s of her work situation to stimulate afresh these early situations and their accompanying emotions' (Lyth,1959, pp. 46-7). There are such nurses in the perverse world of Catch 22. They tend the Man in White, in plaster from head to toe, arms and legs encased andextended. Those whose job it is to tend him routinely take the bottle of plasma going in and the bottle of urine going out and change them round: there is nodifference between nourishment and waste, introjection and projection; fair is foul and foul is fair.Bion describes the church and the army as exemplary organisations for embodying the pathology of group relations. Pianosa is an Army Air Corps base, run by mad,ambitious officers, reeking of arrogance and sycophancy, for whom success and failure are the only measures of worth (p. 262) and survival is always at risk. Theirsurvival in career terms is maintained at the expense of the literal survival of the officers and enlisted men who lie below them in the military hierarchy. The hierarchyincludes General Dreedle, who is astonished to learn that he cannot have anyone shot who irritates him (pp. 218, 279), General Peckem, head of Special Services,who cares only for bureaucratic power in the table of organisation and thinks it eminently rational that combat operations should come under his domain - Whatcould be more special? Peckem outwits Dreedle; Dreedle torments his son-in-law, Colonel Moodus, by dangling a sexy Wac before him (p. 213). ColonelScheisskopf outsmarts them all by getting promoted over their heads to Lt. General and is free to indulge his passion: parades, including precision marching to thepoint of tying the men's arms so they won't swing. The men in the squadron are directly answerable to Colonel Cathcart, who divides his fortunes into split extremes of ''Feathers in My Cap!!!!!' and 'Black Eyes!!!'(p. 209; cf. p. 415) and whose sole preoccupation, after survival and sycophancy, is getting his picture into the S...
