Wilfred bion biography of williams

  Born in India in 1897, W. R. Bion first came to England at the age of 8 to receive his schooling. During the First World War he served in France as a tank commander and was awarded the DSO and the Legion of Honour. After reading history at Queen's College, Oxford, he studied medicine at University College, London, before a growing interest in psychoanalysis led him to undergo training analyses with John Rickman and, later, Melanie Klein. During the 1940s his attention was directed to the study of group processes, his researches culminating in the publication of a series of influential papers later produced in book-form as Experiences in Groups. Abandoning his work in this field in favour of psychoanalytic practice, he subsequently rose to the position of Director of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis (1956-1962) and President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society (1962-1965). From 1968 he worked in Los Angeles, returning to England two months before his death in 1979.

(From the back cover of Cogitations, edited by Francesca Bion, Karnac Books, London-New York, 1992.)

Photograph by courtesy of Parthenope Bion Talamo:Anna Freud, W. R. Bion (as President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society) and James Strachey at the Gala Dinner to celebrate the completion of the Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud's Works, 1964.

W. R. Bion at the I.P.A. International Congress in Stockholm (courtesy of Parthenope Bion) .

Bibliography (courtesy of Parthenope Bion Talamo)

• Bion, W.R. (1940). The war of nerves. In Miller and Crichton-Miller (Eds.), The Neuroses in War (pp.180 - 200). London: Macmillan, 1940.

• Bion, W.R. (1943). Intra-group tensions in therapy, Lancet 2: 678/781 - Nov.27, 1943, in Experiences in Groups (1961).

• Bion, W. R.(1946). Leaderless group project, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 10: 77-81

• Bion, W. R. (1948a). Psychiatry in a time of crisis, British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol.XXI.

• Bion,

English psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Wilfred Ruprecht BionDSO (; 8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.

Early life and military service

Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop's Stortford College in England. After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (on 18 February 1918, for his actions at the Battle of Cambrai), and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917, and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 June 1918, and to acting captain on 22 March 1918, when he took command of a tank section, he retained the rank when he became second-in-command of a tank company on 19 October 1918, and relinquished it on 7 January 1919. He was demobilised on 1 September 1921, and was granted the rank of captain. The full citation for his DSO reads:

Awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

[...]

T./2nd Lt, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, Tank Corps.

For conspicuous gallantry, and devotion to duty. When in command of his tank in an attack he engaged a large number of enemy machine guns in strong positions, thus assisting the infantry to advance. When his tank was put out of action by a direct hit he occupied a section of trench with his men and machine guns and opened fire on the enemy. He moved about in the open, giving directions to other tanks when they arrived, and at one period fired a Lewis gun with great effect from the top of his tank. He also got a captured machine gun into action against the enemy, and when reinforcements arrived he took command of a company of infantry whose

Reviews and Endorsements

'Meg Harris Williams has applied her gift for mystical poetry to "dreaming" Bion's passion, his suffering, as portrayed in his autobiographical works, The Long Week-End, All My Sins Remembered, and A Memoir of the Future. What Williams has done with rare literary craftsmanship and consummate poetic beauty is to weave Bion's autobiographical contributions, testimonies from his conscious memory, with his unconscious "dream" about it in his trilogy A Memoir of the Future. Williams' "dream" about his autobiographies lies atop Bion's dream about himself. The result is compelling and soul-searching. Bion has never been so "understood". Her "dream" engenders profound compassion for the dark fate-encountering pilgrim who overcame the dreadful odds that had always confronted him.'
- James Grotstein, training analyst, Los Angeles, and author of A Beam of Intense Darkness: Bion's Legacy to Psychoanalysis

'I can recommend this book - which evolved in its author's mind over time and outgrew its original envelope through natural growth - wholeheartedly. I found it modest, beautiful and also useful in that it stands as a good companion piece to Bion's allusive yet clinically relevant A Memoir of the Future. The author's personal exploration takes us closer to the deep structure, or grammar, of Bion's ideas without laying possession to them, translating or "explaining" them.'
- Chris Mawson, training analyst, British Psychoanalytical Society, and editor of The Complete Works of W.R. Bion

'To come anywhere near understanding Bion's work, the reader needs to be steeped in classical scholarship, to be a consummate literary critic and reader of texts, to have a profound familiarity with psychoanalytic thought and also to be, independently, truly a thinker. Perhaps uniquely, Meg Harris Williams combines these pre-requisites.'
- Margot Waddell, psychoanalyst and consultant child psychotherapist, Ta

Wilfred R. Bion (1897 -1979) was born in India and first came to England at the age of eight to receive his schooling. During the First World War he served in France as a tank commander and was awarded the DSO and the Legion of Honour. After reading history at Queen's College, Oxford, he studied medicine at University College London, before a growing interest in psychoanalysis led him to undergo training analysis with John Rickman and, later, Melanie Klein. During the 1940s his attention was directed to the study of group processes. Abandoning his work in this field in favor of psychoanalytic practice, he subsequently rose to the position of Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis (1956-62) and President of the British Psychoanalytical Society (1962-65). From 1968 he worked in Los Angeles, returning to England two months before his death in 1979.

A pioneer in group dynamics, he was associated with the 'Tavistock group', the group of pioneering psychologists that founded the Tavistock Institute in 1946 on the basis of their shared wartime experiences. He later wrote the influential Experiences in Groups, an important guide for the group psychotherapy and encounter group movements beginning in the 1960s, and which quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields. Bion's training included an analysis with Melanie Klein following World War II. He was a leading member in the Kleinian school while in London, but his theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, eventually revealed radical departures from both Kleinian and Freudian theory. While Bion is most well known outside of the psychoanalytic community for his work on group dynamics, the psychoanalytic conversation that explores his work is concerned with his theory of thinking and his model of the development of a capacity for thought.