In The Long Week-End Wilfred Bion focuses on his emotional distress during the first twenty-one years of his life. Rarely employing psychoanalytic terminology, he attempts to explore his emotional experience directly, struggling to find a language that could capture the complexity of inner life. Central to The Long Week-End is his desire to communicate how easily he could feel unintelligent, inept, weak, ashamed, guilty, angry, frightened, and cowardly in various settings. This self-criticism at times undermines his theoretical stance in this work, as he emphasizes the importance of doubt and uncertainty when attempting to comprehend most dimensions of experience.
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