Following his incarceration and survival as an infant in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Alfred Garwood revisited the camp with his family ten years ago to commemorate his liberation. Upon arrival he found himself unable to walk, unable to concentrate, and full of what he terms feelings of ‘dreadfulness’.

On returning to London, his previous capacity to look at photographs and listen to stories of his time in the camp changed dramatically. He found himself ‘trembling uncontrollably’ and full of feelings of what he describes in his paper, as ‘annihilation threat and terror’.

Alfred Garwood presents us with this tightly packed paper on the origins of trauma and psychic security perhaps as a way of ‘expunging and abreacting’ (p. 358) this trauma. His question is put very simply: Since trauma implies an injury, what is it that has been injured? The answer to this fundamental question is ‘psychic security’. This forms the basis of the paper. He says, ‘In this paper I wish to suggest this is a psychic