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→In the Second World War
Lacan took the decision not to publish anything during the war years. In 1945, after the war had ended, he visited England for a five-week study trip, described in the article "English Psychiatry and the War" (1947). He had a special admiration, he said, for the English during the war, and he reviewed the work of Wilfred Bion and John Rickman whom he had met during his stay. (They tried to use psychoanalytic ideas in the rehabilitation of army misfits).
Lacan was especially interested in their work with small groups. Rather than being organized around the presence of an authority figure with whom they were supposed to identify, these groups were centered on activities. (A group forms round a task or activity, indicating a different sort of identificatory process.) This sensitivity to problems of identification was praised by Lacan and he claimed that Britain's success in the war was in no small part a consequence of introducing such ideas to the military.
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