Editor's Introduction. ‘The War of Nerves’

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.

There are two aspects of the paper I want to mention. One foreshadows a particular line of development in Bion's later thinking, in relation to projective identification, phantasy and informative countertransference; the other relates to the need for understanding in the wider community of the nature of trauma and its manifestations.

To develop the first of these: there is a statement about the nature of a psychological attack by an enemy, which Bion saw as consisting of a projection into the individual's mind, in order not only to disrupt his or her defences and psychic organization, but also to elicit specific disabling phantasies – based on early infantile anxiety situations – and to encourage the victim into a role that is advantageous to the one making the attack. This is a forerunner of how Bion later extended Klein's notion of projective identification in a way that clarified the mode of operation of what Freud had described as countertransference.2 It also prepares the way for the later notion of shared phantasy: participation in

unconscious enactments and scenarios based on the complex operation of projective identification.

Second, Bion makes use of this idea to encoura