The Long Weekend, 1897-1919: Part of a Life.

A good copy, a few annotations, Name entry and name stamp on endpapers. Text - English. - This is the autobiography of the earlv life of one of Britain's most significant psychoanalytic thinkers. Among his many accomplishments, Wilfred Bion pioneered the study of group processes and was President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. His work is hard to classify but it has had a profound influence on many, and all agree on its originality. His theoretical writings are in direct line from Freud to Melanie Klein, hut branch off into a theory of thinking based on the most primitive elements of emotionality. In this volume the lay reader is given access to Bion's point of view and style of thinking - matters which are rather arcane in his other, more explicitly theoretical writings. The account is powerful, not only as a record of unhappy and largely (at the time) uncomprehended experience, but for the way it reveals the numbing, destructive effect that early life can have on the growth of personality and the capacity to conduct intimate relations. He describes his life with relentless honesty. It is a raw and disturbing read: childhood in India, school, World War One Tank Corps. Bion's commitment to honesty stands at the heart of his thinking and of his theory of thinking. Lies are the poison of the mind. His awareness of the lying nature of his social environment, including the deceit and hypocrisy of much that made Britain 'great' and the fervour of his critique of the Establishment, particularly in its institutional forms, bring the most intimate into relation with the most general. Such illumination of the general with the particular is one of the values of good autobiography. It presents w ith great clarity the simultaneity of conscious and unconscious processes, how one constantly informs the other - how, in fact, we live in two worlds simultaneously, inner and outer reality. ISBN 9780946960439