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Gérard Bléandonu, a community psychiatrist from Lyon, France, has divided Bion's psychoanalytic writing into four areas of production through which the development of Bion's thoughts is seen in relation to events in his life: (1) the period of group psychology, (2) the period of clinical work centering on psychosis, (3) the period of questions regarding epistemology, and (4) the period of his autobiography and literary works. I will take his lead in organizing what follows.
Born in Muttra in the Punjab in 1897, Bion's first eight formative years were spent in colonial India, which made an indelible impression on him. As a young boy, he was forced to leave his family when he was sent to an English boarding school, Bishop's Stortford College. During World War I, Bion was commissioned and joined the 5th Tank Battalion of Bovingdon, Wool, became a decorated hero and saw his share of death and human degradation. In notes he made in 1918 at the end of the war, as if to summarize what he had so recently learned, and simultaneously to outline a research project for a lifetime, Bion wrote that people will use “anything to hold at bay the dark and somber world of thought” (p. 34).
Bion studied history at Queen's College, Oxford, and later medicine at University College London. By 1930 he qualified as Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. Bion joined the psychiatric staff of the Tavistock Clinic in 1932 where he was heavily influenced toward a psychodynamic view by J. A. Hadfield. He learned “reductive analysis” in which the goal was to discover the dynamic links between a symptom and its origins in the past. Free association and dream analysis were used to bring to light “nuclear incidents.” One of his more illustrious patients was the writer Samuel Beckett, with whom he worked from