ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion's The Long Week-End is a fascinating account of one man's failure to become an individual, to achieve integrity, to make emotional contact with his internal objects. It is remarkable in that it is a well-written, witty, artistic evocation of an apparently unprepossessing subject. Bion makes clear that the "war" itself is simply the continuation of a pre-existing state of affairs, ad absurdum: "schoolboys of all ages playing soldiers, rehearsing for the real thing, but never learning that war and yet more terrible war is normal, not an aberrant disaster". During the war episode, the False Parents appear frequently in caricature. Bion is left after the war with no idea of where he is himself; he has only, as it were, a series of map-references and compass-bearings, a "chitinous semblance" of a self, a great void between himself and his internal mother.
