ABSTRACT
This chapter describes W. R. Bion representation of catastrophic trauma as it is illustrated in his literary works. It argues that Bion's analysis of the state of the mind during the explosion of psychosis in Attention and Interpretation can also be usefully seen as a metapsychology of catastrophic trauma. The chapter illustrates how the intrapsychic mechanisms he conceptualized in his theoretical works are relevant to his representation of extreme experience in his literary works. The devastated psychic mechanisms succeeding the catastrophe are amply illustrated in the autobiographies. That a disaster has occurred can be inferred from its product, "the conglomerate of fragments of personality which serves the patient for a personality", which is the self-representation in the autobiographies of the Bion who survived the catastrophe. The autobiographies describe many other instances in which the distinction between inner and outer reality is blurred: among them are nightmares in which the terror generated by the dream threatens to submerge Bion's conscious mind.
