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.
Development
1952
introduced by Wilfred Bion
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).
In Basic Assumption (2005);Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (1961)
1974
developed by Pierre Turquet
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.
In Leadership: The Individual and the Group (1974)
2003
developed by Earl Hopper
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.
In Traumatic Experience in the Unconscious Life of Groups: The Fourth Basic Assumption: Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M (2003)
Relations
- 1952 introduced by Wilfred Bion
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).
- 1952 derives from Paranoid-schizoid position
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.
- 1952 derives from Depressive position
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.
- 1974 developed by Pierre Turquet
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.
- 2003 developed by Earl Hopper
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.
- opposed by Work group
The two are opposed modes of one group's mental life: work-group activity is obstructed and diverted by basic-assumption activity.
Works
- 1961
Experiences in Groups and Other Papers
Bion's book gathers his writings on groups from the 1940s and early 1950s. It opens with a 'Pre-view', the 1943 Lancet paper written with John Rickman on the first Northfield experiment, in which Bion ran the training wing of a military psychiatric hospital so that the soldiers' own disorganisation became a problem for the group to study and tackle. At its centre are seven papers, first published in Human Relations between 1948 and 1951, on the small therapeutic and study groups he took at the Tavistock Clinic after the war. There Bion declined the leadership the members expected of him and addressed his interpretations to the group as a whole, watching how it treated him and the task it had met for. From these observations he concluded that every group works on two levels at once. As a work group it cooperates on its declared task, keeps in touch with reality and can learn from experience; at the same time it behaves as if its members shared one of three unspoken basic assumptions: that they have met to depend on a leader who will sustain them, to fight an enemy or flee from it, or to pair off in the hope that a saviour will be born. Each basic assumption carries its own emotions and calls for its own kind of leader; only one is active at a time, and the others are held in what he calls a protomental system, where bodily and mental events are not yet told apart. Individuals combine with these assumptions spontaneously, in proportion to what he names their valency, and the group mentality they produce runs against their individual aims and against development. Certain institutions, he suggests, are work groups that harness one assumption for a task: the Church dependence, the army fight-flight, the aristocracy pairing. The closing 'Re-view', 'Group dynamics: a re-view' (1952), restates these findings in the light of Melanie Klein's work: basic-assumption life is a defence against the psychotic anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the group evokes very primitive phantasies about the mother's body, and the therapist's sense of being made to play a part in the group's phantasy is explained by projective identification. In dialogue with Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Bion argues that group phenomena are not created by bringing people together but are latent in every person, who is by nature a group animal, and that the family pattern Freud found in groups overlies more primitive mechanisms.
- 1974
Leadership: The Individual and the Group
Turquet's chapter on leadership and membership in groups, in which he proposes a fourth basic assumption beside Bion's dependency, fight-flight and pairing: basic assumption oneness (baO), in which members seek to join in a powerful union with an omnipotent force and to surrender the self for passive participation.
- 2003
Working within the traditions of Bion, Turquet, Foulkes and Pines, Hopper sets out his theory of a fourth basic assumption in the unconscious life of groups, Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification, based on the fear of annihilation that stems from traumatic experience, and applies it to difficult patients in group analysis. Foreword by Malcolm Pines; closing critiques by British and American group analysts.
- 2005
See also
References
- Basic Assumption2005Evidence for a relation
- Experiences in Groups and Other Papers1961Evidence for a relation
- Leadership: The Individual and the Group1974Evidence for a relation
- Traumatic Experience in the Unconscious Life of Groups: The Fourth Basic Assumption: Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M2003Evidence for a relation