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In the early 1970s I decided to make a typescript of Bion's diary to facilitate any future reading of it and as an insurance against any possible loss of the original – somewhat late in the day, its having already survived many house removals in the ‘20s and ‘30s, London bombing raids in the ‘40s, further house removals in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and a voyage of six thousand miles to California in 1968. That typescript tempted Bion to read the account for the first time since he wrote it fifty years earlier and to make some revealing comments on his reactions. As he rightly observes, ‘I am amazed to find I wrote like an illiterate when I had already been accepted at Queen's’.
The Commentary is written in the form he used in A Memoir of the Future, although here the conversation is between two characters only: Bion, the inexperienced young man of twenty-one, and Myself, the wise old man of seventy-five. Memories come flooding back, reinforcing his dislike of his personality and poor opinion of his performance as a soldier. He says, ‘… I never recovered from the survival of the Battle of Amiens. Most of what I do not like about you [myself] seemed to start then’. Fortunately this lack of self-esteem was offset by his pride in his family and his work as a psychoanalyst – the two areas of his life that were of greater importance to him than any other.
Francesca Bion