Trophies of an afternoon

In the later years of his life, the influential British psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion compiled a fictional trilogy called A Memoir of the Future (1990), loosely based on his childhood in Mathura, India. Through his method – which he modestly called ‘science fiction’ – he constructed a speculative account of the future of psychoanalysis. Considered one of the greatest psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud, Bion is most well-known for his work on emotional states within groups and also for his ‘theories on thinking’. Bion’s concept of maternal ‘reverie’ as the capacity of the mother to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant has been an important element in post-Kleinian thought. All these concepts are revisited through his ‘science-fictional method’ in A Memoir of the Future (1990). Through this work he wished to break down the constraints of sense that characterized psychoanalytic writing and arrive at a ‘communication of pure non-sense’.

The text that follows is a creation myth that combines elements of science fiction and Bion’s theories of psychic envelopes, imagined within the context of the colonial experience in India.