ABSTRACT
In A Memoir of the Future, W. R. Bion provocatively acts out what happens ‘at the mind’s limits’, when ‘wakeful dream thinking’ and the language of disguise, typical of poetry and literature, take hold of reality and attempt to finally express what is, by definition, ineffable and unrepresentable. For Bion, the reversal of perspective is therefore what can protect the subject from the unbearable pain of the traumatic experience. A Memoir of the Future tries to rekindle in the reader precisely the experience of the ‘estrangement’, of this alienation that can become the only productive gift of the extreme experience. In A Memoir, the voice of memory of the War is evoked mostly through the stratagem of the character Captain Bion. The chapter examines how Bion presents his project and the tension he identifies in his Memoir/psychoanalytic treatise between what he means by ‘real’ and what reality is, an inevitably distorted representation of truth.
