• Home
  • Books
  • Journals
  • Authors
  • Blog & Podcast
Firing The Mind Firing The Mind
  • FAQs
  • CONTACT

    CONTACT US

    Whether you’re looking for answers, would like to solve a problem, or just want to let us know how we did, we are always happy to hear from you.

    POSTAL ADDRESS

    Phoenix Publishing House

    Unit 2, Brookstone House
    6 Elthorne Road
    London N19 4AG
    United Kingdom

    Email:  hello@firingthemind.com
    Phone:  +44 (0)20 8442 1376

    SAY HELLO

    SEND US A MESSAGE

      CONTACT INFORMATION

      62 Bucknell Road, Bicester
      Oxfordshire OX26 2DS
      United Kingdom

      +44 (0)20 8442 1376

      hello@firingthemind.com

      Whether you’re looking for answers, would like to solve a problem, or just want to let us know how we did, we are always happy to hear from you.

    Login / Register
    Search
    0 Wishlist
    0 items / £0.00
    Menu
    Firing The Mind Firing The Mind
    0 items £0.00
    -10%New
    Click to enlarge
    Home Categories Psychoanalysis Night Vision: Wilfred Bion’s Epistemological Poetics and the Experience of the First World War
    Sitting on a Suitcase: Psychoanalytic Stories £21.59 – £30.99
    Back to products
    Couple and Family Psychoanalysis: Volume 15 Number 1 - Special Issue: Couples and Families in Film £6.99 – £30.00

    Night Vision: Wilfred Bion’s Epistemological Poetics and the Experience of the First World War

    Author: Dominic Angeloch

    £21.59 – £30.99

    The first comprehensive study of Wilfred Bion’s autobiographical and literary writings: an in-depth analysis of how, throughout his life, Bion sought a narrative form for his traumatic experiences as a tank commander in the First World War, and how he developed a unique writing style aimed at generating insight and cognition.

    Look inside!

    Author

    Dominic Angeloch

    ISBN

    9781800133112

    Format

    Paperback, e-Book, Print & e-Book

    Page Extent

    248

    Publication Date

    April 2025

    Subject Areas

    Bionian Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis

    Clear

    Compare
    Add to wishlist
    Share:
    • Description
    • About the author
    • Contents
    Description
    All his life, Wilfred Bion strove to find a narrative form for the traumatic experiences he went through as a tank commander in the First World War. The body of his autobiographical and literary works documents his efforts to wrest a biography of his own from the most devastating processes of world history. As a whole, it is the result of a lifelong struggle to express something unspeakable, to restore something destroyed. What emerges is something like the prehistory of the psychical catastrophe from which Bion was unable to escape until his death. As such, however, these autobiographical fragments also reflect the prehistory of the historical catastrophe under whose spell the world still stands today.

    This book is the first comprehensive study of Bion’s autobiographical and literary writings. Drawing on the concepts of experience and thinking developed in his theoretical and clinical works, with which they are genetically linked, it discusses Bion’s strategies of writing and cognition, and for the first time systematically places a hitherto unexplored part of his work in the context of his entire œuvre.

    Following the chronological thread of his life, from childhood in India through youth in England to his experience of the First World War in France and Belgium, the book traces how Bion developed his unique method of writing. Detailed narrative analyses reveal the painful work of coming to terms with the war experiences which had haunted him throughout his life – a crippling trauma whose causes extended far beyond the individual and private. The book thus provides deep insights into Bion’s life, his thinking, and his writing, and offers the reader a portrait of the primal catastrophe of the twentieth century and its devastating effects.

    About the author

    About the author

    Dominic Angeloch, Priv-Doz Dr phil, is senior lecturer for comparative literature at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, and managing editor of Psyche: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen (Klett-Cotta publishers). He teaches at various universities and has held professorships in comparative literature and international literatures (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Tübingen). He is the author of numerous articles published in international journals and several books.

    Contents

    Contents

    About the author

    Introduction

    Part I
    Experience, cognition, writing—and their failure: Philosophical, psychological, philological aspects

    Chapter 1: Night vision

    Chapter 2: Dangers of understanding: Virgil’s Palinurus as an allegory of cognition
    Virgil’s Palinurus
    Bion’s Palinurus
    Eclipse of Palinurus

    Part II
    Wilfred Bion’s epistemological poetics

    Chapter 3: Wilfred Bion’s “late work”: Autobiography and “literary turn”
    Biography: Childhood in India, youth in England, First World War
    On the structure of Bion’s autobiographical writings
    The Long Week-End 1897–1919 and War Memoirs 1917–1919
    All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life
    The trilogy of novels: A Memoir of the Future
    The presence of the past in a dream that interprets itself
    Dream–dream interpretation—“construction”—dream text
    “The only thing I am not quite clear about …”—Bion’s theory of the dream
    A first step in a new language
    Entering into the unknown

    Chapter 4: “Psychological impossibilities”: Childhood and child’s experience in Wilfred Bion’s The Long Week-End

    Chapter 5 : “A sense of disaster, past and impending”: Youth and boarding school life in England before the First World War
    Experiences beyond description: “Such cataclysmic disasters cannot be described”
    Close reading: The Long Week-End, “England”, Chapter 1
    “Misery at school had a dynamic quality”: Everyday life in the boarding school panopticon
    Glory and flannel: “England at war. Myself with nothing but my tiny little public school soul”

    Part III
    Wilfred Bion’s epistemological poetics and the experience of the First World War

    Chapter 6: A sub-thalamic fear”: Wilfred Bion’s War Memoirs 1917–1919
    Bion’s War Memoirs 1917–1919 and “a great unsolved puzzle”
    Palimpsests
    Memory is figurative communication of emotional experience
    “I died there”: Life after (psychical) death
    “The ghosts look in from the battle again”: The psychological catastrophe of survival
    The “Amiens” report of 1958: Another attempt to describe the indescribable
    Crater landscapes
    How to describe the indescribable?
    The silence in the combat breaks
    “Cracking up”
    “I shall try to give you our feelings at the time I am writing of ”: Outlook

    Chapter 7 : Writing the ineffable: The experience of the First World War in The Long Week-End 1897–1919
    Experience and narrative
    Ypres: Map and territory
    Amiens: August 8, 1918
    Amiens: Map and territory
    Thinking under fire: Measurements in the fog of fear
    Sweeting’s death
    Panorama of working through a catastrophic trauma
    Overview of the external events
    Sweeting’s death: The first text version from the war diary of 1919
    Sweeting’s death: The second text version in the “Amiens” fragment of 1958
    Sweeting’s death: The third text version in The Long Week-End
    “We will remember them”: A tomb for Sweeting

    Postscript: (Aesthetic) experience and epistemological poetics

    References

    Index

    4 reviews for Night Vision: Wilfred Bion’s Epistemological Poetics and the Experience of the First World War

    1. R. D. Hinshelwood, University of Essex – 07/03/2025

      ‘This remarkable text considers the almost impossible dialectic between traumatic experience and written text. It deals with Bion’s personal struggle, all his life, to manage his unmanageable war experience. It is traced through his various expositions, especially his literary/autobiographical writing. In the process, Dominic Angeloch accepts the challenge of capturing and expressing Bion’s distress in the wider and impressive landscape of historical and poetic cultures.’

    2. Professor Dr Michael B. Buchholz, International Psychoanalytic University (IPU), Berlin, Germany – 07/03/2025

      ‘Most books about Wilfred Bion refer to his theories and how he integrates Freud and Melanie Klein. Dominic Angeloch goes beyond this unifying reading. He enriches these views by Bion’s paradoxical instruction for therapists to have “no memory, no desire” alongside another recommendation for “thinking under the fire”, which becomes most instructive. It refers to Bion’s memory of horrible war experiences. A new level of Bion studies is achieved by integrating epistemology, art, and biographical perspective. This book leads us to enter the dark and the unknown so we are “seeing Bion’s darkness”. It was a serious omission from our understanding of Bion but now you hold it in your hands.’

    3. Giuseppe Civitarese, author of On Arrogance: A Psychoanalytic Essay – 07/03/2025

      ‘In the expanding body of literature on Bion and his thought, a careful, in-depth examination of his autobiographical writings has long been missing—until now. With both authority and heartfelt engagement, this book fills that void, drawing readers deep into Bion’s narrative style, especially when he ventures into profoundly personal territory and revisits the most dramatic chapters of his life. From the wrenching separation from his mother in India to his harrowing wartime experiences at the age of eighteen, we gain invaluable insight into his psychoanalytic vision and the singular way he approached the world. As these pages unfold, we are not merely introduced to the private dimensions of Bion’s lived experience; we are offered a key to understanding the very heart of his psychoanalytic thought—a conceptual framework centred on emotional experience, the unknown, and the infinite. Night Vision: Wilfred Bion’s Epistemological Poetics and the Experience of the First World War further illuminates the depth of Bion’s ethical commitment and his fierce repudiation of any “religion” disguised as psychoanalysis. I cannot recommend this extraordinary work highly enough. It stands as the finest introduction I know to the man himself—his character, his personality, and the enduring legacy of his thought.’

    4. Matt Ffytche, editor of Psychoanalysis and History, co-editor of Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism – 07/03/2025

      ‘What does it mean to write one’s life interminably yet be unable to tell it? This question is central to the work of Wilfred Bion, one of the most significant psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, and one he endured in repeated attempts to narrate his catastrophic experience of “psychic death” as a tank commander in the First World War. In this extraordinary study, comparable to W. G. Sebald’s ‘On the Natural History of Destruction’, Dominic Angeloch, an expert in comparative literature and on Bion, gives compelling narrative analyses of Bion’s different versions of his central trauma. In this, Angeloch pursues a “poetics of cognition”: What form of words can be used to describe the experiences we are unable to think? And what can literature reveal to us of the ways we have grappled more broadly to narrate a catastrophic modernity?’

    Add a review Cancel reply

    You must be logged in to post a review.

    FIRE YOUR MIND

    Sign up to our newsletter today!
    Please wait...

    Thank you for subscribing!

    Our purpose is to stimulate debate, to open minds to new ways of working, to present opposing theories and above all to question everything.

    Email: hello@firingthemind.com
    Karnac
    • About
    • Publishing with
    • Trade
    • Rights
    Useful links
    • Privacy Policy
    • Returns
    • Terms & Conditions
    • Shipping & Delivery
    More links
    • FAQs
    • Home
    2022 Firing the Mind. Powered by Bicester IT Hub
    • Home
    • Books
    • Journals
    • Authors
    • Blog & Podcast
    • Wishlist
    • Compare
    • Login / Register
    Shopping cart
    Close
    Sign in
    Close

    Lost your password?

    No account yet?

    Create an Account
    Start typing to see products you are looking for.