M A R Y J A C O B U S ......

The Unexpected: Bionic Woman at the Millennium

Any culture, civilization, or temporarily exposed characteristic of persons or peoples is subject to penetration and displacement by the unexpected. They say animals are aware of the imminence of an earthquake. Humans are sensitive to the imminence of emotional upheaval (Bion 1991c:538). Will psycho-analysts study the living mind? Or is the authority of Freud to be used as a deterrent, a barrier to studying people? The revolutionary becomes respectableÐa barrier against revolution. The invasion of the animal by a germ or `anticipation’ of a means of accurate thinking, is resented by the feelings already in possession. That war has not ceased yet. ÐW. R. Bion, `Making the Best of a Bad Job’, 1979 (Bion 1994:331).

illennarianism is traditionally associated with catastrophic change. The millennium marks the birth of something new, like a revolution or an Mapocalypse, or even a new thought. We may be scared or hopeful; things and bodies (or personalities) may fall apart or cohere; we may be afraid of breakdown (`Break up, down, in, out, or through?’, Bion’s question in A Memoir of the Future (1991c:539) ), or resentful about being invaded by the germ of an anticipatory idea.1 In the terms of Wilfred Bion’s early work on groups, millennial thinking can also resemble the `basic assumption’ 1 Cf. Bion 1988, on the associated with the pairing group as opposed to the work groupÐa feeling super-ego’s `hatred of any new development of hope, or the expectation of a messianic birth located in the future, in the personality as if destined to save the group from its hatred and destructiveness, but which the new development were a rival to be must at all costs be aborted in order not to upset the status quo (see Bion destroyed’ (98). 1989b:150±2). A New Age feminism, or a fresh theory of femininity, can ...... Women: a cultural review Vol. 11. No. 1/2. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals 78 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... easily become the focus for just such abortive hopes and expectancy as the millennium approaches. `Beware the charismatic individual! Beware the stigmata of messianic future!’, warns the psychoanalytic alter ego of Bion’s paradoxically entitled A Memoir of the Future (1991c:251). His 1970s experimental autobiography is not an obvious point of departure for feminist 2 Useful accounts of A reconsideration of millennial thought. But I want to propose it, if only Memoir of the Future are to be found in because Bion’s writing, in spite of its centrality to post-Kleinian psycho- Grinberg et al. analysis, is rarely read for what it has to say about women, let alone 1993:135±40, and 2 Ble andonu feminism, although it has much to say about change. 1994:249±64. For an For the later Bion, the psychoanalytic encounter itself was a site of imaginative literary and psychoanalytic turbulence, ` ``a mental space’ for further ideas which may yet be reading, see also developed’.3 He spent the final years of a long professional life developing Williams 1985. these further ideas in the form of a futuristic autobiographical trilogy. A 3 `Making the Best of a Bad Job’ (Bion Memoir of the Future is a blackly humorous, seriously self-parodic, mono- 1994:325). Bion’s paper dialogical enquiry into his past, present and future selves, whether aborted begins with the proposition: `When or oblivious. It’s also a sustained reflection on the theory and practice of two personalities meet, contemporary psychoanalysis in the wake of Freud and Klein. At once an an emotional storm is apology and a critique, it disturbs, provokes andÐabove allÐrefuses to created’ (321)Ða description of the prophesy. Bion reminds us that desires for the future are bound up with meeting between remembering the past, and implies that the real difficulty is to recognize analyst and patient, but also of the the patterns in the formless, fluid, tumultuous chaos of the here-and-now conditions that prevail for which foetal life is both metaphor and precursor. His introduction in A Memoir, whether imagined as an speaks of `modes of thinking to which no known realization has so far encounter between been found to approximate’ (1991c:ix). Terms like `memory’, `desire’ and different personalities or differing parts of `understanding’ refuse the troublesome discovery of the unthought thought 4 the same personality. or the unobserved phenomenon. A Kantian who held that `the thing-in- 4 See W. R. Bion, itself ’ (14) is radically unknowable except in its secondary manifestations, `Opacity of Memory and Desire’, in Bion Bion also eschews the pre-emptive knowledge that shuts off thought; his 1984a:41±54, in which version of psychoanalysis is aporetic, anticipatory, perplexed and often Bion links the perplexing (negatively capable, in Keatsian terms). At times Bion writes eschewing of memory and desire to Freud’s like a ludic cross between Wittgenstein, Beckett and a New-ish Age artificial `blinding’ of mathematicianÐanalytically, laconically, abstractly. At other times, far himself (43). See also Lansky 1983:433±4. from seeming postmodern (let alone post-historical), he can sound as 5 For Bion’s war retrograde as one of the primitive dinosaurs that roam his fiction alongside experience as a tank the tanks of his traumatic war memories.5 After all, he was born at the commander, see Bion 1991b, and his turn of a previous century and formed (or deformed, as he strongly contemporary war implies) by his military experience during the First World War and the diaries and later reminiscences (Bion armour-plated saurian mentality it apparently produced in him. But most 1997). For the of his writings belong to the last three decades of his life, the 1950s, 1960s dinosaurs of A Memoir, Albert Stegosaurus and and 1970s. This was the time when the Cold War froze what nuclear Adolf Tyrannosaurus, fission heated up, and the Big Bang lay in a hypothetical future rather than locked in sado- the past. Bion can wish his readers a `Relativistic Fission . . .’ ([578]) by masochistic battle, see Bion 1991c:83±4. way of pessimistic envoi. THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 79 ......

6 See Bion, `A Theory A Memoir of the Future is infused with a sense of imminent danger and of Thinking’, in Bion potential explosiveness, silent, internal menace and the risk of final oblivion. 1988:115±16. The author’s own death looms, unknowably; he evidently feels free enough 7 For Bion’s analysis with Klein, see Bion to say what he thinks, if only `to prevent someone who KNOWS from filling 1991a:66±8; cf. `P[sycho]-A[nalyst]’, in the empty space’ ([578]). But Bion’s unconventional autobiography happens A Memoir of the Future to be one of the few places where he writes about women at any length, (1991c:559): `I found it difficult to understand imagining them (whether futuristically or anachronistically) as cohabitants of Klein’s theory and his soma-psych(ot)ic world. Elsewhere, his idiosyncratic and speculative practice thoughÐ perhaps becauseÐI rewriting of Kleinian concepts finds a place for women as mothers, in terms was being analysed by of their capacity to receive and detoxify, reject or intensify, the infant’s Melanie Klein herself. But after great primitive projective identifications, dread or distress, while also providing a 6 difficulty I began to model for the analyst’s containing receptivity. For Bion, the myth of feel there was truth in the interpretations she Oedipus is about investigatory curiosityÐthe quest for knowledgeÐrather gave and that they than sexual difference; the other main character in the Oedipal drama is brought illumination to many experiences, Tiresias (the false hypothesis erected against anxiety about a new theory) (see mine and others, Bion 1989a:48±9). He himself had experienced the mixed benefits and which had previously been incomprehens- tribulations of analysis with Melanie Klein in the 1950s, andÐdespite finding ible, discrete and some resistance to her ideas in himself and his clinical workÐhe thoroughly unrelated. Meta- phorically, light began assimilated and transformed Kleinian concepts in the aftermath, struggling to dawn . . .’ But, he to achieve his independence and make new meanings of his own.7 Although goes on, although `Melanie Klein’s he analysed women such as the child analyst Frances Tustin, his best known interpretations began analysand, outside the psychoanalytic world at least, was Samuel Beckett.8 to have a vaguely but truly illuminating Rarely, if ever, does he address the subject of women directly in his quality’ (560), when psychoanalytic writings, and in his straightforwardly autobiographical he employed the same interpretations with memoirs of the First World War and the period leading up to the Second his patients, `none of World War, girls and women (whether sister, mother, fiance e or wife) play the good results that [he] anticipated either annoying, absent or enigmatic roles. Both sex and women were, occurred’ (559). according to Bion himself, a problem. He is understandably reticent about 8 See Tustin 1995:vii; the war-time marriage he embarked on in his forties, which was tragically cut for Bion’s work with Beckett, see short by the death of his wife in childbirth, leaving him with a small daughter Ble andonu 1994:44±6, to care for.9 Yet A Memoir of the Future shows that he took a lively and Anzieu 1989. 9 See Bion 1991a:60±1, psychoanalytic interest in women and in their points of view, rather than 69±70, for an regarding them simply as metonymic place-holders for the breast or anguished and self- castigating account of `containers’ for foetal sensations and infant projections. Bion’s women, in these events and their fact, have voices of their own, and they play a prominent, sometimes aftermath. Included in the same volume, discomfiting, part in his unfolding psycho-drama, functioning as characters Bion’s love letters to in their own right while serving as often critical interlocutors for a loose his second wife and 10 affectionate letters to conge rie of Bionic alter egos (`Bion’, `Myself ’ and `P.A.’ (Psycho-Analyst) ). his children testify to The Bion of A Memoir tends to associate women with disturbance, his later happiness. persistently imagining them in terms that are provocative, disruptive or 10 I use quotation marks to signal these associated with dangerous invasion by both retrograde and `anticipatory’ characters as distinct thoughts. Take the character called Alice, who opens `The Dream’ (Book I of from Bion, the author of A Memoir. A Memoir): ` ``Oh dear, oh dear,’’ said Alice, rubbing her eyes and pushing 80 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... away the shower of leaves that had awoken her. ``I had such a queer dream . . .’’ ’ (7). In Bion’s `Pro-Logue’, Alice is the generic name of the author’s bedfellow; she shares his restless night of psycho-somatic or soma-psychic farts and jerks: `Alice didn’t think much of it obviously. But what was she up to then? Must remember to ask her’ (4). What Alice was up to will provide the highly selective, and inevitably partial, focus for this exploratory reading of Bion’s interrogation of gender in A Memoir of the Future. One thread among many, Alice’s adventures are intertwined with those of Bion’s multiple personae. Not surprisingly, Bion belongs to a pre-feminist rather than to a proto-feminist era. But that isn’t to say he’s either unenlightened or incurious about the women of his past, present and future, even if he views them, inevitably, through the lens of history (i.e. his own, which is also that of his period, gender and class). A Memoir explores the transformations and shifts in his thinking about women, but it also explores the thinking of his women characters themselvesÐat once the objects of masculine fantasy and subject to their own. Bionic woman has plenty to say for herself, and at times takes over altogether. Indeed, A Memoir is aggressively even-handed when it comes to the war between the sexes. But while Bion doesn’t denigrate what passes for `female intuition’ or `common sense’, neither does he privilege itÐnor does he exempt it from analysis. His women pose provocative questions (provoking to both men and women) in the unresolved discussion we’ve become used to calling `feminism and psychoanalysis’. Bion’s interrogation of gender thus sheds light on the culture of post-Kleinian psychoanalysis during the 1970s. Even if Bion’s women risk seeming old-fashioned to present-day millennial feminists, their role in A Memoir has a tendency to unsettle the status quo, and to do so in ways that are unpredictable, although not necessarily progressive.

A Fabulous Monster; or, Alice in Anachronomous Land

Bion calls his Memoir `a fictitious account of psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream’; he goes on to claim `definitary status . . . for the constructions of wakefulness, scientific alertness and scientific theory’ (4). In what he also refers to as `science fiction’, he explores the multiple selves of his past and present, testifying as he does so to a seemingly unresolvable war between, and within, the sexes, as well as the unending struggle between psyche and soma. His women characters ventriloquize deflatingly practical or sceptical viewpoints, punctuating the discussions with their criticisms and complaints, while observing (accurately) that the conversation between men often excludes them (`ALICE: You have been monopolizing articulate speech’, 142). Alice, of course, is a famous dreamer in her own right; she enters a Wonderland of logical nonsense, distorted THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 81 ...... bodily perspectives and inverted reflections (or what Bion himself calls `reversible perspective’Ðtwo independently observable phenomena with incompatible meanings) (see Bion 1989a:50, 54±9, Ble andonu 1994:165± 72). We might expect both Alice and Dodgsonian mathematics to have intrigued the mathematically minded Bion, whose Grid resembles a game (as well as a periodic table), where unpredictable ascents and descents pre- cipitate catastrophic changes from one state to another. But Bion’s Alice is also a throw-back to a more recent age of anxiety, recollecting the anxious pre-war 1930s of Auden’s and Isherwood’s The Dog beneath the Skin (1936), in which sexual or political dissidence and psychoanalysis meld in an atmo- sphere of impending fascist or communist take-over, and a class-bound, conventionally repressive England has been mysteriously `pacified’ (or `liberated’, depending how you look at it).11 The polyphonic narrativeÐ shifting without warning from autobiographical reminiscence to argument to abstruse reflectionÐreveals Bion’s fascination with turbulence, transforma- tion, reversal, along with the sheer difficulty of thinking, including (specific- ally) a difficulty in thinking about women which it is tempting to attribute to 11 Cf. A Memoir: `Alice may be in Bion himself. Wonderland, but Alice is the `fabulous monster’ (5) whose conventional marriage to Wonderland is not Victorian England’ Roland (a hero of hisÐand Bion’sÐformer time) and not-so-conventional (1991c:293). Although uppity maid, Rosemary, unmasks the world of `drab fidelity’ and equally Bion makes a number of references to the `drab infidelity’ as a class-inflected nightmare played out against a back- pre-First World War ground of gentlemanly farming and rural mollocking. Upper-middle-class period of his marriage is propped up on an underclass experience of urban prostitution boyhood, the world of Books I and II of and lurid primal-scene violence. The mutually seductive, feared yet desired A Memoir sado-masochistic relation of mistress and maid parodies the master-slave approximate to that of the inter-war years, dialectic to the tune of `a well-drilled representation of sexual life’ (17). But particularly in its whence these dreadful cliche s, the `insolent expressions’ and `hardening eyes’ critique of ruling class assumptions and that litter the stage directions of a hallucinatory reality? The pornographic atmosphere of banality of the fiction that opens Book I of A Memoir disconcertingly menace. The scene of `The Dream’ actually replicates a mysogynistic fantasy about what women do when they’re alone: involves Mundens, a sexually humiliate each other. They hate each other and they despise men. reference to The Long Bion calls this `fact and nightmare . . . indistinguishable from hallucination’, Week-End, where pre- First World War or `married love’ viewed from `the vantage point of the maid and whore’ (22, Mundens is the name 24). The content of Rosemary’s dream (so Bion tells us in his `Key’ to A of the farm to which the two boys must Memoir) is `the reciprocal of Alice’s experience of conscious waking reality’ drive a recalcitrant (656). When the tables are turned, the maid is on top, pleasuring her mistress cow and where the cowman has by degrading her; domination and submission structure same-sex relations as committed suicide; much as the relation of one class to another. Stripped of their social roles, the see 1991b:56±61. Alice (1991c:72) is women shed their clothes and their inhibitions, while Roland and his friend reminiscent of the Robin (bonding weakly with each other in adversity) become boys-on-the- younger sister who run in the face of the vaguely defined invasion. Routine violence (rape, guns) refuses to go to church; see 1991b:62. titillates and menaces. Sado-masochistic sexuality is allotted to women, 82 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... schoolboy paranoia to men, as if viewed through the gendered lenses of thriller fiction. In this mutilated dream world, all encountersÐsexual and otherwiseÐare reduced to the same brutal fiction of dominance or submission, fight or flight. The prevailing emotions are envy, boredom and nameless dread. A masque of allegorical speakers stages the phantasmagoria of `thought without a thinker . . . the content that explores its possessive container’ (38). The Bion of Learning from Experience likens this state to the `without-ness’ of `an alimentary canal without a body’, stripping or denuding thought of all that is good.12 `The Dream’ is just such an obscene strip-show. The women get down (`We knew that fucking was a nuisance . . . The clitoris for me every time’ (45)Ðthus Rosemary, in her ex-prostitute mode), while the men seem hardly able to get it up, preoccupied as they are with war and philosophy, the homoerotics of male friendship and mutual admiration. The women openly prefer each other, mocking or deriding the men while simultaneously seducing and manipulating them. The cast of characters inhabits a frag- mented, paranoid-schizoid world or, alternatively, a world of empty abstraction parodically related to the depressive position. When Alice asks whether `we are just a part of [Roland’s] dream?’ the answer comes back from a character called, simply, `Voice’: `You’ll see; we shall fade away. Our place will be taken by a mass of meaningless abstractions. Listen . . .’ (68). Even the robust RolandÐa vehicle for the knee-jerk emotional responses of his outdated class, type and timeÐfades away into a disembodied thinker. Perhaps it was all a dream after all: `ALICE: ``What a night! Roland, what on earth were you up to? . . . I could hardly get a wink of sleep.’’ ROLAND: ``What were you up to?’’ ’ (82). Rosemary (defiantly grandiose) answers this question about her own activities by claiming to be the eternal `She’: `My profession is the oldest profession in the world. . . . Thais, Eve, Lillith . . . there is a lineage which you cannot begin to match. . . . If I were to unveil my beauty you wouldÐshrivel up and die’ (78±9). Strip the mistress and you find the wretched contentment of the doormat; strip the maid and she blossoms into an eternally scornful femme fatale. Women like Rosemary are sure that they are fascinating, `and that is more than you [``Bion’’] can claim to be’ (100). Not for her the gentlemanly Roland, let alone the shadowy `Bion’; her chosen mate is 12 See Bion 1988:97: chocolate bar-wielding, gun-toting, genially brutal, allegorical macho Man. `The process of The downtrodden Alice may fleetingly express an interest in psychoanalysis, denudation continues till [the absence of a but Rosemary remains largely preoccupied with her looks and sensational container/contained plot developments, frivolously egging her Man on to gratuitous violence relation] represent[s] hardly more than an (`Are you going to shoot him? Oh, do shoot himÐplease, please! I’ve never empty superiority/ seen a man shot’ (109) ). With hindsight, we can begin to understand the inferiority that in sexual fantasy vested in the Roland/Alice/Rosemary/Man plot as `scraps of a turn degenerates to nullity.’ conversation destroyed and fragmented by a jealous, hostile, curious and THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 83 ......

13 Bion 1991a:29±33; in destructive, excluded, but none the less present, well . . . personality, shall we retelling this call it?’ (120±1; Bion’s ellipses). This is an old-fashioned Oedipal plot, or triangulated episode `personality’, driven by destructive, triangulated rivalry, along with a fantasy of unperformed rivalrous murder and of masculine envy and feminine betrayal. The opening scenario may have violent retribution, been `only Roland’, ` ``Only’’ pornography, ``only’’ sex’ (131)Ðor rather, Bion lapses into the mode of a police according to the speaker called `Myself ’: `The sentence, ``That was only report and confession Roland’’, would have to be replaced by many terms such as ``jealousy’’, with an imaginary interlocutor. ``triumph,’’ ``envy,’’ ``rivalry,’’ ``revenge,’’ ``love,’’ ``sex’’ ’ (132). This is the 14 See Bion 1991c:130, conge rie of murderous but excluded emotions that Bion attributes to himself where `Man’ refers to in , when he recalls meeting his ex-fiancee in the the transformation of All My Sins Remembered  mathematics `effected company of another man (`If I had had my service revolver with me I would by imaginary have shot him. Then I would have shot her through the knee . . .’).13 numbers, irrational numbers, Cartesian According to Alice, the scenario at the start of the book was `Alice in coordinates freeing Anachronomous Land’ (`MAN: . . . you come from Pornography don’t you? geometry from Euclid by opening up the ALICE: Not reallyÐWonderland’ (136) ). In the land of porno-anachronism, domain of algebraic what Alice and Rosemary are up to turns out to be, in part, a function of an deductive systems’ and compares it to a old sexual grudge, with its anachronistic storm of affects: humiliation, rage, similar freeing of rivalry and exclusion. psychoanalysis `from the domain of Roland’s `dream’ explores the infancy of the spectrum of `love at one sensuality based extreme, rivalry and hate at the other’Ða spectrum found even in the mind’. Cf. also Bion’s account of the `psycho-analyst, the artist, and the entertainer’ (121). Bion’s theory of `selected fact’ in creativity involves what he calls the `excluded middle’ as well as `the 1988:72 and 1991c:243 respectively (`Poincare excluded personality’ (121). The theory of PS Ð D (the oscillating, unre- talks of the Beauty of solved relationship between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions) is a mathematical construction’, `the analogous to the relationship between ugly and beautiful in terms of which beauty of a Bion tends to represent womenÐwhose ugliness is similarly capable of being mathematical con- struction’). represented in aesthetic ways. Rosemary (the whore who turns into Helen of 15 Cf. 1991c:156 (`the Troy) asks: `Has anyone seen an artist paint a picture ``about’’ or ``of ’’ form that lay something ugly which was nevertheless beautiful? Has anyone seen a skivvy concealed within the formless infinite’), and or whore turn into a beautiful woman? Or pander turn into a man?’ (128). cf. Bion’s essay, Throughout A Memoir, Bion, in exploring such aesthetic transformations, `Emotional Turbu- lence’ (1976): associates beauty with the potential for abstract thoughtÐachieved, for `Leonardo’s drawings instance, when mathematics is freed from the world of sense perception of hair and water give 14 a good idea of what by concepts like imaginary numbers or Cartesian co-ordinates. But beauty turbulence looks like. also resides in `the formless infinite’ (156) of chaos or `wave’ theoryÐthe Mental turbulence, whether one’s own or writhing coils of hair and swirling masses of water drawn by Leonardo da 15 that of the Vinci that constitute Bion’s recurrent metaphor for emotional turbulence. community in which In a sudden shift of mood, we see the obtrusive apparition of an old beggar- one lives, is much 16 more difficult to woman, with the `built-in ugliness’ of the beautiful girl (145). Obscurely depict: its existence associated with this filthy, sombre and squalid reminder of carnal aims and and significance cannot be understood mortality is the figure of a woman dying in childbirth (`BION: Childbirth? if the turbulence is ROSEMARY: It seems simple, doesn’t it’ (151) ). Rosemary heartlessly not observed’ (Bion 1994:303). manicures her nails (`sharpening her claws’). But `Myself ’, as she points 84 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... out acutely, is ` ``sharpening [his] moral claws’’Ðthat is not a pretty sight either’ (153). A bit of moral masochism? Things soon turn nasty. Primitive Man beats in a woman’s skull and sucks out her brain like a cannibal. `This is an anachronism,’ says Man, giving `Bion’ a lecture on the evolution of thought. A vision shows the `skull-crushing object and sucking object . . . overwhelmed by depression at the failing supply of nutriment from the dead [container] and the failure to restore it to life’ (161). A thought arises and, transformed, becomes Leonardo da Vinci’s aesthetic form revealed in chaos. This, says Man, is `the taste of your brother’s [read, ``mother’s’’?] brains and blood and guts’, the laws of `mental cannibalism’ (162, 164). Thinking about women, in A Memoir, oscillates between the built-in ugliness of the beautiful girl and a dead or depressive maternal container, an empty supply of nutriment. Whose are the extraordinary violence and savagery here? Surely not only those of primitive, gun-toting Man. And why are they directed specifically against women?Ðas when Man imagines `a man going out with a girl at a holiday resort’ in terms of a man taking her off into the bushes where he `savaged the woman’s breasts and genitalia with his teeth, devouring the flesh of both regions in a manner that would be comprehensible if he were a wild carnivore’ (166), a psychotic scenario worthy of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Bion seems not only to be saying that everyday acts involve primitive emotional experiences, but that where alpha-function is not, there psychosis was (or still is)Ðthe ugliness of untransformed beta-elements, or dream- thoughts gone awry, unprocessed and unprocessable. Mental activity contains the taste of blood; the emotions connected with erectile tissue are those of a carnivore; primal man is little better than the beast of Rosemary’s lurid primal-scene fantasies about her mother’s life as a prostitute. No wonder, as Alice observes, women are less `keen on the survival of the ``good old days’’ of the British Empire’ than men (173). Bion’s female characters are anti-imperialists, pointing out how much importance men attach to `conflict, rivalry, victory’ (174). Rosemary and Alice, after all, have reasons of their own for welcoming their country’s downfallÐ`their nation or culture undergoes a change which makes it possible for each individual to pursue a life which they would not otherwise have been free to do’ (`Bion’, 174). Catastrophic war may free women. The argument spins on 16 Cf. 1991c:268: `P.A.: . . . a beautiful girl and off course, man to man, between men and women, or woman to woman, instinctively wraps an until the women, fed up, threaten to leave (`ROSEMARY: It sounds very ugly soul in her looks.’ Is this old highbrow till you listen to it’ (199) ). `Myself ’ explains, with a touch of beggar-woman condescension, that `this isn’t psychoanalysis: it is talking about psycho- obscurely related to the `vicious old bitch’, analysisÐ’ (199), a very different activity from experiencing it, which he Imagination (349), doesn’t think `you two ladies’ would enjoy (200). But in the end, as in a who used to torture romantic comedy, the two couples walk off together for a cup of coffee, Man Alice in her childhood? seduced by Rosemary, Roland and Alice still together after their years of THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 85 ...... conventional marriage. As Alice observes, `we are back to square one’ (215). But not quite; according to Heisenberg’s law, `the thing itself is altered by being observed’ (216). At the end of Book I, we begin to see how `the thing itself ’ (the group, the personality) may be changed by its potential for scientific (self-)observation, or the mode of thinking analogous to it in the mental domain.

`Ide es MeÁ res’; or, The Brilliance of Masculine Thought

In Book II of A Memoir of the Future (`The Past Presented’) we meet Roland and Alice again (both in daylight and in dreamtime), this time as members of a kitchen-table, country-house-week-end discussion-group. How do we know what we know, and how do we talk about it (Bion in his epistemo- logical mode)? When Alice comments ironically, `I am most impressedÐas I think I am meant to beÐby the brilliance of these logical constructions and the brilliance of masculine thought’ (234), Roland responds by compliment- ing her condescendingly on her illogicality and innate wisdom. As the conversation shifts to the possibility of a new birth, a new conception or fresh species in the psychoanalytic `zoo’, one of the characters remarks satirically: `A feminine psycho-analyst perhaps’ (235). This monstrous birth (`a monster not apparent but real’ (236) ) recalls the `fabulous monster’, `the serpent Alice’ (5) whom we met at the start of Book IÐthe wisdom of the serpent combined with the cunning of the dove (`ROLAND: You women are all the same. She’s a cruel snake’ (273) ). Alice objects: `You often talk as if, because I am a woman, I can’t ever have had an intelligence from which to be separated’ (249). According to `P.A.’, the part of Roland’s primordial mind from which he remains unseparated `is still dominated by the belief that as a woman has not got a penis she cannot have a capacity of masculine thinking’ (249). Could this monstrous birth, or new thought, be a wise feminine psychoanalyst with a capacity for `masculine thinking’? Apropos of his zoo of psychoanalytical concepts (`fearsome and dangerous creatures’, `as fearsome and as non-existent as the cockatrice and the bandersnatch’ (239, 250) ), `P.A.’ tells us that, `like all really simple things they are slippery and hard to grasp’ (250). Perhaps there is an analogous difficulty in thinking about women, since they too, for Bion, are at once so simple and so hard to 17 Cf. Bion 1984a:43 and graspÐso slippery and so serpentine. Bion 1989:38; the reference is to Freud’s `The brilliance of masculine thought’ (234) anticipates a moment when letter to Lou Andreas Alice invokes the tropes of darkness and illumination that accompany Salome (`I know that in writing I have to Milton’s attempt to sing `of Chaos and Eternal night’ (254) in Book III of blind myself Paradise Lost. Later `P.A.’ refers to his use of Freud’s `penetrating shaft of artificially in order to 17 focus all the light on darkness’ to illuminate `obscure areas of the mind’ (271). The obscurity one dark spot’). that comes to light, at this point, is his traumatic memory of sheltering in a 86 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... shell-hole beside a dying runner whose chest had been blown away, destroying his lung and exposing his heart; `Mother, MotherÐyou’ll write to my Mother, sir, won’t you?’ (256), the young soldier repeats over and over again, maddeningly (` ``Yes, blast you’’, I said’). The episode is told and retold elsewhere in Bion’s autobiographical writings about his war-time experience.18 Feelings of remorse and shame, `P.A.’ testifies, `hang across the gaping wound of my mind like a ridiculous field dressing’ (256). This is 18 See Bion 1991b:248±9; here Bion offers a less chaos in its darkest, most nightmarish form. `P.A.’ locates his own death at condensed, and more the scene of this catastrophic `advance’ of 8 August 1918 in which he took compassionate version of the episode part as a tank commander (`I would not go near the Amiens-Roye road for involving his younger fear I should meet my ghostÐI died there’ (257) ). As these traumatic self and the wounded memories suggest, `The Past Presented’ is the backward-looking, purgatorial runner: `And then I think he died. Or book of A Memoir of the Future. What Alice calls `the woman’s view’ (261) perhaps it was only intrudes sporadically, but Roland’s loyal friend Robin asserts: `No woman, me’ (249). The episode is pre-told even one as sensitive as Alice, will understand that life cannot be the same (without much of its for a man who has been in fighting’ (262). Roland’s nightmare of `DU’ (his accompanying affect) in War Memoirs, as foreign `Ought o’Nomic’ alter ego) is inhabited by such `ide es meÁ res’, the part of Bion’s war- breeding-place of untransformed beta-elements, or the unacceptable ideas time journal (1997:124±70), and that make him toss and turn restlessly in his sleep as his `mind bursts with reappears in his 1958, all this stuff ’ (274, 247). According to Bion’s `Key’ to A Memoir, `ide es third-person attempt meÁ res’ (derived from Joyce) are ideas that `provoke breeder-reactions’ to narrate the battle 19 of Amiens (1997:254± (622). Ought o’Nomic `Du’ refers to Roland’s heroism as being `in reality 6, 289±90), with the blown up by your super-intelligent mechanical evacuation’ (278)Ð`your addition of Bion’s panic and desperation bloody heroism and conceptual rubbish’ (279). Do mother-ideas breed such (` ``Oh, for Christ’s reactions, such mental explosions and super-intelligent mechanical evacu- sake shut up,’’ shouted Bion, ations of unbearable reality? revolted and terrified’, When the hero Roland pronounces it `a man’s world’ (293), Alice 254). Bion’s references to having `died’ on promptly rejects it: `A man’s world is and always has been a figment of the the Amiens-Roye imagination. Love and all thatÐcompare that with childbirth and maternal road (e.g. 1991c:257) death . . . a woman’s world is a far more somber one than that discerned by suggest that there is more to be said about the man’ (293). Romantic idealization (`He . . . kept on dreaming and fell in Bion’s relation to war love’ (290±1) ) is the other side of Bion’s soldierly heroism (`bloody trauma. heroism’). Rosemary (`That bloody bitch!’ (314), according to Roland) 19 See Bion’s `Key’ to A Memoir: `In analysis, turns out to represent for `P.A.’ a reflection of `the England I lived in and certain ideas . . . are how it then looked to you. Not a flattering portrait, but true as far as soon seen to provoke breeder reactions . . . appearances go’ (320). Spoiling for a fight, Rosemary offers her hideous It is against this vent vision of male sexploitation of women (battered, prostituted and mutilated, that either of the two people can strive to the victims of combined sex/class hatred). Violence against women points to defend himself by a the incompatibility between masculine and feminine definitions of `Love’ closure’, either by refusing to sleep or and `Honour’ (323). In this world of class and sexual domination, the only `by sleep or by being way out is for the oppressed to turn into the oppressor. The once-prosperous deaf, dumb and blind AliceÐrelated to `the Trojan women before Troy fell’Ðis now a weeping to the surrounding universe’ (1991c:622). skivvy, subject to Rosemary’s whim and tyranny. Rosemary tells Alice: `I can THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 87 ...... see now what a terrible pair you and Roland were as master and mistress. Were all your governing class friends as bad as this?’ (336). Clytemnestra (`a murderous woman’) stalks the dreams of men like Robin, avenging ancient female wrongs with a sharp axe-blow behind the knees; Roland, true to form, suggests the comparison with Rosemary (`You’ve got Rosemary on the brainÐsharp but not very sensitive’ (338) ). `P.A.’ defines the active principle of `seduction and intimidation’ as `the stimulation of one part of a personality against another’ (346); seductive Rosemary and intimidating Man are a well-matched pair. The ill-assorted discussion group adds up to a divided personality (it includes, among others, `two members of a defeated army, one member of a force successfully mobilized to destroy a nation, [and] a woman from a subjected class’ (347) ), set against itself by greed, war, murder, want, starvation and social inequality. According to `P.A.’, the experience of such a group might promote `growth of health and strength of the individuals’ if their meetings turned out to have `developmental generative force’ (347). But when Sherlock Holmes’s Watson joins the cast and asks Alice to `answer for ``womanhood’’ ’ (`Do you think you are a real woman?’ (348) ), her responseÐan apparent non sequiturÐis to denounce her ex-hero and ex-husband Roland to his face as a `fictitious and flattering version of the blackguard you were’ (348). Perhaps Alice and Rosemary are as much a function of Roland’s bloody-mindedness as he is a function of the bloodiness of women (but later, we learn that the flaunting Rosemary is `a desire of Alice’s; what ``P.A.’’ would call a ``sexual desire’’ ’ (411) ). In the end it is Roland, for whom `sex is an unpredictable force’ (350), who gets shot, in a murderous impulse allied to the death instinctÐan impulse associated (according to `P.A.’) with an abortive birth or Frankenstein’s Monster that kills its creator (`The death instinct killed Eros’ (352) ). This `ugly monster’ or new birth is a thought or thinker giving rise to murder at its inception, like a massacre of the innocentsÐif, that is, someone destroys the barrier that should be interposed between thought and action. In this case, the new idea is a monstrous plot hatched between Roland and Robin against Man, through jealousy over Rosemary (who now represents `the spoils of war’, as Alice is part of the spoils of Rosemary’s war (358) ). While murderous Man contemplates marriage, and Rosemary cynically plots her strategy (`No pregnancies’ (367) ), Robin and Roland argue over her until suddenly: `ROLAND (white with rage): I’ll teach the whole damn lot of you! (A shot is heard, soft and muffled. Roland falls dead )’ (370). Before he can kill Man, Man has shot Roland with his luger. The murder initiates the final phase of Book II. Rosemary is troubled by the apparition of the squalid old woman we saw before (`A shattered ghost of a beggar woman slowly becomes apparent’ (374) ). At once `herald of impending disaster and a sign of that disaster . . . a symptom of a ``mind diseased’’ ’ (375), the hallucinatory figure haunts her in the guise of Lady Macbeth; she is her own bad dream. She 88 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... wakes screaming: `MadÐand no one to talk to. Mad! And alone’ (379). Is this break-down, or break-through? Such an ambiguous break-down might have the effect of `an explosion of vast, tremendous and majestic proportions’, a `dark night of the soul’ (381).20 `P.A.’ refers to `terrifying experiences’Ð`the awe-ful experience’ of ` ``going mad,’’ some indescribable disaster, ``break-down’’ ’, people who `express themselves by bringing about a disaster’ (382). The unknown is rendered explicable as an `explosion’, perhaps a pre-conception or conception, or the birth of a baby, or even the idea that a woman might `have a thought worthy of consideration’ (382). `P.A.’ speculates: `People of different sex find it easier to resolve their anatomical and physiological differences than their differences in outlook’ (389). But if, as `P.A.’does, you believe that `there is a mind’ as well as a body, then `the mental differences present goals and problems which are 20 For the relationship far more difficult’ (389). Women constitute generative or destructive forces to between violence and catastrophic change, be reckoned with as much as Quasars; as Rosemary puts it: `You should see see Bion 1984:8±10: what goes on in the psychoanalytic dovecote when feminine intuition `The change is a violent change and intrudes’ (390). While the tigerish Alice howls in the darkness for her dead the new phase is one mate Roland (recalling the tigress grieving for her dead mate in the Indian in which violent 21 feelings are violently childhood of Bion’s The Long Week-End ), the old marriage of Roland to expressed’ (9). See Alice gives way to the unholy wedding of neo-fascist Man and seductive also Bion 1965:8±10, Rosemary, attended by a caste of All Souls that finally includes the ghosts of on the relation between the `P.A.’ ’s war-time companions and the `Ghost of P.A.’ himself. `P.A.’, soliloquiz- catastrophic event and ing on the `excluded middle’Ðthe possibility excluded by the choice of one Bion’s theory of transformations; Bion extreme over anotherÐhad `thought there could be some alternative to an uses the analogy of extreme course’ (395). Man objects that here, on the contrary, `nothing is the expanding pressure waves in the excluded’ and `everything’ is allowed: `This isn’t a marriageÐit’s a riot’ (405). wake of an explosion Time Past’s wild party, the domain of Regret rather than psychoanalysis, for the violent expression of violent includes all possible states of mind along with untransformed auditory emotions, or `wide interferenceÐsnatches of song, jazz, poetry, waltzes; a frenetic dance of externalization of death. Is some catastrophic change occurring, unobserved, like the growth of internal object’, in the wake of the a foetus?Ðor has a `fetal idea’ been killed off ? (417). The Bandmaster calls `All catastrophic event. change at Purgatory!’ and `P.A.’ announces the birth of the `post-Big Bang Era’ 21 For the tiger (418±19). But `The Past Presented’ ends not with a bang but a whimper; or, mourning her mate, see 1991b:17, and cf. rather, it ends with Alice whimpering at the traumatic memories of `P.A.’ ’s Williams 1985:38±41 First World War experiences and his dead comrades, a terrible dream from for a fascinating reading of this which she wakes crying, depressed and calling for Rosemary. episode. The ghosts of Bion’s war-time companions and Bion himself replicate the Xanthippe Darling; or, Any Woman Knows . . . tropes of purgatorial Noman’s Land and hallucination often In `Making the Best of a Bad Job’, Bion quotes Plato on Socrates’ `art of associated with writing of the First midwifery’; according to Socrates, `the only difference is that my patients are World War. men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 89 ...... is in travail of birth’ (Bion 1994:331).22 In the third and last book of A Memoir (`The Dawn of Oblivion’), Rosemary wonders if `a mind will be generated’ (1991c:474) from the getting together of Post-Natal Souls. Pervaded by foetal images and metaphors of gestation and pregnancy, this final part opens by announcing itself as `a psycho-embryonic attempt to write an embryo-scientific account of a journey from birth to death overwhelmed by pre-mature knowledge, experience, glory and self-intox- icating self-satisfaction’ (429). A number of preoccupations found elsewhere in Bion’s late essays (Leonardo’s whirling hair and water, the Caesura of birth, foetal pre-experience) surface in this recapitulatory, developmental journey from amniotic fluid to adulthood and beyond. The same cast of characters emerge from the womb to resume their debate but, during the course of what increasingly resembles a Socratic dialogue, Alice and Rosemary change places, with Alice assuming the role of common-sensical wife and mother while Rosemary becomes the comical cockney maid, prone to invoking her `Mum’, her Mum’s sense of propriety, and her Mum’s `gentlemen’. The women, as usual, are perceived by the men as intrusive (`TWENTY-FIVE YEARS: . . . These women buttedÐI meanÐ``said’’ something’ (457) ). `P.A.’ notes that `Alice, hostile, ``thinks’’ I am an obtuse male’ (459), while Rosemary is in awe of his learnedness. On her side, Alice speaks from the authority of her experience of pregnancy and childbirth: `At lastÐsomething I do understand; I have the advantage of knowing pregnancy’ (460). But if Rosemary is to be believed, men think that women don’t necessarily `know’ what they’re talking about anyway (`ROBIN: . . . Of course, they can’t have known what they were talking about. ROSEMARY: ``Of course.’’ Like women they would not know’ (463) ). Bion commits himself to neither side of the argument. Instead, he focuses on the anger that occupies the excluded middle of these competing viewpoints. At one point Roland calls Alice `Xanthippe darling’, after Socrates’ supposedly shrewish wife. Alice wonders: `Do men agree with the dismissal of Xanthippe? Do you consider the presence of myself and Rosemary an excrescence? Is our sexual equipment the only worthwhile contribution to the discussion?’ (480). Alice is allowed to express her perception of psycho- analysts in unflattering terms (a greedy, maladjusted, bigoted, bad-tempered, complacent, ignorant lot on the whole). She and Rosemary interrupt `P.A.’Ð by now an increasingly long-winded, plaintive and at times defensive characterÐwith their startling (and witty) complaints: `ALICE: My clitoris is passed by unnoticed by your mouth, ``blinded,’’ ``glutted’’ by your penitential penis. What you don’t know is knowledge; once you know it . . . you are too full of knowledge to be curious. ROSEMARY: . . . his eyes are so stuffed with Beauty that he cannot see me. Not even Homer had the wit to 22 The quotation is from Plato’s Theaetetus. see that Helen of Troy was not just an ecto-dermal proliferation’ (467). The 90 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... `capacity for articulate speech’ becomes `more an opaque screen than a link’ (467) to the (sexual) other. From the incompatible perspectives of male fear and female hostility, each sees the other through a glass darkly, a dilemma that could only be resolved by Picasso’s device of painting on a piece of glass, `so that it can be seen from both sides of the screenÐboth sides of the resistance’ (465). Into this linguistic impasse of recriminatory, mutual non- comprehension, Bion tosses a casual hand-grenade: Roland’s exasperated exclamation, `You bloody women’ (463). Unremarkable in themselves, these words cause almost as much of an explosion as the birth of a new idea. Roland amplifies: `I was scared of bloody women. Even the first man I saw spread-eagled in the shell hole we shared was not bloodyÐonly faintly green parchment stretched over bones’ (464). War trauma and sex trauma, rather than Rank’s birth trauma (a notion later contested by AliceÐ`Whose experience is traumatic?’ (563) ) surface side by side in the shell-hole occupied by thin-skinned ecto-dermal man. In his contemporary essay, `On a Quotation from Freud’ (1976), Bion announces, `I want to say something which sounds just like saying some- thing for the sake of saying it; and perhaps it is. ``Bloody cunt.’’ ``Bloody vagina’’ ’ (Bion 1994:307). The first phrase, he speculates, is part of a `universal language’Ðneither sexual nor (like the second phrase) possibly anatomical or obstetrical. What interests him is a primitive or archaic language that is connected not only with the sacred (`Bloody’, as Bion points out, is an abbreviation of `By Our Lady’) but with turmoilÐthe turmoil that underlies the calm of consulting rooms or institutions, the Socratic dialogue where language may reach its limits and produce expres- sions of anger, or for that matter the seemingly civilized psychoanalytic meeting. When Roland tells Robin, `Don’t be a bloody cunt’ (1991c:483), Alice primly objects, `surely it is not necessary to talk like that . . . I have to think of Rosemary’ (`ROSEMARY: My mum was very particular how she brought me up’ (483) ). Alice’s squeamishness about `such . . . language’ contrasts with her own ability to `talk that stuff as well as you can’ when she has to (`Why don’t you two fucking bastards shut up . . .?’ (484) ). `P.A.’ asserts: `This language, which clearly we all know though we have forgotten it . . . makes an unrecognizedÐand unrecognized archaic and still vitalÐ contribution to our intercourse’ (485). What `P.A.’ refers to as `the sacred ``bloody’’ and the non-sexual ``cunt’’ ’ (486) is acknowledged by Roland as archaic language whose purpose is to `hide or disguise or preserve some powerful germ of vital development’ (487). `P.A.’ draws an analogy between the `storms that rage’ beneath `the calm and mirror-like surface’ of Rosemary’s character and language itselfÐ`a distorted, distorting and turbulent reflective surface’ (490). Reality is neither civilized nor reasonable, but speaks a universal language: `The bloody cunt which is not anything to do with anatomical sex, not masculine, not feminine, not haematology, not THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 91 ...... religion but could be said to be sacred has . . . nevertheless an almost universalÐwestern at leastÐcomprehensibility’ (492). Even Alice speaks such `cuntish language’ as if she had been `born to it, lived it, loved it as [her] very own favourite language’ (493).23 For `P.A.’, this `cuntish’ language is the language of the angry, inarticulate baby, a `gem of obscene ``water’’Ð amniotic fluid, social freedom’ (494) brought to the surface by mental turbulence, tapping reserves of vitality to enliven an otherwise somnolent but well-behaved discussion group. `P.A.’ is preoccupied with his experiences as a tank commander in the First World War and its traumatic aftermath. Alice, however, for whom childbirth is `no metaphor’ (507) asks: `And the women? Or don’t they matter? What should I tell my daughtersÐand their daughtersÐabout childbirth?’ (508). What is woman’s place in a new post-bomb world order, where giving birth can still be dangerous? When RobinÐa proto-Thatcherite, headed for the FalklandsÐsays, `We could do with a woman with some guts today’, Alice responds, sceptically, `do you suppose that any woman would be allowed to clear up the mess . . .?’ (511). The old question, `What does woman want?’, sounds different in this context. Political power? Wages for housework? The more `P.A.’ sounds like a man trapped by the occupational demands and risks of his profession, the more Alice sounds like an under- appreciated, unwaged housewife (`If a house has to be kept liveable it is women who have to do so. How much respect do you think is paid to the minutiae to which we devote ourselves?’ (530±1). And finally, with impatience: `Oh, Freud! You people seem to believe that no one ever thought before Freud. Any woman knows . . .’ (532). What `any woman knows’ turns out to be what babies are trying to sayÐwhereas psychoanalysts have to resort to jargon `to express a minute particle of common sense which any woman would know’ (534). Not any woman, replies `P.A.’ But wait a momentÐwhat have domestic minutiae to do with minute particles of common sense? Bion’s epilogue will proclaim his rebellion against common sense, while his entire psychoanalytic oeuvre explores the psychic action of minute splitting (do domestic labour and psychoanalytic jargon both split women’s knowledge?). Increasingly, Alice becomes the repository for a `feminine’ or `maternal’ intuition against which `P.A.’ tries to maintain 23 Commenting, his own sceptical, agnostic view of the unknowable. The philosophic scold, Ble andonu associates `sexual insults such as Xanthippe, can proclaim her respect for truth (`ALICE: Even women have ``bloody cunt’’ ’ with been known to wish to bear children in whom a love of truth can germinate’ Rosemary’s `sado- masochistic sexuality’ (561) ), while insisting on the medical fact that birth may be life-threatening (1994:262) as well as for mothers as well as infants. But in the face of her way of knowing, `P.A.’ with the amniotic fluid and meconium defines his job, which is to share not only the danger, but `the ``smell’’ of that of early life; however, danger’ (517), while acknowledging both the `bad smell’ of obscene language as we see, Alice is as and the `evil smell’ (511) that accompanies creativity, which has its origins much at home in this medium as her maid. too in turmoil and danger. 92 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... `Bion’ speaks of the individual `who behaves as if his wisdom and intelligence would be contaminated if he allowed himself to recognize that his body thought; conversely, that his physique would suffer if he allowed his body to know what his mind thought’ (566). `Suppose’, asks Alice, `while I am pregnant, I have some disturbing news. Would this affect the fetus?’ (575). `P.A.’ suggests that news may be welcome or unwelcome, depending on whether the pregnancy is wanted or unwanted, the father loved or unloved. But the model of the pregnancy is like that of talkÐits pains and frustrations have to be faced, rather than `fall[ing] back on murder or war as a substitute for discussion’ (576). It is left to Alice to name one 1970s fall-back for failed discussions (`Nuclear war, for example’), to which `P.A.’ responds uncom- promisingly, giving himself the last word: `There are no labels attached to most options; there is no substitute for the growth of wisdom. Wisdom or oblivionÐtake your choice. From that warfare there is no release’ (576). We might recall the unthinkable future or `excluded middle’ that confronted Bion himself at this point: wisdom and oblivionÐnot war, but death. At the end of A Memoir, Bion takes leave of his group of characters in an epilogue spoken in his own voice. His book, he tells us, represents a rebellion against `common-sense, reason, memories, desires andÐgreatest bug-bear of allÐ understanding and being understood’ (578). But, despite his uncompromis- ing stance, `sanity, like ``cheerfulness,’’ will creep in’ (as they do, for instance, via Alice’s caricature of housewifely sanity, or Rosemary’s cockney comic turn). In the last resort, A Memoir of the Future gives birth to a New Age foetus rather than a feminist (let alone `a feminine psycho-analyst’). `All change’Ðor no change? Bion’s women clearly reveal the extent to which millennial thinking risks replicating uninterrogated, indeed conventional tropologies of gender (the dualities of mistress and maid, Helen and whore). But they also succeed in penetrating and displacing the `masculine brilliance’ of Bion’s psychoanalytic culture at its blind spot, the very focus of illumina- tion: `Too dark to see, or too blindedÐ. . . The difficulty is not only with the galactic centre. It is as difficult to see the centre of one’s own personality’ (254). A Memoir brings the enquiry home to Bion himself. In The Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963), Bion had written: `Self consciousness or curiosity in the personality about the personality is an essential feature of the story’ (1989a:46). His own curiosity in and about the personality is an essential feature of A Memoir, perhaps its constitutive feature as an auto-enquiry. At the end of his last paper, `Making the Best of a Bad Job’ (1979), Bion calls for psychoanalysts to `study the living mind’. Whose living mind, after all, was he better placed to study than his own? But `Making the Best of a Bad Job’ also offers a warning against psychoanalytic orthodoxy: `The revolutionary becomes respectableÐa barrier against revolution’ in the ceaseless war waged by `the feelings already in possession’ against anticipatory thinking (1994:331). In the Bionic revolution, A Memoir THE UNEXPECTED: BIONIC WOMAN AT THE MILLENNIUM . 93 ...... strongly suggests, women fight on both sides of the barrier. Their role is at once reactionary and anticipatory; they function as respectable deterrents and as sources of emotional turbulence; they represent deathly forces, while being repositories of knowledge about the risks of giving birth. In the last resort, Bionic woman can also be read, not just as the precursor of imminent emotional upheaval, but as a figure for `the unexpected’ itselfÐfor that ultimately unknowable form of emotional turbulence about which no personality can fail to be curious. The war between the sexes is for Bion himself a displaced version of the struggle between life and death within what he calls, not the organism, but the personality, whose essential feature is its curiosity about itself in the face of catastrophic change. A Memoir of the Future offers a blueprint for the ways in which the not-seeing part of the personalityÐits ideological blind-spotÐtends to be implicated in millennial thinking and attendant anxieties about change and death. For a feminist reader, Bion’s articulation of millennial and anticipatory thought reveals itself, like psychoanalysis, as powerfully and inescapably gendered. But Bionic womanÐ`the unexpected’Ðdoes more than define the limits of what is thinkable for Bion. The unexpected, after all, can be an opportunity to scrutinize our own unthought millennarianism along with our fantasies about change.

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