Concept
Basic assumption
In Bion's account of groups, an unspoken emotional belief that the members share and that takes hold of a group, making it behave as if it had met for some purpose other than its real task. He named three: dependency on a leader who will provide, fight or flight against an enemy, and pairing in the hope of a saviour yet to come. Only one is active at a time while the others lie dormant.
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- Valency
- Introduced by
- Wilfred Bion
- Key works
- 4
introduced by
- Wilfred Bion 1952 Worked out in Bion's papers on groups from 1948 to 1951 and in 'Group dynamics: a re-view' (1952), collected in Experiences in Groups (1961).
derives from
- Paranoid-schizoid position 1952 In 'Group dynamics: a re-view' (1952) Bion traced the basic assumptions to a primitive part-object scene tied to the psychotic anxieties, splitting and projective identification of Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
- Depressive position 1952 Bion's 1952 re-view places the anxieties that basic-assumption life defends against in both of Klein's positions, the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive.
developed by
- Pierre Turquet 1974 Turquet added a fourth basic assumption to Bion's dependency, fight-flight and pairing: basic assumption oneness (baO), in which members seek to merge with an omnipotent force and give up the self for passive participation.
- Earl Hopper 2003 Hopper proposed a fourth basic assumption, Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification ((ba) I:A/M), a defence against the fear of annihilation that follows traumatic experience. He first presented it in the late 1980s and set it out in full in his 2003 book.