You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The reader will have no difficulty in extending empathy to me as a reviewer of my late analyst's War Memoirs. Reading it was more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I could not help viewing it as a war novel, a veritable Iliad, wondering whether the hero, who portrays himself as an non-hero, would survive. His daily reminiscences while under fire and between battle engagements is often all too English in so far as his expression of his feelings seems to be held in check - most, but not all, the time. The difficulty I had in reading it was that it was a long trial by ordeal of my own analyst as a young man. As I continued reading the book, I had the ominous feeling, knowing all along, that he was imminently going to die - or even worse - suffer horrendously. He had left Los Angeles and returned to England before my own unconscious and my analysis by him would have desired.
One of the most haunting aspects of the Memoirs is that it was structured as a compilation of diary entries in the form of presumed letters home to his mother about what was currently happening in his personal sector of the Western Front. In actual fact, according to his daughter's ‘Aftermath’ section at the end of the book, he never actualized these memoirs as letters home. According to her, he employed the form of letters to his mother (interestingly, not his father) as a ‘container’, as a known loving image to share his fears with. Upon reading his daughter's note, I could not help recalling Bion's discovery of maternal reverie, alpha function, and especially the interpersonal dimensions of projective identification. In those early papers he would frequently state that the mother must contain her infant's ‘fear of dying’. When I first came across that statement, I thought that it was a most interesting way of addressing the infant's primal experience of the death instinct. After reading War Memoirs, I have come to realize that Bion was speaking first hand as an embattled infant caught i