Wilfred Bion

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (8 September 1897 in Mathura - 28 August 1979 in Oxford) was a British physician and psychoanalyst.

Biography

She was born in India, where she lived until she was eight years old. The son of a minor employee of the British colony, he was raised with the privileges of colonists in India. He then moved to London where he began a boarding life, with few visits from his parents. He developed as a great sportsman, especially in swimming and water polo. He became team captain. His autobiographical writings already reveal, in those years, a very special view of the world, disengaged from the common sense of social repression. Bion participated in the two world wars, being decorated and as a hero, in the second, an experience that marks him in an overwhelming way and that will be part of both his theoretical and personal elaborations in his writings. Later, being quite mature, he trained as a doctor, psychiatrist and then psychoanalyst at the International Psychoanalytic Association, in London, becoming president of the local branch of the British society.

Work

His work is initially based on Freud and Melanie Klein, but the first part of his work is very difficult to read, giving the impression that he tries to put his passionate and very personal thought into the official words of recognized masters. In the second part of his work, considered by the Kleinians as psychotic, he is freer and clearer, although extremely revolutionary, mystical and inspired, with a thought that, being deeply based on psychoanalysis, transcends and threatens the entire stagnant structure of the movement of The time.

His contributions have had great relevance in the treatment of psychosis from analytic therapy. Risking a re-election in the institutional presidency, he decides to leave, expressing the quote "before the weight of the medals sank him", and he goes to Beverly Hills, California, where practically without references he begins a new life.

He leaves traces in the Californian school of psychoanalysis, among them, two groups of fanatics who dispute the authority over the author's thought and others who are less relevant but no less fanatical. They call themselves "Bion's Babies" and "Raging Kleinians". For Bion, human thought and, within it, psychoanalysis, are in their prehistory. His conception of the possible connection with esoteric disciplines or Eastern philosophical traditions, which allude to a whole and humanity's belonging to it, is strong. For the Bion of the last period, the bodily materiality of physiology misleads us into believing that we are individual beings.

List of Bion's work (in English)