Our Eternal Home

Meg Harris Williams is a literary critic specialising in the relation between psychoanalysis, aesthetic experience, literature and poetry. She is also a practising artist. She is the author of Donald Meltzer: A Contemporary Introduction (2021), Dream Sequences in Shakespeare: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (2020), The Art of Personality in Literature and Psychoanalysis (2017), The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Bion, Meltzer, Keats (2010) and Bion's Dream: A Reading of the Autobiographies (2010).

• Part I: Making up the Mind 1. The Self and its Boundaries 2. Protomental Life and the Caesura of Birth 3. Room for Growth 4. Catastrophic Change: The Dynamics of Development 5. Introducing the Patient to Himself 6. Can Beauty Help? the Role of Aesthetics Part II: Autobiographical Generation 7. The Becoming Room: Summary of the Film 8. Babushka Dolls: The Infant in the Toddler in the Mother (in the Analyst) (Vivienne Pasieka) 9. First Steps on the Moon: The Movement of the Analytic Pair in the ‘Becoming Room’ (Annelise Scappaticci) 10. The Voice and the Heart: Evolving an Intimacy (Vera R. F. Montagna) 11. The Fledgling: Ending of an Analysis (Alison Vaspe)

‘Drawing on Wilfred Bion’s autobiographical writings, this book reveals the mind as an inner landscape where emotional truths and conflicts search for the links that allow becoming to occur. It offers a compelling and unsettling exploration of the complex paths by which non-verbal emotional experience finds its way into awareness and meaning. The quest for one's eternal inner home appears as an endless, unfolding process. With quiet precision, it illuminates moments of recognition as they emerge within the psychoanalytic encounter, where thought is born in the presence of another mind. The book is also deeply moving: reading it is an experience of beauty, as each chapter stands as a living, personal response to what Bion tried to make almost thinkable.’Avner Bergstein, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, author of Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life‘With authority and authenticity, Meg Harris Williams guides us through Wilfred Bion's autobiographies and memoirs, illuminating both prenatal and postnatal dimensions of the mind. In this well-researched, poetic exploration, the archaic chord is struck and vitality is released.’Dr Matt McArdle, MBBS, FRANZCP, President, Australian Psychoanalytical Society‘An infinite surprise. Bion's thought and his conception of the Self, enter into a passionate relationship with the minds of the authors. Free from the confines of the past and delightfully unsaturated, they live again in the present as a generative idea, new in every moment, igniting sparks, stirring turbulence, and promoting “becoming”, the mysterious journey of the Self toward transcendence, toward O, our “eternal home”.’Fiorenza Siri, psychoanalyst and theatre director, Chorò Group of Savona, Italy‘Can beauty help? Yes, is the answer from Wilfred Bion. Sensual reactions are the primitive basis for finding meaning. The beauty of finding a mother after being born allows us to endure not-knowing. The analytical process is itself a search for the sleeping beauty behind the ugliness of all-powerful distortions. The authors of this book know Bion's work from the inside and can thus poetically show us how to read his work, without lecturing. Here we get to enter Bion's world and his autobiographical works from the inside. Through personal responses from various clinicians about the idea of "meeting oneself", the content of the book is enriched with the next generation's experience of how Bion's work helps to understand human life and human infinity.’Torunn Landrø, IBUP (Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy), Norway‘Meg Harris Williams has a lifelong experience of becoming and being an author, poet and artist within the Post-Kleinan Tradition. (artlit.info). The core of this book belongs to the autobiographic work written by the aged Bion. As the author is winding ideas from his earlier works, she translates the meaning of his terminology in a in a gentle poetic way. Four analysts relate to the context by applying their clinical casework from within. The introjected experience of attending to the text in this book, creates a countertransference in the reader´s mind, providing capacity for new emotional experiences.’Kina Meurle-Hallberg, psychotherapist and psychomotor physiotherapist, Sweden; and Lise Radøy, child and adolescent psychoanalyst with IBUP, and psychomotor physiotherapist, Norway.