Aftermath. War Memoirs 1917-1919

‘Had everyone gone mad?‘ (p. 77).

This question came to Bion's mind while commenting on what should have been one of the more peaceful and less frightening moments of his war years, the Christmas 1917 break from fighting, and refers to the brutish behaviour of men off duty. He gives it no immediate answer, but reading War Memoirs makes me wonder whether he did not perhaps spend a good portion of the rest of his life exploring the avenues of enquiry that it opened up, as he moved through the study of history to teaching, medicine, psychotherapy and finally psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytically informed study of groups.

The diaries themselves are almost raw material, with hardly any emotional or intellectual elaboration, a far cry indeed from the war poems of Owen or Sassoon. Even the later versions of the same experiences delineated in Bion's autobiographical writings (e.g., see Volume I, p. 209) do not seem to have undergone great changes. It is interesting to note that some episodes are carried over almost unchewed and apparently undigested into A Memoir of the Future (see Volumes XII–XIV), as though no further working-through were possible.

As far as A Memoir of the Future is concerned, this technique is justified by the fact that Bion was trying to present the reader with raw, basic, almost primitive experiences that had been dealt with at the time of their occurrence by a mind that was recognized as being ill-equipped to do so. In several places in the diaries he complains of the fact that he (and others) had not the mental equipment of a professional soldier, which, he seems to have felt, would have given him some sort of protection from the full blast of war. But the reason

he uses these episodes in A Memoir of the Future is to show up the co-existence of regressed states of mind, together with more sophisticated ones. It is illuminating to compare his Diary description (pp. 127–128) of gaining some comfort from lying on the bank ‘just as if I was lying pe