Product details
- ISBN 9781800133112
- Weight: 365g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Karnac Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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All his life, Wilfred Bion strove to find a narrative form for the traumatic experiences he went through as a tank commander in the First World War. The body of his autobiographical and literary works documents his efforts to wrest a biography of his own from the most devastating processes of world history. As a whole, it is the result of a lifelong struggle to express something unspeakable, to restore something destroyed. What emerges is something like the prehistory of the psychical catastrophe from which Bion was unable to escape until his death. As such, however, these autobiographical fragments also reflect the prehistory of the historical catastrophe under whose spell the world still stands today.
This book is the first comprehensive study of Bion’s autobiographical and literary writings. Drawing on the concepts of experience and thinking developed in his theoretical and clinical works, with which they are genetically linked, it discusses Bion’s strategies of writing and cognition, and for the first time systematically places a hitherto unexplored part of his work in the context of his entire œuvre.
Following the chronological thread of his life, from childhood in India through youth in England to his experience of the First World War in France and Belgium, the book traces how Bion developed his unique method of writing. Detailed narrative analyses reveal the painful work of coming to terms with the war experiences which had haunted him throughout his life – a crippling trauma whose causes extended far beyond the individual and private. The book thus provides deep insights into Bion’s life, his thinking, and his writing, and offers the reader a portrait of the primal catastrophe of the twentieth century and its devastating effects.
Dominic Angeloch, Priv-Doz Dr phil, is senior lecturer for comparative literature at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, and managing editor of Psyche: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen (Klett-Cotta publishers). He teaches at various universities and has held professorships in comparative literature and international literatures (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Tübingen). He is the author of numerous articles published in international journals and several books.
