Bion's Dream: A Reading of the Autobiographies

Synopsis:

'This book offers a definitive reading of Bion's remarkable autobiographical writings from a perspective embedded in the poetry of the ages, that of the Romantics in particular. It is at once learned and, utterly freshly, able to explore the inside story of Bion's life and mind. The volume is a distillation and elaboration of the work of many years. Whilst ostensibly an extended commentary on the autobiographical works themselves, it is also, in its own right, a tour de force, engaging, as it does, with the heart of the matter: with the development of a psychoanalyst, of a life, a self, a mind, thoroughly inward with the "dark and sombre world of thought".'

- Margot Waddell, psychoanalyst and consultant child psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic

Description:

'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, Tavistock Clinic, author of Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Personality

Notes about the author(s):

Meg Harris Williams, a writer and artist, studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, and has had a lifelong psychoanalytic education. She has written and lectured extensively in the UK and abroad on psychoanalysis and literature, and teaches at the Tavistock Centre in London, and the University of Surrey. She is married with four children and lives in Farnham, Surrey.