Wilfred Bion strove to find a narrative form for the traumatic experiences he went through as a tank commander in the First World War. The body of his autobiographical and literary works documents his efforts to wrest a biography of his own from the most devastating processes of world history. As a whole, it is the result of a lifelong struggle to express something unspeakable, to restore something destroyed. What emerges is something like the prehistory of the psychical catastrophe from which Bion was unable to escape until his death. As such, however, these autobiographical fragments also reflect the prehistory of the historical catastrophe under whose spell the world still stands today. This book is the first comprehensive study of Bion’s autobiographical and literary writings. Drawing on the concepts of experience and thinking developed in his theoretical and clinical works, with which they are genetically linked, it discusses Bion’s strategies of writing and cognition, and for the first time systematically places a hitherto unexplored part of his work in the context of his entire œuvre. Following the chronological thread of his life, from childhood in India through youth in England to his experience of the First World War in France and Belgium, the book traces how Bion developed his unique method of writing. Detailed narrative analyses reveal the painful work of coming to terms with the war experiences which had haunted him throughout his life – a crippling trauma whose causes extended far beyond the individual and private. The book thus provides deep insights into Bion’s life, his thinking, and his writing, and offers the reader a portrait of the primal catastrophe of the twentieth century and its devastating effects.

Table of Contents:
About the author Introduction Part I Experience, cognition, writing—and their failure: Philosophical, psychological, philological aspects Chapter 1: Night vision Chapter 2: Dangers of understanding: Virgil’s Palinurus as an allegory of cognition Virgil’s Palinurus Bion’s Palinurus Eclipse of Palinurus Part II Wilfred Bion’s epistemological poetics Chapter 3: Wilfred Bion’s “late work”: Autobiography and “literary turn” Biography: Childhood in India, youth in England, First World War On the structure of Bion’s autobiographical writings The Long Week-End 1897–1919 and War Memoirs 1917–1919 All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life The trilogy of novels: A Memoir of the Future The presence of the past in a dream that interprets itself Dream–dream interpretation—“construction”—dream text “The only thing I am not quite clear about …”—Bion’s theory of the dream A first step in a new language Entering into the unknown Chapter 4: “Psychological impossibilities”: Childhood and child’s experience in Wilfred Bion’s The Long Week-End Chapter 5 : “A sense of disaster, past and impending”: Youth and boarding school life in England before the First World War Experiences beyond description: “Such cataclysmic disasters cannot be described” Close reading: The Long Week-End, “England”, Chapter 1 “Misery at school had a dynamic quality”: Everyday life in the boarding school panopticon Glory and flannel: “England at war. Myself with nothing but my tiny little public school soul” Part III Wilfred Bion’s epistemological poetics and the experience of the First World War Chapter 6: A sub-thalamic fear”: Wilfred Bion’s War Memoirs 1917–1919 Bion’s War Memoirs 1917–1919 and “a great unsolved puzzle” Palimpsests Memory is figurative communication of emotional experience “I died there”: Life after (psychical) death “The ghosts look in from the battle again”: The psychological catastrophe of survival The “Amiens” report of 1958: Another attempt to describe the indescribable Crater landscapes How to describe the indescribable? The silence in the combat breaks “Cracking up” “I shall try to give you our feelings at the time I am writing of ”: Outlook Chapter 7 : Writing the ineffable: The experience of the First World War in The Long Week-End 1897–1919 Experience and narrative Ypres: Map and territory Amiens: August 8, 1918 Amiens: Map and territory Thinking under fire: Measurements in the fog of fear Sweeting’s death Panorama of working through a catastrophic trauma Overview of the external events Sweeting’s death: The first text version from the war diary of 1919 Sweeting’s death: The second text version in the “Amiens” fragment of 1958 Sweeting’s death: The third text version in The Long Week-End “We will remember them”: A tomb for Sweeting Postscript: (Aesthetic) experience and epistemological poetics References Index

About the Author :
Dominic Angeloch, Priv-Doz Dr phil, is senior lecturer for comparative literature at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, and managing editor of Psyche: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen (Klett-Cotta publishers). He teaches at various universities and has held professorships in comparative literature and international literatures (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Tübingen). He is the author of numerous articles published in international journals and several books.

Review :
‘This remarkable text considers the almost impossible dialectic between traumatic experience and written text. It deals with Bion’s personal struggle, all his life, to manage his unmanageable war experience. It is traced through his various expositions, especially his literary/autobiographical writing. In the process, Dominic Angeloch accepts the challenge of capturing and expressing Bion’s distress in the wider and impressive landscape of historical and poetic cultures.’ ‘Most books about Wilfred Bion refer to his theories and how he integrates Freud and Melanie Klein. Dominic Angeloch goes beyond this unifying reading. He enriches these views by Bion’s paradoxical instruction for therapists to have “no memory, no desire” alongside another recommendation for “thinking under the fire”, which becomes most instructive. It refers to Bion’s memory of horrible war experiences. A new level of Bion studies is achieved by integrating epistemology, art, and biographical perspective. This book leads us to enter the dark and the unknown so we are “seeing Bion’s darkness”. It was a serious omission from our understanding of Bion but now you hold it in your hands.’ ‘In the expanding body of literature on Bion and his thought, a careful, in-depth examination of his autobiographical writings has long been missing—until now. With both authority and heartfelt engagement, this book fills that void, drawing readers deep into Bion’s narrative style, especially when he ventures into profoundly personal territory and revisits the most dramatic chapters of his life. From the wrenching separation from his mother in India to his harrowing wartime experiences at the age of eighteen, we gain invaluable insight into his psychoanalytic vision and the singular way he approached the world. As these pages unfold, we are not merely introduced to the private dimensions of Bion’s lived experience; we are offered a key to understanding the very heart of his psychoanalytic thought—a conceptual framework centred on emotional experience, the unknown, and the infinite. Night Vision: Wilfred Bion's Epistemological Poetics and the Experience of the First World War further illuminates the depth of Bion’s ethical commitment and his fierce repudiation of any “religion” disguised as psychoanalysis. I cannot recommend this extraordinary work highly enough. It stands as the finest introduction I know to the man himself—his character, his personality, and the enduring legacy of his thought.’ ‘What does it mean to write one’s life interminably yet be unable to tell it? This question is central to the work of Wilfred Bion, one of the most significant psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, and one he endured in repeated attempts to narrate his catastrophic experience of “psychic death” as a tank commander in the First World War. In this extraordinary study, comparable to W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, Dominic Angeloch, an expert in comparative literature and on Bion, gives compelling narrative analyses of Bion’s different versions of his central trauma. In this, Angeloch pursues a “poetics of cognition”: What form of words can be used to describe the experiences we are unable to think? And what can literature reveal to us of the ways we have grappled more broadly to narrate a catastrophic modernity?’