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This is not a particularly recent paper, nor is it written by a psychoanalyst: but in response to the Journal review editor request to select a paper it is one that immediately came to my mind. The author, Kay Souter, is a professor of literature at La Trobe University of Melbourne and reports how for many years now she has presented to her students the key theoretical papers of Bion, particularly ‘Attacks on linking’ (1959) and ‘A theory of thinking’ , against the background of the autobiographical material available through his memoirs and letters. The conjunction of the autobiography and the theory makes available to the reader the radical ordinariness of much of Bion's thinking, and the extent to which it was a brilliant and heroic response to the circumstances of his life…. As with all leaps of insight, it takes a special intellectual power and emotional tenacity to proceed and elucidate the shape and structure in the painful formlessness of ordinary life…
This paper, then, explores the link between war, masculinity, the maternal and Bion's sensitivity to the necessity of interpersonal contact. His psychoanalytic contemporaries who did not experience the extremities of life at the Western front simply do not see the same things.
Souter begins with an evocation of Bion's childhood in India and his memory of the haunting cough of the tigress that prowled around their compound at night after her mate had been shot by Bion's father. Both this distant and disconcerting father and the volatile moodiness of his mother stand in contrast to the reassuring presence of his nanny/Ayah: but contact with all of these was drastically severed by his departure to school in England, aged eight. This background of estrangement was exacerbated by his sense of never quite fitting in with the public school ethos from whence he