ABSTRACT
This short paper was published as a chapter in a book, The Neuroses in War, in 1940. At the time of writing the paper, Bion was working in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Two years earlier he had begun an analysis with John Rickman, but it had ended prematurely because of the outbreak of war.1 That, and his Tavistock experience, enabled him to connect his wartime experiences with psychoanalytic formulations of unconscious phantasy and the role of primitive infantile anxieties and defences against them.
