ABSTRACT
At the end of his autobiography All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life (Bion, 1985) the English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion describes an extremely painful memory. He is sitting in his garden with his infant daughter. His wife has died in childbirth. His daughter calls out to him and, feeling “numbed and insensitive” (1985, p. 70), he refuses to answer her or to go to her. She begins to cry and to crawl toward him across the lawn but he ignores her. He even feels angry that she is persecuting him. Finally, the child’s nanny picks her up and comforts her. Bion feels, he reports, astonished “to find such depth of cruelty in myself” (Bion, 1985, p. 70).
