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Our ayah was a wizened little woman who, in so far as I connected age with her at all, was assumed by my sister and me to be very old, much older than our father and mother. We were very fond of her, perhaps more fond than of our parents. On second thoughts, perhaps not. My mother was a little frightening. For one thing she might die because she was so old. She was not so old as our ayah; my sister and I agreed that she was not less than, say, two or maybe three hundred years old, and though this was a ripe age she did not seem likely to die. Our mother, on the other hand, was peculiar; it felt queer if she picked me up and put me on her lap, warm and safe and comfortable. Then suddenly cold and frightening, as it was many years later at the end of school service when the doors were opened and a cold draught of night air seemed to sigh gently through the sermonically heated chapel. Sermons, the Headmaster, God, The Father Almighty, Arf Arfer Oo Arf in Mphm, please make me a good boy. I would slip off her lap quickly and hunt for my sister.
Wilfred Bion is beginning his autobiography—a most psychoanalytically written account. But … why should we label a text devoid of technical terms like this one as 'psychoanalytical'? It is 'psychoanalytic' because it is a ruthful, reality embedded, verbal reproduction of some basic emotional truths—some of them, tragic.
Bion created the technical term L-link (Bion, 1962). This term encompasses something poets would call 'love'. 'Love' has had an old love-affair with psychoanalysis since the inception of the latter. Sometimes people put it as love of psychoanalysis, love of truth. Some people put it as love of human beings, actually embedded during the psychoanalytic fifty minute hour in those two characters we are accustomed to call 'analyst' and 'analysand'. This has been an enduring love-affair—mysterious and dangerous as any love-affair—since Freud's problems concerning 'love' were brought to the realm of science.