Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

76 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
Northfield Reloaded, 1942 – 2017
By Cosmin Chita
Paper presented at the 17 th International Symposium of
the Group Analytic Society International, Berlin, August
2017.
Just over 75 years ago in April 1942, the British army south of
Birmingham in Northfield, took over Hollymoor Hospital and opened
a rehabilitation centre for soldiers with neurotic disorders. The country
had been in the war for almost three years, isolated, the target of
German air raids and had been forced to build up a national army
within a short time. Lacan, who visited the country in 1945, spoke of
"the synthetic creation of an army" (Lacan 1947). The fact that Great
Britain was confronted with a huge wave of immigration also appears
to be important: civilians, governments, foreign armies and prisoners
of war. Taking these circumstances into account, the words of John
Rickman in 1938 appear almost prophetic:
"Mankind is always facing the task of shaping its group
life, so that it shall be either an embodiment of an early
ideal of perfect uniformity, or else that it shall be a place
of struggle, with an ultimate aim of peace”. (Rickman,
1938, 2003)
From the beginning, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts felt
called upon to participate in the general war effort. Rickman, though
a convinced Quaker, was already engaged in the Royal Army Medical
Corps after the declaration of war in the autumn of 1939. A year later
in Wharncliffe, he designed a double-track treatment model for
neurotic soldiers consisting of psychiatric therapy and para-military
training. After his visit to Wharncliffe, Bion wrote to his former
teaching analyst Rickman:
"Not the least value of a parallel military training course
seems to me to be that a patient is given a world to adjust
to that is nothing like so severe as the isolated
unsupported world which is presented to him by the
bed-ridden existence, aimless and disoriented, which he
has to face in the special hospitals I have seen so far."
(Vonofakos and Hinshelwood, 2003)