ABSTRACT
In A Memoir of the Future, Bion provocatively acts out what happens ‘at the mind’s limits’ (to echo Jean Amery’s account of his survival after the trauma of Auschwitz; Amery, 1966), when ‘wakeful dream thinking’ and the language of disguise, typical of poetry and literature (‘paronomasia’, ‘a flower of speech’; MF, p. 239), take hold of reality and attempt to finally express what is, by definition, ineffable and unrepresentable. The trauma of reality, after the experience of the War and towards the end of Bion’s life, is investigated—enacted and worked through—intentionally by way of a kind of language and a post-modern narrational mode that explodes the limits of representation, mostly time and space, and uses a paradoxical mise-en-scène where the faults of reason or what Western thought considers as reasoning and truth are exposed in their limitations.
