ABSTRACT
Bion’s life was marked early on by his departure from India at the age of eight and by his enlistment at the age of 18 in the Great War at the head of a tank company which was soon destroyed in combat, and of which he was the sole survivor. He gives a detailed account of these events in his War Memoirs, and also returns to them in A Memory of the Future. He subsequently lived as a bachelor afflicted by nightmares until the beginning of his analysis with John Rickman. It was during this period that he became the analyst of Samuel Beckett. Enlisted in the army once again during the Second World War, he developed essential research projects on group psychology, which he subsequently explored more deeply at the Tavistock Clinic, in spite of the loss of his wife, who died while giving birth to their daughter Parthenope. He became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society following his analysis with Melanie Klein, married Francesca, whom he met at the Tavistock Clinic, and had two other children. He then enjoyed an important surge of clinical and theoretical ideas which made his work known throughout the world. However, troubled by the narrow thinking of the classical psychoanalytic societies and institutes, he left England for California and South America where he trained many analysts. He died in Oxford without ever seeing his native India again.
