Appendix B. Confessions of an Emmature Superego or, the Ayah's Lament

Averse narrative fictionalizing the genesis of Bion's ideas, in the voice of the “ayah” of his Indian childhood. I wrote this originally to be performed by Alaknanda Samarth, who played the child Bion's ayah in the unfinished film of A Memoir of the Future. The narrative is spoken by the voice of the ayah-as-goddess, the oriental aspect of Bion's internal mother/object. In the autobiographical books she is a shadowy figure, realized most graphically perhaps in the character of Rosemary: so, like one of Bion's “empty concepts”, she can be filled with meaning. She appears in various guises, from the Great Cat Ra (the Tiger) to the knowledge-containing Skull. Her story follows as in a dream-sequence the autobiographical history of the Memoir and The Long Week-End, from pre-natal life and its passionate origins, through childhood in India and in exile in England, to the war and its re-living through psychoanalysis. The narrative dramatizes the implications of Bion's concept of “home leave” (the enforced distancing from his emotional roots), which may be said to constitute the origins of his differentiation between positive and negative states of emotionality—a clarification that, when successful, leads ultimately towards the birth of thought. For Bion repeatedly describes his actual life-experiences as taking place in the realms of “minus K”. It was their re-living in the form of dreams that constituted, for him, learning from experience.