Introductory Notes on Wilfred Bion

Wilfred Bion was born in 1897 in Muttra, India, where his father was an engineer and administrator. India made a lasting impression on him and amongst the writings that he used in his work was the Bhagavad Gita. He was parted from his family at the young age of 8 to attend school in England as was the sad custom at that time. During the First World War he joined the Royal Tank Corps and saw a great deal of action for which he received two high awards for gallantry. In his later book The Long Week End (1982), though, Bion makes it clear that in the chaos and fear of war, what happens is very confused and unclear and is rewritten and falsified afterwards in an attempt to make sense of the madness. These experiences clearly influenced him deeply and one constantly sees them reflected in his psychoanalytical writings, especially on psychotic states. The extreme violence and fragmentation of psychotic projectiles and psychic landscapes in devastation and ruin seem to me to come straight from images of that terrible war. He went to Oxford where he excelled in sport and graduated in Modern History. After a brief period of teaching, and already interested in psychoanalysis, he went to University College Hospital to study medicine in order to pursue a career in psychoanalysis. One of his appointments was with Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon with a deep interest in psychology who was known for his book on groups, The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), upon which Bion clearly drew in his work on groups. After qualifying he went straight into psychiatry and was soon working at the Tavistock Clinic and started analysis with John Rickman. His psychoanalytic training was interrupted by the Second World War, during which time he was very active in using and developing his ideas on groups in the treatment of psychological casualties as well as in the selection of officers and this early work with groups formed the subject of his first paper (Bion 1943). After the war he compl