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.