'Nameless Dread'

A ‘Nameless Dread’

I’ve been reading about a psychoanalytical term described as ‘nameless dread’ and the psychoanalyst who coined the term, Wilfred Bion (a pupil of Klein). The phrase alone is powerful and contains a certain amount of mysterious terror and the concept behind it, I think, is relevant to our work.

Bion’s theory relates to the anxieties of a baby and the mother’s way of dealing with them. He suggests that these anxieties at the most primitive level are associated with death, the infant’s ‘feeling, say, that it is dying’.

“A baby whose distress cannot be contained (by the mother) might experience what Bion calls ‘nameless dread’, a feeling that its anxieties are not only intolerable, but cannot be made sense of. Its anxieties fragment within the psyche, and are then felt to attack it...”

Basically the ‘nameless dread’ as I understand it is the un-understandable fear and anxieties that babies often experience faced with the unknown and without a mother to ‘contain’ and reassure them. In Bion’s case he related this infant experience / state to soldiers in the trenches.


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Bion was a psychoanalyst during the 1st world war and a lot of his and other psychoanalysts of that time seem to have been informed in their theories by the primitive and raw effects of war on men and their psyche.

Apparently the most feared wound during the war in the trenches was evisceration which is a wound to the stomach or more accurately the effect of your guts being ripped from your belly by a metal gun shell. One account is of this soldier who had developed ‘war neurosis’ after an attack in the trenches...

“The victim had been flung by the force of a shell-blast into the distended stomach of a dead German, and his mouth was filled with the entrails.”

Can you imagine that... It’s horrific and I think the difference between the fear and anxiety that an infant experiences and that of the 1st world war trench soldier is that the baby’s ‘nameless dread’ is usually not real or not as big as it seems where as the soldier’s fear was very real. The baby’s fears can be ‘contained’ but the soldier’s fears can not be protected from being un’contained’ because there is a very real chance that their stomach could be ripped open and their guts may hang inside out.

This relates to another account of a soldier, who after his trench was shelled (bombed) was later found ‘...wandering into the open, taking off his clothes, and explaining that he was going to bed.’

The conclusion from this was made that the mental capacity for containing his anxiety had been destroyed along with the dug-out (trench). I also read in the same essay that babies do not like clothes coming between them and their mother, there is something that they find reassuring in skin contact and I guess you could read that into this situation, where the soldier has regressed to a childlike state, craving the comfort of mother.

So... I think this all relates to our modest (but significant) philosophical and psychological thoughts through our inquiries into the unknown, nothingness, the potential of an empty or un-understandable existence and our behaviour within this context.