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If Bion's psychoanalytical books had not been the subject of frequent notices in this Journal the present autobiographical fragment would hardly be worth reviewing. What makes it essential to do so is Bion's reputation as an aloof intellectual thinker. This reputation is both understandable and undeserved. Understandable because of his search for ‘absolute truth’ or ‘O’, his attempt to introduce a ‘grid’ in which he hoped to catch the transformations of mental processes and also his somewhat idiosyncratic language. Why that reputation is undeserved becomes very clear to the reader of his journal edited by Francesca Bion, his widow. Before going into details, let me say at once that it is an extraordinarily well-written account of the epoch and social background into which Bion was born: a British family of Huguenot extraction, living in India, where for several generations they had served as missionaries, in the Police Force and in the Department of Public Works. As was customary, the eight-year-old boy was sent to a preparatory school in England, and all the rest might have followed in the customary way had it not been for World War I. Bion's wartime experiences account for nearly two-thirds of the book. Readers of his psychoanalytical writings know already from the book covers that he won the D.S.O. as well as other distinctions. What they cannot know was how he came by it and what effect it had on him. The (overtly) non-biographical books and especially his later works, the collection of three books which go by the title ‘A Memoir of the Future’, are deeply imbued with Bion's army experience. Indirectly it showed already in his earlier work—for instance, ‘Experience in Groups’—but also when he uses terms like ‘what the soldier calls lateral contact’.
Reading his account of the war as an officer in the Tanks is like a sudden illumination: so this is where it all comes from, especially the much despised ‘sensa’ (experience of sensuous phenomena), hence the need for