Online Lecture - Meg Harris Williams
Learning from the Experience of Reading Bion's Autobiographies
Meg Harris Williams
Thursday 5th November
In her talk, Meg will describe some key elements that emerge from Bion's presentation of his 'self' in his autobiographical works, and how, as with creative fiction, identification with these becomes a passionate learning experience for the reader, by encouraging or even demanding that further symbolic transformations are made.
Bion said, it is not enough just to read a book: we also have to have the experience of reading a book. How can we make reading his autobiographical works an intimate learning experience, that advances not what we know about Bion and his life and times, but what we know about ourselves as individuals in the present?
As he often emphasises, the fictional characters of his internal conversation in the Memoir of the Future were more real to him than many of the people he encountered, and it was they who preserved his mind alive during many dead years of depression, and fostered his picture of personality growth with its primary themes of turbulence, catastrophic change and learning to think. The Memoir presents a fictional yet true self-analysis which, like all creative work, invites the reader to participate in a type of internal recognition of our own equivalent dreamworld and its inhabitants, the parts that make up the whole of what he calls ‘our Eternal Home - our Self’.
Meg will draw on her new book on Bion, Our Eternal Home: Bion's Idea of the Self (published 30 October by Routledge), which also includes illustrative contributions from four analysts.
https://www.routledge.com/Our-Eternal-Home-Bions-Idea-of-the-Self/Williams/p/book/9781041136064.
Chaired by Eve Steel.
Biography
Meg Harris Williams is a writer and lecturer on literature and psychoanalysis and also a visual artist. She teaches internationally and is editor of The Harris Meltzer Trust. Her books and papers have been translated into many languages and include: Inspiration in Milton and Keats (1982), A Strange Way of Killing: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1987), The Apprehension of Beauty (with Donald Meltzer; 1988), The Chamber of Maiden Thought (with Margot Waddell; 1991), Hamlet in Analysis (1997), The Vale of Soulmaking (2005), The Aesthetic Development (2010), Bion's Dream (2010), The Becoming Room: Filming Bion's Memoir of the Future (2015), The Art of Personality in Literature and Psychoanalysis (2017), Dream Sequences in Shakespeare (2021), and Donald Meltzer: A Contemporary Introduction (2021). Her new book is Our Eternal Home: Bion's Idea of the Self. Website: www.artlit.info.