Building on Bion: Roots

The International Library of Group Analysis

Edited by Malcolm Pines, Institute of Group Analysis, London
The aim of this series is to represent innovative work in group psychotherapy, particularly but
not exclusively, group analysis. Group analysis, taught and practised widely in Europe, derives
from the work of SH Foulkes.
other titles in the series
Building on Bion: Branches
Contemporary Developments and Applications of Bion’s Contributions
to Theory and Practice
Edited by Robert Lipgar and Malcolm Pines
ISBN 1 84310 711 2
International Library of Group Analysis 21
Dreams in Group Psychotherapy
Theory and Technique
Edited by Claudio Neri, Malcolm Pines and Robi Friedman
ISBN 1 85302 923 8
International Library of Group Analysis 18
Bion and Group Psychotherapy
Edited by Malcolm Pines
ISBN 1 85302 924 6
International Library of Group Analysis 15
Rediscovering Groups
A Psychoanalyst’s Journey Beyond Individual Psychology
Marshall Edelson and David N. Berg
ISBN 1 85302 726 X pb
ISBN 1 85302 725 1 hb
International Library of Group Analysis 9
Group
Claudio Neri
ISBN 1 85302 416 3
International Library of Group Analysis 8
Self Experiences in Group
Intersubjective and Self-Psychological Pathways to Human Understanding
Edited by Irene N.H. Harwood and Malcolm Pines
ISBN 1 85302 587 6 pb
ISBN 1 85302 596 8 hb
International Library of Group Analysis 4
Group Psychotherapy of the Psychoses
Concepts, Interventions and Contexts
Edited by Victor L. Schermer and Malcolm Pines
ISBN 1 85302 584 4 pb
ISBN 1 85302 583 6 hb
International Library of Group Analysis 2
Circular Reflections
Selected Papers on Group Analysis and Psychoanalysis
Malcolm Pines
ISBN 1 85302 492 9 pb
ISBN 1 85302 493 7 hb
International Library of Group Analysis 1
INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF GROUP ANALYSIS 20

Building on Bion: Roots

Origins and Context of Bion’s
Contributions to Theory and Practice
Edited by Robert M. Lipgar and Malcolm Pines

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

London and New York
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2003

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Building on Bion–roots : origins and context of Bion’s contributions to theory and
practice / edited by Robert M. Lipgar and Malcolm Pines.
p. cm. -- (International library of group analysis ; 20)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-84310-710-4 (pbk. :alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Group psychoanalysis. 3. Bion, Wilfred R. (Wilfred Ruprecht),
1897-1979. I. Lipgar, Robert, M., 1928- II. Pines, Malcolm. III. Series.

BF173.B8775 2002
150.19’092--dc21 2002073972

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 84310 710 4

Printed and Bound in Great Britain by

Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear
 Contents
PREFACE 7
Robert M. Lipgar, University of Chicago, and
Malcolm Pines, Group Analyst and Psychoanalyst
INTRODUCTION: EARLY BION 9
James S. Grotstein, School of Medicine, UCLA

Part I: Roots and Early Developments

1. Re-discovering Bion’s Experiences in Groups:
Notes and Commentary on Theory and Practice 29
Robert M. Lipgar, University of Chicago

2. Bion’s War Memoirs: A Psychoanalytical Commentary:

Living Experiences and Learning from them: Some
Early Roots of Bion’s Contributions to Psychoanalysis 59
Paulo Cesar Sandler, Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise
de Sao Paolo, Brazil

3. Gregariousness and the Mind: Wilfred Trotter

and Wilfred Bion 85
Nuno Torres, University of Essex

4. ‘Group Dynamics: A Re-view’ 118

Matias Sanfuentes, University of Essex

5. Anthropological Psychoanalysis: Bion’s Journeying in Italy 132

Claudio Neri, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’
 Part II: Bion’s Context: Contemporaries
and Refinements
6. Pairing Bion and Foulkes: Towards a Metapsychosociology? 153
Dennis Brown, Institute of Group Analysis, London

7. Group Mentality and ‘Having a Mind’ 181

Robert Hinshelwood, University of Essex

8. Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification: The Fourth

Basic Assumption in the Unconscious Life of Groups
and Group-like Social Systems 198
Earl Hopper, Institute of Group Analysis, London

9. Building on ‘O’: Bion and Epistemology 226

Victor L. Schermer, Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

10. Bion and Foulkes on Empathy 254

Malcolm Pines, Institute of Group Analysis, London

THE CONTRIBUTORS 263

SUBJECT INDEX 265
AUTHOR INDEX 270
 Preface

In composing these two volumes, Building on Bion: Roots and Building on Bion:
Branches, we wanted to bring you, the reader, closer to the extraordinary depth
and breadth of Wilfred Bion’s thought and influence. Our interest in
advancing the exploration of the full range of human concerns that preoccu-
pied him was particularly stimulated in Turin, Italy, during the International
Centennial Conference on the Work and Life of Wilfred Bion, July 1997. We
were impressed there with the relevance and quality of new work being done
that extended and enlivened themes Bion had spent a lifetime developing. It
was clear that his life and work was having far-reaching influence. Since so
many contemporary analysts, theorists, and teachers in different disciplines
are working with his insights, we wanted to further the examination of the
roots of his genius as well as the many branches of his legacy.
Our plan was to bring together some of the best visions and re-visions
building on Bion’s writings. With the benefit of the Internet as well as our
ability to participate in a number of international gatherings of psychoana-
lysts, group analysts, psychologists and organizational consultants, we are
able now to present new work by authors from Italy, France, Argentina, Brazil,
the United States, as well as Great Britain. Collecting these papers seemed to
take on a life of its own, perhaps in Bion’s spirit, and these volumes found
their own shapes. Quite literally, Bion’s work was international, and
consistent with this we wanted to advance diverse dialogues international in
scope. In both volumes, readers will meet clinicians and theorists, individual
and group analysts, psychiatrists, psychologists and other social scientists
from different countries – men and women with different intellectual and pro-
fessional backgrounds sharing their encounters with Bion and his work,
offering us insights into Bion’s vision as well as their own discoveries and
re-visions. We believe you will find in these volumes Bion’s own passion for

7
8 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

learning and profound commitment to psychoanalysis and its pertinence to

human survival and development.
Volume I, Building on Bion: Roots, explores formative influences affecting
Bion’s emotional and intellectual development – the roots of his brilliance in
the spring of his career. Battlefield experiences in World War I, as well as
influences of Kant, Trotter, Freud and Klein are discussed. In these chapters,
there is a particular focus on his early work studying groups and how this
exploration relates to the work of other psychoanalysts, particularly Foulkes.
Bion’s experiences with groups are re-examined so that the spirit and shape of
his inquiry can be discovered by those not familiar with his writings and
revisited, perhaps rediscovered, by those who feel well acquainted with Bion.
In examining the context of Bion’s work and especially its relation to Foulkes’
theory and practice of group-analysis, we are given a deeper appreciation of
both pioneers and a much fuller understanding of both psychoanalysis and
group psychology.
The second volume, Building on Bion: Branches, as the title suggests,
explores the growing influence of Bion’s work as it is being applied well
beyond group psychology and individual psychoanalysis. These chapters
show the reach and further development of his theoretical and clinical explo-
rations. Specifically, there are applications in areas of leadership, organiza-
tional consultation, experiential learning as well as psychoanalysis. Also in
Volume II there are chapters relating Bion’s work to that of other geniuses
such as the pianist Glenn Gould and the psychologist/research methodologist
William Stephenson. The authors of these chapters bring us Bion’s originality
and passion as he sought the distinctive essence of psychoanalytic learning
and how such a pursuit and such learning can be shared and advanced. We
meet a spiritual Bion, a scientific Bion, and Bion apprehending Beauty. We
encounter Bion’s formative personal and intellectual journeys in Volume I; the
branches (and blossoms) of his insights and interests are in Volume II: Part 1
Working with Groups; Part 2 Application – Putting Bion’s Ideas to Work;
Part 3 Bion as Pioneer in Thinking, Learning and Transmitting Knowledge.

Robert M. Lipgar and Malcolm Pines

 Introduction
1
Early Bion

James S. Grotstein

The remarkable double life of Bion

Wilfred R. Bion’s reputation as a profound thinker and analytic contributor
continues to grow posthumously. An autodidact and polymath extraordinaire,
one who spoke from so many points of view (or ‘vertices’, as he would idio-
syncratically say), such as mathematics, science, poetry (particularly Ovid and
Milton), art, philosophy, religion, mysticism, logic, history, etc., he has left us
with twin legacies that have never until now, in these two volumes, been
brought into a unified synthesis: that of his contributions to the theory of
groups and that of his contributions to psychoanalysis. I remember when he
first came to Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties, many group therapists
consulted him unaware that he was a psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysts
approached him unaware that he had been connected with groups.
Bion, a general psychiatrist before he became a psychoanalyst, had been
deeply interested in groups since he was a medical student. His collegial rela-
tionship with his former analyst, John Rickman, proved to be foundational for
his ideas about groups; not least amongst such ideas was the hope of
extending the benefits of psychiatry and psychotherapy to the general public.
Thus, Bion was a ‘social psychiatrist’ prior to becoming a psychoanalyst.
Much has been written about his subsequent alleged ‘desertion’ of group
relations work for individual psychoanalysis because of Melanie Klein’s
urging. Whether or not that is true, we do not know, but we do know, as many
of the contributors to this volume attest, that his views of group relations were

9
10 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

fundamentally enhanced by his new-found understanding of Klein’s concep-

tions of splitting, projective identification, the activities of the para-
noid–schizoid and depressive positions, the function of unconscious
phantasy, the manic defenses, the death instinct, and the operations of greed
and envy. What was less well known, at least amongst psychoanalysts, was
that his interest in group psychology continued, albeit as a minor chord, in his
psychoanalytic thinking and resurfaced as a major chord in Attention and Inter-
pretation (1970).
Bion, who was so keen on studying lines of authority in his group
relations work, was himself quite a contrast in his professional life. He always
questioned authority – ever since his ambivalent relationship to ‘Arf Arfer’ (his
infantile name for God) and especially as a tank commander in World War I, in
which he felt so disappointed in the failure of his commanders back at head-
quarters to comprehend the battle situation (Bion, 1982. See Sandler, Chapter
2 in Volume 1 for an in-depth study of Bion’s war experiences.) In fact, when
Bion came to Los Angeles, he refused to supervise analysts who came to him
for that purpose. He stated that he did not believe in supervision and would
cite his experiences in the war. He agreed only to offer a ‘second opinion.’2
Actually he was treated badly by ‘command’ in World War II as well. Bion
apparently had the ‘Nelson touch’.3
His experiences in World War I were formative for his personality and for
his later ideas about group psychology and psychoanalysis. Dr Paulo Sandler
(this volume) discusses the impact of Bion’s war experiences on his later
thinking and makes many correlations between those experiences and
specific psychoanalytic ideas he espoused. One idea in particular is note-
worthy, the respect for truth. Truth was later to become part of his metatheory
for psychoanalysis as ‘Absolute Truth’ and the ‘truth instinct,’ concepts that
are arguably profounder than Freud’s in regard to unconscious mental life.
Bion had become interested in group psychology early on in medical
school largely because of the influence upon him of a surgeon, Wilfred
Trotter. Nuno Torres (Chapter 3 in Volume 1) presents an account of their
relationship and convincingly details how important Trotter’s ideas were in
Bion’s later thinking, particularly the notion of ‘gregariousness.’ Torres raises
interesting questions about why Bion may not have cited him more often.
Bion’s formal venture into group work seems really to have begun when he
worked on the problem of officer selection while he was attached to the
Scottish Command of the British Army.4’5 The backdrop of military duty is
very important in understanding Bion’s future work with groups, particularly
 INTRODUCTION 11

at Northfield Hospital, where the task was to ‘re-moralize’ troops who had
become demoralized in combat.6 His experiences in the army served as a
backdrop for his later work with group relations. His Northfield experience
seems to have been unsuccessful (Harrison, 2000), however, and one of the
contributors to this present work, Dennis Brown (Chapter 6 in this volume),
in speculating on that issue, broadly discusses and compares Bion with
Foulkes, who also served at Northfield.
It was clear that his immersion in psychoanalytic training and his training
analysis with Klein was to become pivotal for his later thinking about groups.
Klein had conceived of a developmental state of mind in the infant that she
termed the ‘infantile psychosis,’7 included in which were such categories as
regression, projective identification, splitting, and the reversion to the use of
omnipotence, amongst others. Bion seems to have instantly grasped the appli-
cability of these ideas for understanding group psychology and revised his
earlier conceptions about groups in light of them, i.e., basic assumption
groups formed because of persecutory anxiety in the group and their
formation was due to splitting and projective identification. Soon enough
afterwards, thanks to his work with Klein and his analyses of psychotic
patients, he was able to conceive of deeper and more extensive parallels
between individual and group psychology and was able to redefine the group
as being basically an integral work group that includes members who are both
individuals and identified with the group. In fact, he began to conceive of the
individual self and the group self as being overlapping characteristics of
everyone. Individual psychology and group psychology thus became inter-
twined in his thinking, and eventually ‘basic assumptions’ sub-groups seemed
destined to emerge that would present unconscious resistances to the progress
of the work group. He called these basic assumption groups ‘pairing,’
‘fight–flight,’ and ‘dependency.’ They corresponded to resistances to progress
in individual analysis, e.g., pairing corresponds to the erotization of normal
dependency; fight–flight corresponds to the sado-masochistic, hostile, or
passive–aggressive stance; and dependency (pathological, not healthy)
suggests an omnipotent dependency that projects responsibility for growth
on others. It must be remembered, however, that these basic assumption des-
ignations, even when applied to the individual, retain their group character.
Sanfuentes (Chapter 4 in Volume 1) researches the differences between Bion’s
original publication of Group Dynamics: A Review (1952) and his altered
version of it (1955) and reveals how much the latter version reflects how
12 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

much Bion had come to respect Klein’s thinking and its applicability to
groups.
When one thinks about individual psychoanalysis, one thinks of
‘thinking,’ but when one thinks about groups, one often thinks of ‘group
processes’ as behaviour. Robert Hinshelwood (Chapter 7 in Volume 1)
addresses this issue frontally by suggesting that the group, the work-group in
particular, constitutes a group mind that thinks in order to achieve meaning.
He goes on to apply Bion’s elaborate psychoanalytic epistemology to group
thinking processes. Victor Schermer (Chapter 9 in Volume 1) also reviews
Bion’s psychoanalytic epistemology and applies it to group processes. Hanna
Biran (Volume 2) similarly discusses Bion’s concepts about thinking and
anti-thinking, i.e., alpha function and attacks on linking, and applies them to
group psychology.
Another feature of group work that was clarified by Bion was the nature
of anxiety in groups. Following Klein, he conceived of these primitive
anxieties as being psychotic in nature, and he also conceived that the
formation of the basic assumption sub-groups was due to ‘proto-mental states’
of anxiety, which became the forerunner of his now famous concept of ‘beta
elements’ (Bion, 1962). Lipgar (Volume 1, Chapter 1) cites two other subse-
quently conceived basic-assumption functions, (a) ‘oneness,’ as proposed by
Pierre Turquet (1974), and (b) “me-ness,” as proposed by W. Gordon
Lawrence, Alastair Bain, and Laurence Gould (1996). Hopper (Chapter 8 in
Volume 1) takes up a thread of an idea left by Bion that there may be yet
another basic-assumption process, one which he calls ‘incohesion: aggrega-
tion/massification,’ which occurs after the group has been subjected to
trauma.

The group identity of the individual and the individual

identity of the group: Bion’s ‘binocular vision’
What many analysts failed to realize was that Bion was far more invested in
the importance of the idea of the group or society than they had thought. In
fact, Bion makes society or culture at large, beginning with the infant and its
mother and the family as the first group, a basic dimension of normal mental
life. His discovery of the normal interpersonal role of projective identification
between infant and mother (Bion, 1959) and his notion of container/
contained (Bion, 1962) are prime expressions of this line of thought. ‘Man
always needs someone other than himself,’ he would say (personal communi-
cation). Bion goes farther, however, as he propounds the dialectic of
 INTRODUCTION 13

‘narcissism and socialism,’ which Gordon Lawrence discusses in Volume 2.

He seems to be stating that individual psychoanalysis (at least Kleinian) leaves
out the importance of the group dimension of the individual. As an individual
the person is one thing, but as a member of group (s)he is another. In other
words, each human being is defined by his/her personal individual identity
and by his/her group identity – in parallel with the fact that each group can
be thought of as a single whole and as a group composed of individuals. This
idea of reciprocity and balancing characterizes one of Bion’s most profound
8
ideas, that of binocular vision, an idea that seems to have emerged from his for-
mulation of ‘reversible perspectives’ (Bion, 1962), which he had originally
attributed to an aspect of resistance on the part of some psychotic patients but
later realized that it was also an important aspect of normal reflective
thinking.
Put another way, Bion created a paradigm change by adding this comple-
mentary dimension to the individual, one which can be summarized as
follows: the individual is both the responsible agent for the initiation of his
own will and at the same time is the unconscious medium through which the
will of others passes and unconsciously affects him so that his subsequent
behavior is comprehensible only by the consideration that he is behaving as if
his will is now identical to the will of the group or a division within the
group.9’10 Bion’s idea of groups was always balanced between the individual
and the group itself. Others, like Dalal (1998), emphasize the group over the
individual.
Bion (personal communication) often stated that man is born a dependent
creature and needs others for emotional support. The group idea was implicit
in these statements. The kind of dependency he had in mind was not just that
which Klein had propounded, i.e., the infant’s dependency on the breast.
What he clearly had in mind was what Joseph Lichtenberg (1989) terms the
need for ‘affiliation,’ i.e., a need to belong to a group.
Bion has often been compared and contrasted with another prominent
groupist, Michael Foulkes. Some of the contrasts seem to center around Bion’s
Spartan starkness, propriety, negativity, and discipline as opposed to the
allegedly more human and relating aspects of Foulkes. Dennis Brown
(Chapter 6 in Volume 1) undertakes the task of contrasting these men and
their ideas about groups and seeks to integrate them. Lipgar (Chapter 1 in
Volume 1) does something similar but takes another approach, that of decons-
tructing the myth of Bion’s starkness and remoteness. We begin to surmise
from both their contributions that Bion was more strictly ‘analytic’ and
14 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Foulkes more ‘relational.’ It is almost as if Bion could be compared with Klein

and Foulkes with Winnicott.
Claudio Neri (Chapter 5 in Volume 1) takes a view similar to Brown’s, i.e.,
that Bion was too much into thought and not into affect-sharing as a function
of work groups. Yet Lipgar’s chapter (Chapter 1, this volume) leads us to
consider that these characterizations of Bion as too intellectual may be too
pat. He discusses Bion’s experiences in groups in detail and summarizes well
Bion’s attitude toward the importance of groups, and of relating within group
life in a subsection in his contribution: ‘Relationship to one’s group as
intrinsic to the full life of the individual.’

The mysterious ‘third’ in Bion’s theory of groups

Bion’s description of group phenomenology is vivid and is suggestive of what
might be called ESP (extrasensory perception) elements. He states that there is
such a thing as the psychology of the group but that the origins of this
psychology lie solely with the individuals comprising the group, but he also
seems to believe that the potential group-relating aspect within the individual
is activated by the group; i.e., the existence of the group evokes what we call
‘group psychology.’ How does this happen? Bion describes how individuals
become unconsciously caught up in different strands of the group process as if
they were puppets being controlled and manipulated by an invisible
puppeteer. Yet Bion did not believe that the group itself had an independent
agency. Agency in the group, consequently, became prime cause but remained
ineffable and inscrutable – as a mysterious, potentiating, synergistic
summation and transformation of the combined agencies of the individuals in
the group.
Recently, Ogden (1994, 1997) helped clarify the mystery of the
‘agency-at-large’ phenomenon in his formulation of the ‘analytic third
subject’ and particularly one aspect of it that he calls the ‘subjugating third
subject,’ the former of which designates the subjectivity of the relationship
between the analysand and the analyst, and the latter denoting a mysterious
‘virtual’ object that inhabits the potential space between the analysand and
analyst and represents a combination of the projective identifications of each.
This subjugating object thereafter seems to ‘subjugate’ the wills of the
analysand (as transference) and the analyst (as countertransference) and often
results in enactments.
My own version of this idea of a mysterious third designates the
‘dramaturge’ aspect of the ‘dreamer who dreams the dream,’ a subjective
 INTRODUCTION 15

presence in the unconscious who ‘knows’ what is on the agenda of the

‘dailies’ of the analysis and mysteriously directs each participant to play out
his role so that the unconscious theme can become explicated (Grotstein,
1981). However, I believe that there is more to the idea of the ‘third,’ or, to be
more general, to the inescapable tendency for subgroups to form within a
group. Abelin (1980, 1981) conceives of an early triangulation in infant
development that occurs prior to the Oedipal triangulation during Mahler’s
stage of rapprochement. This particular triangulation involves infant–
sibling–mother, whether the sibling is actual or phantasied. My own
extension of Abelin’s idea is that this earlier triangulation forms the basis for a
‘sibling family’ within the parental family. One particularly observes this
phenomenon in large families and especially in dysfunctional families where
an older sister or brother is looked up to for guidance by the younger siblings
in lieu of the parents. Ultimately, this ‘sibling’ family becomes the model for
the ‘gang’ organizations where an older brother becomes the head of the
younger family. My point here is that Abelin may offer us yet another model
for the formation of a subgroup within a group, in this case, a sibling or peer
subgroup that is in dialectical opposition to the work group analogized to the
parental family.
Yet another model for thirdness comes from Stein Bråten (1993), the
Norwegian sociologist who believes that the infant is born with an inherent
expectation of interaction with the other. He states:
The infant is born with a virtual other in mind who invites and permits
fulfilment by actual others in felt immediacy. Thus, the normal developing
learning mind recreates and transforms itself as a self-organizing dyad (i) in
self-engagement with the virtual other, as well as (ii) in engagement with
actual others who fill and affect the companion space of the virtual other
and, hence, are directly felt in presentational immediacy. (Bråten 1993,
p.26)
I understand Bråten to be saying that the infant is born with a ‘group instinct’
whereby it is especially preconditioned to anticipate engagements with others
by having an inherent ‘reserved space’ dedicated to interactions with them
(before they happen). This idea would help to confirm Bion’s thesis about the
inherent tropisms of ‘narcissism and socialism.’
16 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Oedipus and the sphinx

Another idea of Bion’s that has applicability to the psychologies of both the
individual and the group is his notions of the Oedipus complex and the
sphinx – in conjunction with the myths of the Garden of Eden and the Tower
of Babel. Bion’s version of the Oedipal story is that it involves Oedipus’ hubris
in trying to discover the truth that underlay the pollutions of Thebes. He then
calls attention to the riddle of the sphinx in which the sphinx kills those who
encounter her and fail to divine her riddle, but perishes when Oedipus suc-
cessfully answers it. In the Garden of Eden myth God forbids Adam and Eve
to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge about good and evil (presumably
sexuality), and in the Tower of Babel myth man is punished for trying to
arrogate God’s language, by being scattered asunder speaking different
tongues. Bion assigns the god-like withholding of knowledge to the sphinx.
Oedipus’ ability to answer her riddle was tantamount to Prometheus’s stealing
fire (knowledge) from the gods.
What I believe links the above themes is Freud’s (1915) notion of primal
repression. It is as if the infant is born with the infant wealth of knowledge that
can only be known by the ‘godhead’ (the unconscious). This ‘knowledge’ is
not yet dangerous because the corpus callosum (the bridge in the brain
between the two cerebral hemispheres) does not myelinate (and therefore
function) until four to five months of age (when the depressive position comes
on line). The importance of this last factor is that the beginning integration of
the two hemispheres, along with the shortly later acquisition of verbal
language and symbolic function, initiates the onset of the function of signifi-
cance. Knowledge is harmless until the significance of the knowledge
becomes realized. Primal repression seems to place a massive barrier on the
‘godhead knowledge’ and the significance that could possibly be attached to
it. At the same time, however, the infant is early on dominated in a
pre-reflective state by right hemispheric imagery11 (Jaynes, 1976; Shlain,
1998). This image domination lends a sphinx-like atmosphere to the little
mind of the toddler in whom images may become animated into monsters
(like sphinxes). The onset of verbalization, which occurs along with the
capacity for significance, rings the death knell for the dominance of the
animated, pre-reflective imagistic world, which then goes underground (into
the unconscious). ‘Sexual knowledge’ is attributed by Klein to the newborn
infant. My thesis is, following Freud, that, if this is so, it enters into primal
repression in the first few months of life because the infant, though able to
tolerate the facts about it, allegedly cannot yet tolerate the significance of it –
 INTRODUCTION 17

because the infant needs for a long while, I suggest, to believe in its own
omnipotent, autochthonous birth from itself in order to establish its own
sense of agency before being able to acknowledge the significance of the fact
that its birth was due to parental (Adam’s and Eve’s) sexual intercourse
(Grotstein, 2000).
The application of the above ideas to the group would be that the
members of the group project their ‘godhead’ font of unconscious knowledge
into the group leader, who thereupon becomes the ‘sphinx who knows but
will not tell – but who will, in his omniscience, omnipotently care for them
and their welfare. Yet another factor in the attribution of omniscience to the
sphinx is that primitive thinking is pre-reflective in nature. That is, it is
concrete, absolute, Cyclopean (‘monocular’).

Splitting and projective identification in groups

An important aspect in the formation of this mysterious third subject and
agent in groups is the employment of the mechanisms of splitting and projective
identification. Bion’s whole concept of basic assumption groups predicated
splitting on a fundamental level, but it was the projective identification that
followed in the wake of splitting that was to become so meaningful in under-
standing group transformations. Interestingly, Freud (1921) himself
understood this mechanism, although he never used it by name, when he
suggested that in the formation of groups each group member projects his ego
ideal into the group leader. Later, Bion (1959, 1961) was to make funda-
mental revisions and extensions of the Kleinian theory of projective identifi-
cation, but in the meantime he was able to apply it to the psychology of the
group in many ways. First of all, each member of the group is subject to
projective identifications from virtually every other member; second, the
group leader or director becomes the focus of countless projections from all
the members. Whereas Freud mentioned only the projection of each member’s
ego ideal onto the leader, Bion was able to detect the projective identification
12
of the members’ expectations and anxieties.
Although Bion did not stipulate further about the contents of the
members’ projective identification in one another and into the leader or
director, one can now speculate that the contents include: (a) unprocessed
anxiety, i.e., beta elements, (b) agency and role expectations, i.e., love,
salvation, aggression towards the ‘enemy,’ sanctuary, etc., (c) omnipotence,
and (d) omniscience. While Bion’s ideas about groups certainly apply to
individual psychology as well, there is no significant literature to support this.
18 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

My own view is that his three basic-assumption groups, when combined with
the three others posited by his followers (mentioned above), all apply to the
structure of the pathological organizations (psychic retreats – Steiner, 1993)
or endopsychic structure (Fairbairn, 1944) of the individual.

Second thoughts: Bion’s experiences treating psychotics

Note: I have decided to choose select portions of Bion’s works throughout
these two Introductions in order to give a representative idea of his thinking. I
shall add my annotations of them as I do so.
Bion launched his psychoanalytic career with a series of works on the
results and findings in treating psychotic and borderline patients. Most of
these experiences were collected and published in his now famous Second
Thoughts (Bion, 1967). The papers were presented between 1950 and 1962,
and he presented a retrospective reflection about them in 1967. They collec-
tively represent Bion as he was acquiring his stride as one of the sec-
ond-generation leaders of Kleinian psychoanalysis and in close colleagueship
with Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal, who were also psychoanalysing
psychotics.
The first paper in the collection was ‘The imaginary twin,’ in which the
psychotic analysand could not tolerate separation or the experience of objects
which differed from him, thus, he conjured up ‘twins’ who were like him. This
observation was to be one of many that was to create such a unique contribu-
tion to the understanding of psychotics. In ‘Notes on the theory of schizo-
phrenia’ Bion observed the uniqueness of their language and their object
relations and stated that the most important aspects of their thinking could
only be adduced from the analyst’s countertransference. He states: ‘It must
mean that without phantasies and without dreams you have not the means
with which to think out your problem’ (Bion 1967, p.25) – and
The severe splitting in the schizophrenic makes it difficult for him to achieve
the use of symbols and subsequently of substantives and verbs... The
capacity to form symbols is dependent on: (1) the ability to grasp whole
objects (2) the abandonment of the paranoid–schizoid position with its
attendant splitting (3) the bringing together of splits and the ushering in of
the depressive position. (Bion 1967, p.26)
With these formulations Bion was establishing the groundwork for his
ultimate theory of thinking. One could apply some of these ideas to the
understanding of groups in the following way: the group must have its own
 INTRODUCTION 19

dreams (by day and by night) in order to cohere as a group and to process cat-
astrophic changes. While the group’s dependence on the leader may typify
the psychology of the paranoid–schizoid position, there must also be some
attainment of the depressive position, i.e., ambivalence rather than idealiza-
tion of the leader in order for the work group to flourish.
Later in the same work he states:
The experiences I have described…compel me to conclude that at the onset
of the infantile depressive position, elements of verbal thought increase in
intensity and depth. In consequence the pains of psychic reality are exacer-
bated by it and the patient who regresses to the paranoid–schizoid position
will, as he does so, turn destructively on his embryonic capacity for verbal
thought as one of the elements which have led to his pain. (Bion 1967, p35)
In other words, the attainment of the depressive position comes at the expense
of defencelessness, which may cause in its wake a cataclysmic regression to the
paranoid-schizoid position, but with such a violence that a traumatic state
ensues. This also typifies the situation of groups in crisis.
In his next paper, ‘Development of schizophrenic thought,’ he continues
his exploration of schizophrenic thinking. He states:
First is a preponderance of destructive impulses so great that even the
impulses to love are suffused by them and turned to sadism. Second is a
hatred of reality which…is extended to all aspects of the psyche that make
for awareness of it… Third, derived from these two, is an unremitting dread
of imminent annihilation. Fourth is a precipitate and premature formation of
object relations, foremost amongst which is the transference, whose
thinness is in marked contrast to the tenacity with which it is maintained.
(Bion 1967, p.37)
He then went on to describe the divergence of the psychotic from the
non-psychotic personalities in the schizophrenic and the formation of ‘bizarre
objects.’ He also put forth the idea that the schizophrenic employs projective
identification of his mental pain and his mind that perceives the pain instead of
employing repression. He extends his ideas about these themes in his next
work, ‘Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities,’
where he makes the interesting points (a) that the schizophrenic’s ego is never
wholly withdrawn from reality, and (b) ‘…that the withdrawal from reality is
an illusion, not a fact, and arises from deployment of projective identification
against the mental apparatus…’ (Bion 1967, p.46).
One can readily see how much of these initial formulations apply to his
theory of groups and why he conceived of group psychology as being at times
20 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

‘psychotic.’ One can also see the beginnings of Bion the epistemologist. In his
next work, ‘On hallucination,’ he remarks, ‘The attempt to rid himself of his
perceptual system leads to compensatory hypertrophy of sense impres-
sions…’ (Bion 1967, p.85), thus, the appearance of hallucinations. The
ultimate significance of his succeeding papers, ‘On arrogance’ and ‘Attacks on
linking,’ was his formulation that psychotic patients employ excessive
projective identification currently because in their infancy and childhood
they had been deprived of its successful use with their mothers. This was the
beginning of his radical revision of the concept of projective identification.
First, he normalized it as a function in infantile mental life. Second, he
conceived of it as the normal means of communication between infant and
mother. Third, he conceived of projective identification, consequently, as an
interpersonal or intersubjective encounter in which mother, at first, and the
analyst, later, are to be ‘containers’ for the infant’s proto-mental experiences,
i.e., beta elements. Although Bion did not employ the term ‘empathy’ for his
concepts of reverie and containment, empathy is certainly what he meant by
those processes. The mother, like the analyst, must obligatorily attain a state
of profound empathy in order to ‘sense’ the pain of her client, the infant. Pines
(Chapter 10 in Volume 1) discusses empathy as a necessary ‘sensitive respon-
siveness’ to the analysand on the part of the analyst. One can see how these
ideas readily apply to the group’s dependency on the leader and on their
expectation that the leader will accept, tolerate, detoxify, and rectify their
projective identifications into him.
In his ‘Theory of thinking,’ which represents the summation of his studies
on schizophrenic thinking, Bion states the following:
It is convenient to regard thinking as dependent on the successful outcome
of two main mental developments. The first is the development of thoughts.
They require an apparatus to cope with them. The second development,
therefore, is of this apparatus I shall provisionally call thinking. I repeat –
thinking has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts. (Bion 1967,
pp.110–111)
‘Thoughts’ may be classified, according to the nature of their developmental
history, as pre-conceptions, conceptions or thoughts, and finally
concepts… The conception is initiated by the conjunction of a pre-
conception with a realization. The pre-conception may be regarded as the
analogue in psycho-analysis of Kant’s concept of ‘empty thoughts’. (Bion
1967, p.111)
 INTRODUCTION 21

This model will serve for the theory that every junction of a pre-conception
with its realization produces a conception. Conceptions therefore will be
expected to be constantly conjoined with an emotional experience of satis-
faction. (Bion 1967, p.111)
I shall limit the term ‘thought’ to the mating of a preconception with a frus-
tration…with a realization of no breast available for satisfaction. This
mating is experienced as a no-breast. Or ‘absent’ breast inside. The next step
depends on the infant’s capacity for frustration: in particular it depends on
whether the decision is to evade frustration or to modify it. (Bion 1967,
pp.111–112)
…[T]he failure to establish, between infant and mother, a relationship in
which normal projective identification is possible precludes the develop-
ment of an alpha-function and therefore of a differentiation of elements into
conscious and unconscious. (Bion 1967, p.115)
…[J]ust as sense-data have to be modified and worked on by alpha-function
to make them available for dream thoughts etc., so the thoughts have to be
worked on to make them available for translation into action… Translation
into action involves publication, communication, and commonsense…and
correlation. (Bion 1967, pp.117–118)
In this final chapter in his book Bion has consolidated his experiences with
psychotics and has evolved the rudiments of the most far-reaching and
innovative theory of thinking to date. He is probably the first person in
western civilization to have separated thoughts from the thinking of thoughts
and to have given priority in time of emergence to the former. From schizo-
phrenics he learned that the ability to think one’s thoughts depends on the
ability to tolerate frustrating thought-feelings. His theory of thoughts
themselves is that they are fundamentally involved with emotions. He
develops an epigenesis for the development of thoughts from pre-conception
to conception to concept, and for thinking as evolving from publication to
communication to commonsense and correlation. In terms of group theory
one could speculate that ‘thoughts without a thinker’ are equivalent to Freud’s
concept of the irruption of the instinctual drives, but in this case, from the
collective group membership. It is the task of the group leader, consequently,
to become the thinker who then thinks them, but Bion also helps us see that
this is also a function of leadership within a group and that this work is
optimally taken up by different members at different times.
In his ‘Commentary’ at the end of the book he discusses many retrospec-
tive responses to his publications, one of which was his regret that he was
22 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

unable to use artistic techniques in order to reproduce his experiences with

patients more accurately for the reader. He then discusses his soon-
to-be-famous grid as a categorical contrivance that could sort out the
elements of a session with some scientific accuracy, account for their transfor-
mations, and allow for their being placed into convenient categories. I shall
discuss the grid later in my introduction to Volume 2.
As one reads through Second Thoughts, one gets intimations of Bion’s
trajectory. One also gets an idea of how he thinks, not just what he thinks. He
thinks diligently, creatively, imaginatively, idiosyncratically and independ-
ently. He respects Freudian and Kleinian theories but is also able to use them
as stepping stones for newer ideas. He stands ideas on their heads and
observes them from different angles, which he is later to call ‘vertices.’ His
style of language is noteworthy. The language is measured, thoughtful,
balanced, and objective. He is seldom explicit – mainly implicit. He speaks in
‘poetics,’ i.e, the language of evocation and conjury. One can readily tell that
he was schooled in Latin. The genius/messiah in him is about to burst forth.

References
Abelin, E. L. (1980) ‘Triangulation, the role of the father and the origin of coregender identity
during the rapprochement subphase.’ In R. F. Lax, S. Bach and J. A. Burland (eds.)
Rapprochement. New York: Jason Aronson.
Abelin, E. L. (1981) ‘Triangulation.’ In R. Lax et al. (eds.) Rapprochement. New York: Jason
Aronson.
Bion, W. R. (1952) ‘Group dynamics: A review.’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 33,
225–247.
Bion, W. R. (1955) ‘Group dynamics: A review.’ In Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann and Roger
Money-Kyrle (eds.) New Directions in Psycho-Analysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the
Pattern of Adult Behaviour. London: Tavistock Publications.
Bion, W. R. (1958) ‘On hallucination.’ In Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis.
New York: Jason Aronson, 1967.
Bion, W. R. (1959) ‘Attacks on linking.’ In Second Thoughts. London: Heinemann, 1967.
Bion, W. R. (1961) ‘A psycho-analytic theory of thinking.’ International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 43 306–310.
Bion, W. R. (1962) Learning From Experience. London: Heinemann.
Bion, W. R. (1967) Second Thoughts. London: Heinemann.
Bion, W. R. (1982) ‘The Long Week-End 1897–1919.’ In F. Bion (ed) Life, London: Karnac
Books.
Bléandonu, G. (1993) Wilfred R. Bion: His Life and Works. 1897–1979. (Trans. C.
Pajaczkowska.) London: Free Association Press.
Borges, J. L. (1989) ‘The Aleph.’ In Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. (Trans. A. Hurley.) New
York: Viking, 1998.
 INTRODUCTION 23

Bråten, S. (1993) ‘Infant attachment and self-organization in light of the thesis: Born with the
other in mind.’ In I. L. Gomnaes and E. Osborne (eds) Making Links: How Children Learn.
Oslo: Yrkeslitteratur.
Dalal, F. (1998) Taking the Group Seriously: Towards a Post-Foulkesian Group Analytic Theory.
London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1944) ‘Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object-relationships.’
In Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock, 1952.
Freud, S. (1915) ‘Repression.’ Standard Edition 14, 141–158. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Freud, S. (1921) ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego.’ Standard Edition 18, 67–144.
London: Hogarth, 1955.
Grinberg, L., Sor, D. and Tabak de Bianchedi, E. (1977) Introduction to the Work of Bion. New
York: Jason Aronson.
Grotstein, J. (1978) ‘Inner space: Its dimensions and its coordinates.’ International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 59, 55–61.
Grotstein, J. (1981) ‘The ineffable nature of the dreamer.’ In Grotstein (2000) Who Is the
Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press,
1–36.
Harrison, T. (2000) Bion, Rickman, Foulkes and the Northfield Experiments: Advancing on a Different
Front. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Jaynes, J. (1976) The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Lacau, J. (1966) Ecrits 1949–1960. (Trans. A. Sheridan.) New York: WW.
Lawrence, W. G., Bain, A. and Gould, L. (1996) ‘The fifth basic assumption.’ Free Associations 6,
37, 28–55.
Lichtenberg, J. (1989) Psychoanalysis and Motivation. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Ogden, T. (1994) ‘The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts.’ International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis 75, 3–20.
Ogden, T. (1997) Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human. Northvale, NJ and
London: Jason Aronson.
Shlain, L. (1998) The Alphabet and the Goddess: The Conflict between Words and Images. New York:
Penguin/Arcana.
Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations in Psychotic Common Neurotic and
Borderline Patients. London: Routledge.
Symington, J. & Symington, N. (1996) The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion. London:
Routledge.
24 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Endnotes
1. Although I do not cite them directly, much of what I write here has been informed by
the following authors who have written on Bion: Bléandonu 1993; Symington, J. and
Symington, N. 1996; and Grinberg, Sor and Tabak de Bianchedi. 1977.
2. Bion often decried the existence of psychoanalytic institutes but would then hasten to
add, ‘but think of the alternative.’
3. At the battle of Copenhagen Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson was signaled by his superior,
Admiral Lord Barham, to withdraw. Nelson held his telescope up to his blind eye,
sailed straight for the Danish fleet, won the battle of Copenhagen and became Admiral
Lord Nelson.
4. There is where he met Fairbairn.
5. Bion hit on the idea of bringing the potential candidates together to observe how they
behaved individually and with each other. In effect, the candidates unconsciously
‘chose’ who were to be the officers. Here Bion was creating a situation which was to fa-
cilitate a group process in which the participants would unconsciously (or unwittingly)
select their own leaders.
6. I recall a dream I had shortly after my analysis with Bion was over and during a time of
deep distress for me. In the dream Bion was garbed in his British officer’s uniform and
was mock-marching across the stage as if to show me how to behave – courageously
and with discipline.
7. The concept of ‘infantile psychosis’ is still well regarded by current Kleinians. My own
view is that the term is an inaccurate hyperbole. What she describes under the rubric of
the infantile psychosis would be better described as the first, primitive ‘infantile neuro-
sis,’ one that anticipates a ‘childhood neurosis’ (Oedipus complex), which I believe
Freud erroneously termed the ‘infantile neurosis.’ The point is that what Klein de-
scribed was primitive, not psychotic (which Kleinians seem to confuse with ‘omnipo-
tent’). Ironically, it was Bion himself (1958) who proffered the truest qualification for
psychosis, bizarreness, as in ‘bizarre objects.’
8. Shortly after my own personal analysis with Bion had been terminated, I published a
contribution in which I coined the ‘dual-track hypothesis’ (Grotstein, 1978). Because
of having been in analysis with him, I had refrained from reading his work and had
therefore been unaware of his concept of ‘binocular thinking.’ I can only conclude that
I must have been subtly influenced and impressed by how he employed binocular
thinking in his analysis of me.
9. This dual idea in regard to psychic responsibility is implicit in his notion of
container/contained which he discovered in the background of schizophrenic
patients where they were allegedly deprived of the experience of the normal use of
protective identification (into mother as container).
10. This latter idea resembles in many ways Lacan’s (1966) notion that the Other, his term
for the unconscious, originates in the linguistic cultural template of a society; i.e., we
are ‘born into the symbolic order of language in the name of the father…’ ‘As the ego
speaks, it is being spoken by the Other,’ in other words, a social unconscious, which dif-
fered both from Freud’s and Klein’s individual or personal unconscious and from
Jung’s collective unconscious.
11. I am indebted to Professor Ross Skelton (personal communication, 1999) for remind-
ing me of Borges’ (1989) haunting imagistic story, The Aleph, in which he movingly
captures both the essence of Bion’s O and Matte-Blanco’s concept of infinity and total
 INTRODUCTION 25

symmetry in the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and a point in space that
syncretistically contains an infinity of points.
12. Bion’s theory of groups and recommendations on how they should be conducted be-
came the ‘Tavistock Method’ and has been legendary in its effects here in the States on
psychiatric residents, amongst others, who participate in the ‘Tavistock’ in their train-
ing. I have heard several residents say that if they didn’t believe in the unconscious be-
fore, they certainly do now.
 Part I

Roots and Early

Developments
 1

Re-discovering Bion’s
Experiences in Groups
Notes and Commentary on Theory and Practice

Robert M. Lipgar

Introduction
For the past four decades or more, books on group psychotherapy with few
exceptions make reference to Bion’s work. His Experiences in Groups (1961) is a
seminal work in group psychology. This collection of papers, mostly written
in the late forties, contains a sketch of a group theory, insights and examples of
his way of working with groups. He uses an essentially psychoanalytic
method to investigate group life much as Freud and others investigated the
psychological life of individuals. Despite his prominence and broad influence,
or perhaps because of it, Bion’s work is often misconstrued and misapplied
(Lipgar, 1993b).
By providing a series of quotations from Bion’s book together with
commentary, I hope to give readers an opportunity to discover or rediscover
Bion and his experiences in groups for themselves and to take for themselves
what they will that is useful. In this way, I have chosen to have Bion speak for
himself and for readers to think for themselves. My intention is to put each
reader in a good position to make his or her own constructions of Bion’s work
and make applications relevant to one’s own contemporary practice in
psychotherapeutic groups and in other situations of leadership.
To make it as easy as possible to access Bion’s observations and opinions
and to skip and browse without losing one’s sense of the whole, I have placed

29
30 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Bion’s words under several key topic headings. This is one way to make
Bion’s experiences in groups alive again and relevant to those of us with an
active interest in how groups work and how we might participate more effec-
tively as leaders and followers. I hope you find this way of engaging with
Bion’s work on groups interesting as well as useful.
At the start, Malcolm Pines’ comment on reading Bion may be helpful:
the reader will be struck by Bion’s ‘striking originality, the complexity of
thought and density of context, the calm assumption that his own responses
to the situation he describes are simultaneously noteworthy yet trivial’ (Pines
1985, p.xi). This last characteristic of his writing, at once intriguing and
baffling, sets the tone for so much about Bion’s intellectual and personal
leadership that inspires and frustrates, capable of both empowering and
humbling us.

Experiences in Groups revisited

The task: It takes a task to make a group
I had, it was true, had experience of trying to persuade groups composed of
patients to make the study of their tensions a group task. (Bion 1961, p.29)
It is important to bear in mind that in Bion’s view, a group requires a task and
that he made ‘the study of their [patients’] tensions’ the group’s task. Bion
conducted such study groups after World War II at the Tavistock Clinic with
patients, executives, and clinic staff. These have been remembered as very
powerful experiences (Pines (ed.) 1985; Bléandonu, 1994). Bion reported his
thoughts, feelings, observations and insights in a series of papers in Human
Relations (1948–52), published as Experiences in Groups in 1961. He gave
examples of how he conducted himself in his role as ‘taker of groups,’ sharing
his thoughts on technique and extrapolating from his experiences theoretical
insights for a general psychology of group behavior.
Sutherland (in Pines (ed.) 1985) reports that in conducting groups at the
Tavistock Clinic, in practice, Bion made little distinction between psycho-
therapy groups and study groups. Bion and Rickman, however, open the
Experiences in Groups (1961 p.11, in the section called ‘Pre-view, intra-group
tensions in therapy: their study as the task of the group’) by drawing a distinc-
tion between two meanings of the term ‘group therapy’ – ‘treatment of a
number of individuals assembled for special therapeutic sessions’ vs. ‘a
planned endeavor to develop … the forces that lead to smoothly running
co-operative activity.’ It seems to me quite clear that Bion’s attention was on
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 31

both – the treatment of individuals within the group context, and treatment
of the group itself. (I will for now allow the words treatment and analysis to
work together and not discuss here possible distinctions.) This dual interest, I
believe, has left much room for construing and misconstruing how these two
interests are interrelated in Bion’s work but also in life.
Confusion between consultative and/or therapeutic interventions
designed to ‘develop the forces that lead to smoothly running co-operative
activity’ and/or to advance the work of dealing with ‘the psychological diffi-
culties of its members’ is understandable but not without resolution. In their
touchstone book Psychotherapy Through the Group Process, Whitaker and
Lieberman (1964) make a very systematic effort to synthesize this apparent
duality. Chapters in Volume II, Building on Bion: Branches, by Ettin and Wilke
also explore related issues of leadership in depth. The responsibility, it seems
to me, for finding ways to balance therapeutic or personal developmental
goals and group development, rests very much with each of us as practitioners
and leaders.
Many who have followed Bion, not only in conducting therapy groups at
the Tavistock Clinic and elsewhere, but also in conducting small and large
study groups in the context of group relations conference work, often do so
with insufficient understanding, rigor and discipline, and find themselves
neglecting one or another aspect of the complexities of work in groups.
Carefully understood and conducted, small and large study groups in the
context of ‘working conferences’ in the A. K. Rice/Tavistock tradition do not
have the task ‘to deal with the psychological difficulties of its members,’ to use
Bion’s phrase (op. cit. p.64). Rather their task is to ‘the study of the group’s life
as it occurs in the here and now’ (cf. brochures from Tavistock/Leicester and
AKRI conferences), a rather different focus. But in neither case is it possible to
ignore the level of cooperation among its members on behalf of either task.
When and how one chooses to intervene so that work proceeds are of course
questions which we will explore here with Bion.
In order to build soundly on Bion’s work, indeed, we need to understand
more not only about group psychology, but also about how different group
tasks (those that are stated, explicit and contracted, or those that are only
apparent in practice) influence leadership roles and functions and vice versa.
Different leadership roles and functions evolve and are appropriate to
different groups with different objectives in different organizational, institu-
tional, and culture settings. We will seek here to understand the complex
32 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

interrelatedness of leadership competence, group task, and process of group

development.
There has been much controversy about the outcomes of conducting
either therapy groups or experiential study groups within a Bionian model.
Yalom (1995, first, second and third editions), Malan et al. (1976), and
Lieberman (1990) among others have found reason to question the wisdom
of taking what has become known as the Bion/Tavistock model to either
therapy groups or small study groups. Yalom (1995, p.186) saw Bion (and
Ezriel) as allowing the therapist only a very limited role, one that was cold and
distant, limited to providing interpretations of group-as-a-whole process.
Gustafson and Cooper (1979) argue for revisions in the consultant’s role in
small study groups along similar lines. In re-reading Bion’s classic work, it will
be useful to consider how his experiences, insights, and behavior in role may
require revision and adaptation according to the particular circumstances of
oneself, one’s own work and circumstances.

The basic assumptions: Mental activity in groups (not a kind

of group in-and-of itself )
The basic assumption is that people come together for purposes of
preserving the group. (Bion 1961, p.63)
The basic assumption of the group conflicts very sharply with the idea of a
group met together to do a creative job, especially with the idea of a group
1
met together to deal with the psychological difficulties of its members.
(ibid. p.64)
The concept of ‘basic assumptions,’ distinctively associated with Bion’s work
in groups, is one that is easily misapplied. It has become an easy shorthand for
people to refer to a group as though it were in and of itself a ‘basic assumption
group’ or a ‘work group,’ rather than take the care to consider the complexity
of the coexistence and interplay of these aspects of group life as distinct
qualities of mental activity experienced directly and subjectively, as well as
those inferred from observable behaviors.
…but in the group it takes some time before individuals cease to be
dominated by the feeling that adherence to the group is an end in itself. (ibid.
p.63)
These quotations refer to an insight of central importance in Bion’s approach
to groups: the ongoing tension between task (work) and affiliation (main-
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 33

tenance of cohesiveness through shared fantasies). As ‘group animals’ we

struggle with our need for individuality and the exercise of individual respon-
sibility and our need for belonging. This challenge is coupled with an
awareness of relentless tension between work requirements (the psycholog-
ical work of ‘learning from experience’) and valency for the ‘basic assump-
tions’ (a kind of tropism toward togetherness, fight/flight, and pairing). As
members struggle to deal, or avoid dealing, with the requirements of acting
and interacting with reality constraints and demands and learning from
experience, group life shifts easily from one basic assumption to another.
Conflict and tension occur in Bion’s view between the ‘basic assumptions’
and ‘work’, not between one and another of the basic assumptions.
Bion observed and described three particular types of ‘basic assumptions’,
2
three clusters of emotions and desires, shaping attitudes and beliefs. These are
identified as ‘fight/flight’, ‘pairing’, and ‘dependency’. All three are
considered to serve as defenses, protections from psychotic anxiety (fragmen-
tation and terror) and serve to preserve the group qua group, (regardless of task
and adaptive relevance of the group’s activity). Such a naive belief in and
bonding to the group, however pervasive, was, in Bion’s view, regressive.
From the basic assumption about groups there springs a number of
subsidiary assumptions, some of immediate importance. The individual
feels that in a group the welfare of the individual is a matter of secondary
consideration – the group comes first, in flight the individual is abandoned;
the paramount need is for the group to survive – not the individual. (ibid.
p.64)
When groups are dominated by basic assumption activity, particularly the
basic assumption fight/flight (baF/F), the group functions as though individ-
uals and their individual needs, potentialities and responsibilities are of little
importance. When groups are heavily under the sway of basic assumption
mental activity, certain reactions, resistances, and expectations of leaders will
occur as phenomena particular to one basic assumption.
There will be the feelings that the welfare of the individual does not matter
so long as the group continues, and there will be a feeling that any method
of dealing with neurosis that is neither fighting neurosis nor running away
from the owner of it is either non-existent or directly opposed to the good
of the group; a method like my own is not recognized as proper to either of
the basic techniques of the group. (ibid. p.64)
Bion at this point reflects on and interprets some of his reactions experienced
in role as ‘taker of groups.’
34 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

It is, therefore, not surprising that critics of my attempts to use groups feel
that it must be either unkind to the individual or a method of escape from his
problems. It is assumed that if the human being as a gregarious animal
chooses a group he does so to fight or run away from something.
The existence of such a basic assumption helps to explain why groups show
that I, who am felt to be pre-eminent as the leader of the group, am also felt
to be shirking the job. The kind of leadership that is recognized as appro-
priate is the leadership of the man who mobilizes the group to attack
somebody, or alternatively to lead it in flight…We learned that leaders who
neither fight nor run away are not easily understood. (ibid. p.65)
We can turn now more directly to matters of exercising leadership and
choosing interventions. As he encounters, inevitably, resistance and conflict
with the basic assumptions, Bion engages us in exploring his experience of
providing psychological ‘work’ leadership. Throughout his explorations, we
will be asked to attend to affects both in the group-as-a-whole and in
ourselves.
…the thing that knocked holes in my theories was not words used, but the
emotion accompanying them. I shall, therefore, resort to an avowedly
subjective account. (ibid. p.61)

Interventions and leadership: Psychological work and group

management
We will consider in detail that sequence of interventions reported by Bion in
Chapter 1 in Experiences in Groups. These reflections of his role behaviors as a
‘taker of groups’ at the Tavistock Clinic have become the basis for much
commentary and are probably as much responsible for characterizations of the
Tavistock model as the final chapter, which is more a theoretical review. For
instance, Gustafson and Cooper have been particularly critical of Bion’s
legacy to the group relations conference work and characterized these inter-
ventions as ‘merciless’ and as the ‘same interpretation made ten times’
(Gustafson and Cooper 1978, pp.144–45).
Let’s review these nine or ten interventions as Bion reports them and
consider their implications. How would you characterize them? Does Bion’s
account seem prescriptive? What shall we take from these reports for his
legacy?
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 35

1. It becomes clear to me that I am, in some sense, the focus of attention in

the group. Furthermore I am aware of feeling uneasily that I am expected to
do something. At this point I confide my anxieties to the group, remarking
that, however mistaken my attitude might be, I feel just this. (Bion 1961,
p.30)
Unlike the legendary image of Bion as distant and withholding, to me he
appears to be intervening in a way which might be classified as sharing his
own experience in the here and now – offering data of his own feelings and
encouraging them, by example, to take their own feelings seriously and to
gain self-awareness. In this light, it can be taken as a contribution which
would provide members with opportunities and data for reality testing. If
taken as exemplary, this intervention can be construed, ironically perhaps, in
light of the mythic ‘Bionic’ stance as oracular, as modeling ‘transparency’
which Yalom (1995, third and fourth editions) carefully describes and
recommends.
Such behavior by the consultant/therapist would be consistent with what
Rice would call the ‘primary task’ Bion has set for the group – to engage the
group in the study of the intra-group tensions. Hence, this and the following
interventions may be evaluated as examples of his participating in the psycho-
logical work of the group – providing leadership by doing that kind of psy-
chological work which advances learning from experience and counters the
dominance of basic assumption activity.3
2. …that clearly the group cannot be getting from me what they feel they
are entitled to expect. I wonder what these expectations are, and what has
aroused them. (ibid. p.30)
Rather than ‘merciless,’ this may be regarded as an empathic comment made
to all members present, to the group-as-a-whole, as well as an invitation to
members to examine their own individual experiences of the relationship,
their bases in reality. Such an intervention implies a recognition of the
importance of subjective perceptions in the process of learning from
experience. Bion further develops these implications later in the book and
even more in later writings.
3. When I draw attention to the fact that these ideas seem to me to be based
on hearsay, there seems to be a feeling that I am attempting to deny my
eminence as a ‘taker’ of groups. (ibid. p.30)
This may seem to be a premature appeal to logic or rationality and might stir
feelings of envy and/or inadequacy, and some members might experience
36 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

such an intervention as a narcissistic injury. By drawing attention early in the

group’s meetings to the difference between members’ present feeling-state,
consisting of confusion, uncertainty, or unconnectedness, and the manifested
clear-headedness of the consultant/therapist, he may increase members’ level
of anxiety. Nonetheless, it may also have the effect of mobilizing members’
leadership and their capacity for work. This intervention, as well as others,
can be used by us as a focal point for useful discussion about therapeutic
technique and the timing of interventions, about how to address the dynamics
from the perspective of the collective or from the perspective of the individual
in relation to it. Bion gives some indications in his report about how he
responded to the situation as it unfolded, how he responded to what followed
his previous interventions.
4. I feel, and say, that it is evident that the group had certain good expecta-
tions and beliefs about myself, and are sadly disappointed to find they are
not true. (ibid. p.30)
Gustafson and Cooper (1979) have construed these interventions as an
example of ‘abandonment’ of leadership. It seems to me plausible to construe
this sequence as an example of empathic understanding of the situation in
which the members find themselves, especially vis-à-vis their relationship to
leadership and authority. I do not see Bion as continuing ‘to abdicate’ and ‘to
intrude’ (ibid.). Nor does it seem to me that he is being ‘authoritarian’ (Eisold
1993, p.11).
5. I point out that it is hard for the group to admit that this could be my way
of taking groups, or even that I should be allowed to take them in such a way.
(Bion 1961, p.30)
This intervention seems empathic toward the group as a whole, a kind of ‘mir-
roring’, if you will, of the group’s attitude toward him at the moment. Does
not such an intervention enable members to acknowledge their frustrations
under the circumstances and to express their anger? Isn’t this an example of
Bion’s preparedness to serve the group in a ‘containing’ function?
6. He therefore asks me directly what my object is, and why I cannot give a
straightforward explanation of my behavior. I can only apologize, and say
that, beyond feeling that the statement that I want to study group tensions is
probably a very inadequate description of my motives, I can throw no light
on his problem;… (ibid. p.32)
This is hardly an ‘impersonal, mass group interpretation’ (Yalom 1985,
p.195), a characterization of Bion’s approach common in the group literature.
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 37

To me it seems the contrary – forthcoming, frank and personal, a direct

response to an individual member.
7. Without quite knowing why, I suggest that what the group really wants to
know is my motives for being present, and, since these have not been
discovered, they are not satisfied with any substitute. (Bion 1961, p.33)
Depending in some measure, perhaps, on the ego-strengths of the members of
the group, it may be argued that Bion’s stance, unfamiliar and unconventional,
could incite frustrations beyond levels compatible with learning. Such a
conclusion, however, would not be fair without knowing more about the
whole situation, members’ expectations and capacities, and perhaps most
important, the on-going relationship and presence, interpretations and
attentions of the ‘taker of groups’ – therapist/conductor/study group
consultant.
8. In the tense atmosphere prevailing my own thoughts are not wholly
reassuring. For one thing, I have recent memories of a group in which my
exclusion had been openly advocated; for another, it is quite common for me
to experience a situation in which the group, while saying nothing, simply
ignores my presence, and excludes me from the discussion quite as effec-
tively as if I were not there. (ibid. p.34)
Bion’s stance here is one of self-awareness, showing access to his own feelings
in the moment – although it may also be construed as an example of his
determinedly independent, even heroic commitment to engage us in
encounters profound and dangerous: ‘plung[ing us] as deeply as he can into
the depths of the mind. Truth and falsehood, sanity and madness are the
matters that concern him and which will not let him go and few who have read
him will be free of his concerns thereafter’ (Pines 1985, p.xii).
9. I point out that the group now appears to me to be coaxing me to mend
my ways and fall in with their wish that my behavior should conform more
to what is expected or familiar to them in other fields. (Bion 1961, p.35)
I take his comment here as neutral if not warmly empathic, responding to the
mood of those in the group at that moment.
10. I also remark that the group has, in essence, ignored what was said by
Mr. Q. (ibid. p.36)
Here again may be a surprising example of Bion attending to an individual,
albeit in relation to the group process. Can we take this as an example of the
wide range of behaviors which Bion would include as compatible with
38 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

working on task, or simply regard this as a mis-step which should be

overlooked? In caricatures as well as in thoughtful descriptions, Bion and the
Tavistock model are commonly represented as addressing only group-
as-a-whole, never the individual.
11. …I say that I think my interpretations are disturbing the group.
(ibid. p.36)
Such an observation of the group’s attitude toward him and of his impact on
the group may be received as empathic and ‘containing’ rather than as
‘intrusive’ and ‘abandoning.’ Such observations are rather low-level interpre-
tations and over a period of time would demonstrate role consistency and
commitment to the task. This model of leadership would make room, even
require individual members to experience the consequences of offering their
own interpretations and viewpoints to the others and exercise their own
leadership.
12. I remind the group, it was quite clear that in the beginning the group was
most unwilling to entertain any idea that they had not properly satisfied
themselves of the accuracy of hearsay reports about myself. In my view,
therefore, those who felt that they had been misled by others, and now
wished to withdraw, ought seriously to consider why they resisted so
strongly any statements that seemed to question the validity of their belief in
the value of my contribution to a group. (ibid. p.37)
Once again, Bion, by example, would seem to invite us to use our feelings and
perceptions, reflect upon these and their underlying assumptions and share
experiences in the moment and continue to learn. Such a reading of this series
of interventions does not support the stereotypes of Bion’s work.

Guidelines and technique: Toward what end?

It would be satisfying if I could now give a logical account of my technique
– the technique the Professional Committee, it will be remembered, wished
me to employ – but I am persuaded that it would also be very inaccurate and
misleading. … I will, however, emphasize one aspect of my interpretations
of group behavior which appears to the group, and probably to the reader, to
be merely incidental to my personality, but which is, in fact, quite deliberate
– the fact that the interpretations would seem to be concerned with matters
of no importance to anyone but myself. (ibid. p.40)
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 39

This paragraph concludes with this most interesting and provocative

statement, open to much misunderstanding. Is Bion saying that he does not
care whether he is understood or that the feelings of others are of no matter to
him? I doubt it. Such a reading would fly in the face of everything else Bion
stood for and accomplished personally, in his group work and subsequent
professional career. Rather, it seems more reasonable to take this statement to
be Bion’s way of emphasizing the importance of holding to the stance of par-
ticipant/explorer or participant/analyst – the stance of one who is alive in the
moment, responsive and responsible, seeking to symbolize and communicate
one’s unique comprehension of the experience of one’s own membership in
the group, including one’s awareness of role, feelings, attitudes, behaviors,
fantasies. Bion is, I believe, stating role priorities and acting his values as he
conducts himself in this leadership role. I take it to be a frank statement of rec-
ognition of one’s limitations and a caution against presuming to exercise
control, authority and power over others, authority and power that has not (as
yet) been thoughtfully negotiated and contracted.
In making interpretations to the group I avoid terms such as group
mentality; the terms used should be as simple and precise as possible. (ibid.
p.60)
…the psychiatrist must decide what description best clarifies the situation
for him, and then in what terms he should describe it for the group. (ibid.)
These statements open the way for the therapist/conductor to be deliberate in
choosing words and selecting terms for his/her interpretations, interventions,
or consultations according to his/her view of the group’s membership and
development phase. This is not permission to ‘shoot from the hip,’ to interpret
everything that moves as soon as it moves you. Nor do these sentences convey
an indifference to being understood, nor insensitivity to the feelings and
needs of others.
…the situation should be described in concrete terms and the information
given as fully and precisely as possible, without mention of the theoretical
concepts on which the psychiatrist’s own views have been based. (ibid. p.61)
This seems to be a recommendation for simple, direct language and
data-based interventions, rather the opposite of the legendary obtuse or
‘oracular’ ones often attributed to the Tavistock tradition.
The psychiatrist must see the reverse as well as the obverse of every situation,
if he can. He must employ a kind of psychological shift best illustrated by
the analogy of this well-known diagram [figure/ground illustration of the
40 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

solid/empty cube drawing]. … Similarly, in a group, the total of what is

taking place remains the same, but a change of perspective can bring out
quite different phenomena. The psychiatrist must not always wait for
changes in the group before he describes what he sees…for example (to
take the case of an individual), a patient had complained of considerable
anxiety about ‘fainting off’. Sometimes he had described the same
phenomenon as ‘becoming unconscious’. At a later group he was somewhat
boastfully saying that, when things happened in the group which he did not
like, he simply ignored them. It was possible to show him that he was
describing exactly the same situation, this time in a mood of confidence, as
he had on another occasion described with anxiety as ‘fainting off’. His
attitude to events in the group had altered with an alteration in the basic
assumption of the group. (ibid. p.87)
Here he gives an example of an intervention linking an individual’s behavior
in the group with that individual’s reported behavior outside the group.
Although it also draws attention to the influences of group processes on the
individual, this intervention is hardly an impersonal, mass group interpreta-
tion. It also serves as an example of ‘binocular vision,’ a concept which Bion
describes in these papers and was to develop further in subsequent papers and
lectures.
I interpret only that aspect of the individual’s contribution which shows that
the individual, in attempting, say, to get help for his problems, is leading the
group to establish the baD or, alternatively, to shift to baP or baF. (ibid.
p.117)
Since each basic assumption in Bion’s view has its own characteristic anxieties,
and each individual his own valency, then this statement reports Bion’s
strategy here to be one of interpreting an individual’s defenses, i.e., the indi-
vidual’s involvement in shared (group-wide) security operations or
defense-maintenance functions. As such it is quite different from the common
stereotype of the Bion/Tavistock approach, often characterized as being
‘intrusive,’ prematurely exposing the instincts and primary process (in what is
said to be the ‘Kleinian’ manner), or attentive only to group-as-a-whole
processes. In this statement, it would seem that Bion has included attention to
the individual, consistent with and possibly prior to Ezriel’s (1950) contribu-
tions to technique at the Tavistock Clinic.
This statement may also be used to allow for interpretive activity which
could be considered to be ego-supportive, since clarifying ways in which we
are in the thrall of the basic assumptions can serve to strengthen our hand in
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 41

managing their influence. Basic assumptions for Bion are always to be part of
a group’s culture and are necessary defenses against psychotic anxiety. The
‘sophisticated group’ would seek to manage and engage basic assumption
mentality on behalf of its work in reality adaptation independent of its wish to
survive for its own sake. Bion’s interpreting and making public that which is
known but not yet expressed would be enabling and supportive. (For further
discussion of covert processes, cf. the section on group mentality later in this
chapter.) Anonymous contributions, unless made public, contribute to the
dominance of basic assumption activity over work activity. Silence is
non-participation, non-work that colludes with basic assumption activity.
Bion will discuss anonymous contributions and how silence gives consent
later in these papers.
At first, in an attempt to counteract what I thought was some sort of
resistance which patients were achieving through use of the group, I used to
be beguiled into giving individual interpretations as in psychoanalysis. In
doing this I was doing what patients often do – trying to get to individual
treatment. True, I was trying to get to it as a doctor, but in fact this can be
stated in terms of an attempt to get rid of the ‘badness’ of the group and, for
the doctor, the ‘badness’ of the group is its apparent unsuitability as a thera-
peutic instrument – which is, as we have already seen, the complaint also of
the patient. Ignoring those inherent qualities of the group which appear to
give substance to the complaint, and choosing instead to regard this unsuit-
ability as a function of the failure of the doctor or patient to use the group in
a therapeutic way, we can see that the failure, at the moment when the
analyst gives in to his impulse to make individual interpretations, lies in
being influenced by baD instead of interpreting it, for, as soon as I start to
give supposedly psycho-analytic interpretations to an individual, I reinforce
the assumption that the group consists of patients dependent on the doctor,
4
which is the baD. (ibid. pp.115–116)
In his reflections above, Bion explores the group-as-a-whole and uses the
group as both the context and instrument for personal growth and learning.
In this way, Bion, like Foulkes and few others at the time, was making a bold
departure from what had been the more common approach to psychotherapy
in group settings. It was more common for the doctor to engage patients one
at a time, with other group members present as audience. Bion’s commitment
is to the task stated at the start: to engage members in the study of intra-group
tensions, consistent with his belief that such work would challenge and enable
members more fully to develop as individuals. In sharing his experiences as a
42 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

‘taker of groups,’ Bion shows his awareness of being subject to covert group
5
processes and the need to recognize and interpret such experiences.
Bion’s interventions are aimed toward promoting ‘learning from experi-
ence’ in the context of the group experience. Here his work is fundamentally
psychotherapeutic, taking psychotherapy as that enterprise which is directed
toward individuation and self-definition, interdependency and capacity for
intimacy.6
Bion’s work here is that of the analyst/consultant/therapist who serves as
a container for group members’ projections. Working with these projections
in the resonating, complex and emotion-laden context of a group requires
profound awareness of self and others, as well as a profound commitment to
learning in the ‘here and now.’ Often, the term ‘container’ itself, so identified
with Bion, does not connote the kind of active participation and interaction,
the processing and modifying of the projected part-objects which he shows is
required of leaders who would contribute to developmental psychological
work in groups. The term is often taken in a more static sense, not conveying a
sense of the kind of subjective activity, the stressful experiences entailed in
working creatively with internalizations and projective identifications.
Now we will consider in greater depth ‘learning from experience’ in the
context of the group and the part Bion plays in this learning.

Relationship to one’s group as intrinsic to the full life of the

individual
Aristotle said man is a political animal, and in so far as I understand his
Politics, I gather that he means by this that for a man to lead a full life the
group is essential. I hold no brief for…[this] extremely dreary work, but I
think that his statement is one that psychiatrists cannot forget without
danger of achieving an unbalanced view of their subject…the group is
essential to the fulfillment of a man’s mental life. (ibid. p.53)
…I consider that group mental life is essential to the full life of the
individual, quite apart from any temporary or specific need, and that satis-
faction of this need has to be sought through membership of a group. (ibid.
p.54)
Given this profound assertion that group mental life is essential to the full life
of the individual, it follows that Bion might in practice, as J. Sutherland recalls
(Pines [ed] 1985, pp.47–86), make little distinction between psycho-
therapeutic task groups and staff self-study groups. Such a distinction,
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 43

however, is, I believe, of critical importance. The socio–economic political

context, psychosocial situation, as well as the contractual responsibilities, are
different for each, and exploring and understanding these matters requires
extending his insights, building on Bion’s work. But for Bion, the over-
arching concern was for growth and development.
…anyone who has any contact with reality is always consciously or uncon-
sciously forming an estimate of the attitude of his group toward himself.
(ibid. p.43)
…the way in which a man assesses the group attitude to himself is, in fact, an
important object of study even if it leads us to nothing else. (ibid. p.43)
Here Bion shares his existential view of the human condition and reasserts his
commitment to searching for insight and truth. For Bion, at this time, seeking
truth included forming an estimate of the attitude of one’s group toward oneself. In the
process of assessing the group’s attitude toward oneself, interpretations
emerged for Bion as primary to his contributions. From many of his examples
and selected quotations here, it is clear that he means to link interpretations
immediately to personal and emotional experience. They are not to be
mystical, abstract formulations or pronouncements from a presumed superior
authority, but rather expressions of sophisticated participation, full
engagement in the here and now.
Many people dispute the accuracy of these interpretations… This objection
to the accuracy of the interpretations must be accepted, even if we modify it
by claiming that accuracy is a matter of degree; for it is a sign of awareness
that one element in the individual’s automatic assessment of the attitude of
the group towards himself is doubt. If an individual claims he has no doubt
at all, one would really like to know why not… Or is the individual unable
to tolerate ignorance about a matter in which it is essential to be accurate if
his behaviour in a society is to be wise? In a sense, I would say that the
individual in a group is profiting by his experience if at one and the same
time he becomes more accurate in his appreciation of his position in the
emotional field, and more capable of accepting it as a fact that even his
increased accuracy falls lamentably short of his needs. [Compare with note from
Bion 1961 p.91 reprinted below.]
It may be thought that my admission destroys the foundations of any
technique relying on this kind of interpretation; but it does not. The nature
of the emotional experience of interpretation is clarified but its inevitability
as part of human mental life is unaltered, and so is its primacy as a method.
(ibid. p.45)
44 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Courage is required to bring a group ‘to task’ and into the ‘here and now’.
Skill is required to reflect on, and share one’s emotional experience in ways
which bring others to reflect on theirs. More critically, interpretation is
emphatically affirmed as having ‘primacy as a method.’ It is this process of
‘sense-making’ and ‘hypothesis-building’ that are given special importance in
Bion’s view of the psychological work leader. Although this is said to be
primary, I do not find that he models interpretive activity exclusively, nor that
he omits or argues against other interventions.
One of the problems of group therapy, then, lies in the fact that the group is
often used to achieve a sense of vitality by total submergence in the group, or
a sense of individual independence by total repudiation of the group, and
that part of the individual’s mental life, which is being incessantly
stimulated and activated by his group, is his inalienable inheritance as a
group animal.
It is this feature of group membership that gives rise to a feeling in the
individual that he can never catch up with a course of events to which he is
always, at any given moment, already committed. (ibid. p.91)
Bion’s appreciation of the human dilemma, of the inevitability of having to
take risks (of having to act without full knowledge of the consequences), of
being unprepared, vulnerable and subject to feelings of shame and fragmenta-
tion, is almost palpable. His modesty and humor, as well as his wisdom and
independence show clearly.
In any event, as I hope to be able to show, the group reactions are infinitely
more complex than the foregoing theories, even in this full deployment,
suggest. (ibid. p.131)
Contrast this with Yalom’s statement that Bion’s theory leads people to
believe they have an ‘all-inclusive system [which] satisfies one’s need for
closure…a citadel of such impregnability…’ (Yalom 1995 (2nd. edition)
p.181). In this way, I believe Yalom finds the teacher guilty, so to speak, for the
students’ shortcomings. In this next excerpt, Bion builds on Freud but
separates as well.
In his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud opens his discussion
by pointing out that individual and group psychology cannot be absolutely
differentiated because the psychology of the individual is itself a function of
the individual’s relationship to another person or object. He objects (p.3)
that it is difficult to attribute to the factor of number a significance so great
as to make it capable by itself of moving in over mental life a new instinct
that is otherwise not brought into play. In my view no new instinct is
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 45

brought into play…it is always in play. The only point about collecting a
group of people is that it enables us to see just how the ‘political’ character-
istics of the human body operate… The individual is a group animal at war,
not simply with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and
with those aspects of his personality that constitute his ‘groupishness’. (ibid.
p.131)

Group mentality: a pool of anonymous contributions

[Group mentality is]…the unanimous expression of the will of the group, an
expression of will to which individuals contribute anonymously. (ibid. p.59)
In this simple sentence, Bion makes one of his most profound observations of
‘how the political characteristics of the human body operate.’ I find this image
of us unwittingly engaged in contributing to a pool of anonymous contribu-
tions, striking and illuminating. After some discussion of how he sees a picture
of ‘hard-working individuals striving to solve their psychological problems’
(ibid. p.48), his focus shifts and he sees a picture of ‘a group mobilized to
express its hostility and contempt for neurotic patients’. He reflects on this
mental activity as analogous to shifting focus as one does when looking
through a microscope. He builds his picture by noticing one member’s ‘super-
cilious tone’ as another ‘examines her fingernails with an air of faint distaste.’
(ibid. p.49) He sees these as ‘followers’ of two absent members who serve as
‘leaders’ of that part of the group that feels there are better ways of spending
their time.
It can be seen that what the individual says or does in a group illumines both
his own personality and his view of the group; sometimes his contribution
illumines one more than the other. Some contributions he is prepared to
make as coming unmistakably from himself, but there are others which he
would wish to make anonymously. If the group can provide means by which
contributions can be made anonymously, then the foundations are laid for a
successful system of evasion and denial, and in the first examples I gave it
was possibly because the hostility of the individuals was being contributed
to the group anonymously that each member could quite sincerely deny that
he felt hostile. We shall have to examine the mental life of the group closely
to see how the group provides a means for making these anonymous contri-
butions. I shall postulate a group mentality as the pool to which the
anonymous contributions are made, and through which the impulses and
desires implicit in these contributions are gratified. (ibid. p.50)
46 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Here Bion sets the stage for introducing the concept of projective identifica-
tion as a key mechanism for understanding human behavior and group life.
Knowing that we seek and find others willing to receive our exportation of
what is toxic and indigestible to ourselves, he brings us face to face with the
irrevocability of interdependency – in the most intimate and profound ways.
…in group mentality the individual finds a means of expressing contribu-
tions which he wishes to make anonymously, and, at the same time his
greatest obstacle to the fulfillment of the aims he wishes to achieve by
membership of the group. (ibid. pp.52–53)
It is clear that the first thing they are aware of is a sense of frustration produced
by the presence of the group of which they are members. It may be argued that
it is quite inevitable that a group must satisfy some desires and frustrate others,
but I am inclined to think that difficulties that are inherent in a group
situation, such, for example, as a lack of privacy which must follow from the
fact that a group provides you with company, produce quite a different sort of
problem from the kind of problem produced by the group mentality. (ibid
p.53)
…it is the nature of a group to deny some desires in satisfying others, but I
suspect that most resentment is caused through the expression in a group of
impulses which individuals wish to satisfy anonymously, and the frustration
produced in the individual by the consequences to himself that follow from
this satisfaction… The situation will be perceived to be paradoxical and
contradictory… (ibid. p.54)
Group mentality is the unanimous expression of the will of the group, con-
tributed to by the individual in ways of which he is unaware, influencing
him disagreeably whenever he thinks or behaves in a manner at variance
with the basic assumption. It is thus a machinery of intercommunication
that is designed to ensure that group life is in accordance with the basic
assumptions. (ibid. p.65)
It is this ‘machinery of intercommunication’ that must be lived and worked
with in ways that enable development of individuality even as we struggle as
‘group animals.’ Development of individuality – subjective integrity and the
capability for responsible choice – is required for the survival of the species,
and both the individual and the species are required to undertake that kind of
psychological work in group settings that Bion has been describing. Such
work is not accomplished ‘leaderless’ but requires psychological work leaders.
The study of intra-group tensions, however, does not imply or require the
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 47

survival of that particular group as it is composed or organized in its particu-

larity. It is the process and quality of the psychological work that transcends
the commitment or attachment to a particular composite of persons.

Group culture: Outcome of conflicting interests

Group culture is understood as ‘…those aspects of the behaviour of the group
which seemed to be born of the conflict between group mentality and the
desires of the individual’ (Bion 1961, pp.59–60).
I shall assume that the group is potentially capable of providing the
individual with the gratification of a number of needs of his mental life
which can only be provided by a group. I am excluding, obviously, the satis-
factions of his mental life which can be obtained in solitude, and, less
obviously, the satisfaction which can be obtained within his family. The
group meets this challenge by the elaboration of a characteristic culture of
the group… I include in it (‘culture of the group’) the structure which the
group achieves at any given moment, the occupations it pursues, and the
organization it adopts. (ibid. pp.54–55)
This discussion of group psychology needs to be examined further in con-
junction with Bion’s statement in the final chapter, ‘Group dynamics’: the
‘belief that a group exists, as distinct from an aggregate of individuals, is an
essential part of this regression…’ (ibid. p.142). Bion’s statement is puzzling
and would appear to contradict the basic premise of the preceding work. This
apparent but important contradiction has not received sufficient attention. In
my view, it expresses Bion’s ‘binocular vision’ in the sense that studying
groups and endeavoring to understand one’s relations within the context of
groups is essential to the full life of an individual and essential to the under-
standing of human psychology. Much of Bion’s experiences in groups
contains or anticipates what he would learn and elaborate later in his study of
psychotic thought processes. For instance, his observations about a ‘hatred of
learning’ is a precursor to his later work on the ‘attacks on linking.’
…in the scheme I am now putting forward the group can be regarded as an
interplay between individual needs, group mentality, and culture. (ibid. p.55)
I was then able to suggest that the group had adopted a cultural pattern
analogous to that of the playground, and that while this must be presumed
to be coping fairly adequately with some of the difficulties of the group – I
meant coping with the group mentality but did not say so – it was a culture
48 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

which only permitted of the broaching of the kind of problem one might
well expect a school-child to help with. (ibid. p.57)
These examples, I hope, give some idea of what I mean by culture, and also
some idea of what I consider to be the need to attempt to elucidate, if
possible, two of the three components in the triad (of group mentality, group
culture, and individual needs). (ibid. p.57)
…operations of what I have called the group mentality, or of the group
culture, only occasionally emerge in any strikingly clear way. Furthermore,
the fact that one is involved in the emotional situation oneself makes
clear-headedness difficult. (ibid p.57)
Practising group therapists and others who wish to have positive influence as
group leaders or group members may acknowledge that ‘clear-headedness’ is
difficult, particularly at time of turmoil and conflict. And so Bion’s recogni-
tion of one’s emotional involvement may seem disarmingly simple, even
trivial. The difficult challenge, however, is not in the recognition so much as in
the performance. Being aware that one may be taken up in the projections of
others, the ‘emotional situation,’ and being able to discern and interpret the
basic assumption activity which may be impeding rather than supporting
work, is unendingly complex and difficult. It requires self-awareness,
empathy, courage and commitment to others and the task.
…silence, it is said, gives consent. Nobody is very happy about insisting on
collective responsibility in this way, but I shall assume, nevertheless, that
unless a group actively disavows its leader it is, in fact, following him. In
short, I shall insist that I am quite justified in saying that the group feels such
and such when, in fact, perhaps only one or two people would seem to
provide by their behavior warrant for such a statement, if, at the time of
behaving like this, the group show no outward sign of repudiating the lead
they are given. I dare say it will be possible to base belief in the complicity of
the group on something more convincing than negative evidence, but for
the time being I regard negative evidence as good enough. (ibid. p.58)
This was written not long after the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis. Fin-
ger-pointing, as well as on-going analysis of, and reflection on, the guilt of all
the Germans and the guilt of many other sectors, governments, groups, and
agencies had just gotten underway. Although throughout the course of the
twentieth century, we have witnessed horrors which for many national, racial,
and ethnic sub-groups can deservedly rival the catastrophes of World War II
and the Holocaust for the Jews, no serious scholar of our times can confidently
say that we have learned our lessons from the horrors throughout the globe,
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 49

but especially in Europe in the twentieth century. Bion’s personal career both
in World War I and World War II would make one wonder how he managed
the calm, modest and restrained perspective to say simply that ‘Nobody is
very happy about insisting on collective responsibility in this way…’ Rather
an understatement I would say, but an observation which for Bion leads, I
believe, to rather profound analysis and insight. And he goes on to say that
‘unless a group actively disavows its leader it is, in fact following him’ (ibid.
p.58).
Group culture is a function of the conflict between the individual’s desires
and the group mentality.
It will follow that the group culture will always show evidence of the
underlying basic assumptions. To the two basic assumptions I have already
described (fight/flight and pairing) it is necessary to add one more. It is the
basic assumption that the group has met together to obtain security from
one individual on whom they depend. (ibid. p.66)
It requires the authority conferred by my position as psychiatrist to keep me
in the picture at all when the basic assumption (in this example, the
fight/flight b.a.) implies that a person whose primary concern is with the
welfare of the individual is out of place. (ibid. p.70)
Once again, we see that Bion commits himself to disrupting the dominance of
‘basic assumption’ activity and that his leadership is focused on the ‘welfare of
the individual.’ In view of this, it is somewhat puzzling that his reputation in
the group literature is that his method was to conduct leaderless groups, that
his leadership was passive rather than active and that his focus was on the
group as a whole rather than supportive of the individual. To explain this
puzzle, one is hard pressed not to refer back to his own formulations about the
basic assumptions and the profound resistance he found to meeting the
demands of development – resistance so profound as to be viewed by Bion as
‘hatred of a process of development’ (ibid. p.89).
But the group designed to perpetuate the state of dependence means for the
individual that he is being greedy in demanding more than his fair term of
parental care. There is, therefore, a quite sharp clash in the group between
the basic assumption and the needs of the individual as an adult. In the other
two group cultures the clash is between the basic assumption of what is
required of the individual as an adult, and what the individual, as an adult,
feels prepared to give. (ibid. p.74)
It seems so rational that we should think of it as a therapeutic group, that we
should assume that the psychiatrist is the leader, and that we should talk
50 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

only about neurotic ailments, that it may not be observed that by thinking
in this way, and behaving, appropriately, we are attempting to peg the
group to a mode of behavior that will prevent the obtrusion of kinds of
group that are feared. (ibid. p.75)
In the group the patient feels he must try to co-operate. He discovers that his
capacity for co-operation is emotionally most vital in the basic group, and
that, in the pursuit of objectives that do not easily lend themselves to the
techniques of the basic group, his ability to co-operate is dependent on a
kind of give and take that is achieved with great difficulty compared with
the swift emotional response that comes of acquiescence in the emotions of
the basic group. In the group the individual becomes aware of capacities that
are only potential so long as he is in comparative isolation. The group,
therefore, is more than the aggregate of individuals, because an individual in
a group is more than individual in isolation. (ibid. p.90)
This last sentence again bears further discussion in relation to Bion’s
statements quoted above from pp.54–55 and p.142 of Experiences in Groups. In
the review chapter, titled ‘Group dynamics,’ Bion remarks that a belief that the
group is more than an aggregate of individuals is a regressive notion. Once
again, Bion shifts the frame, requiring that we do further work, empowering
us to be ‘sense-makers.’
Now all this, and more like it, really boils down to the hatred of a process of
development. (ibid. p.89)
In the group it becomes very clear that this longed-for alternative to the
group procedure is really something like arriving fully equipped as an adult
fitted by instinct to know without training or development exactly how to
live and move and have his being in a group. (ibid. p.89)
…the whole group-therapeutic experience shows that the group and the
individuals in it are hopelessly committed to a developmental procedure, no
matter what might have been the case with our remote ancestors. (ibid.
pp.89–90)
It might have been thought that the group makes a common assumption and
that all else, including the emotional state associated with it, springs from
this. This does not reflect my belief. On the contrary, I consider the
emotional state to be in existence and the basic assumption to be deducible
from it. As far as the group is concerned the basic assumption is essentially a
tacit assumption…the assumption is not overtly expressed even when it is
being acted on… We thus have a situation in which the individuals behave
as if they were conscious, as individuals, of the basic assumption, but uncon-
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 51

scious of it as members of the group. This is as it should be: the group has
not a conscious: and it is not articulate: it is left to the individual to be both.
(ibid. p.94)
Here Bion presents us with an apparent paradox: individuals in and of the
group are the group’s intelligence, yet without individual responsibility and
intelligence, the group is dumb! The primitive resistances to our learning from
experience, to change and development are powerful. Without the individ-
ual’s vigorous struggle to learn and develop, the group to which s/he belongs,
or rather, in which s/he participates, may falter, and without working actively
on one’s relatedness to the group, one’s growth, learning and fullness of life is
thwarted. Belief in the group seems both necessary and regressive. Truly,
Bion’s ‘man’ is at war with his ‘groupishness.’

The sophisticated work group: A higher level of functioning

I propose from now on to reserve the word ‘co-operation’ for conscious or
unconscious working with the rest of the group in work, whereas for the
capacity for spontaneous instinctive co-operation in the basic assumption
…I shall use the word ‘valency’. (ibid. p.116)
there is no way in which the individual can, in a group, ‘do nothing’ – not
even by doing nothing… all members of a group are responsible for the
behaviour of the group [see ibid. p.58]. (ibid. p.118)
Silence gives consent! (cf. p.48 in this chapter and Bion 1961, p.58)
The reciprocal sub-group is composed of those ostensibly supporting the
new idea and this sub-group sets out to achieve the same end as the first
sub-group, but in a rather different manner; it becomes so exacting in its
demands that it ceases to recruit itself. In this way there is none of the
painful bringing together of initiated and uninitiated, primitive and sophis-
ticated, that is the essence of the developmental conflict… To exaggerate for
the sake of clarity, I would say that the one sub-group has large numbers of
primitive unsophisticated individuals who constantly add to their number,
but who do not develop; the other sub-group develops, but on such a narrow
front and with such few recruits that it also avoids the painful bringing
together of the new ideas and the primitive state. (ibid. p.128)
This brief use of the concept of sub-groups must be considered in relation to
Bion’s ideas about ‘aberrant forms of change from one basic assumption to
another’ and ‘the specialized work group’ (cf. Bion 1961, pp.155–158). Bion
sketches ideas about the function of schisms within groups and the reforming
52 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

of groups in relation to their social context. The flexibility of his thinking and
the powerful reach of these conceptualizations are impressive. He opens for
us a consideration of how failure to deal with the problems and challenges of
what is now generally discussed as ‘diversity’ results in ossification or
regression. When group boundaries become too rigid or too loose, growth
and development will fail.
There follows the introduction of an interesting view of the relationship
of the ‘work group’ and the ‘ba group’, one that is often overlooked in discus-
sions and applications of Bion’s views:
When Freud criticizes McDougall’s views on the highly organized group,
he points out that McDougall considers that the conditions of reorganiza-
tion remove ‘the psychological disadvantages of group formation’. This
comes very near to my view of the specialized work group as having as its
function the manipulation of the basic assumption to prevent its obstruction
of the work group. (ibid. p.135)
Bear in mind that for Bion, the ‘work group’ makes use of the ba’s and
manages them, mobilizing or managing one ba to protect the work from one
of the other ba’s. His view did not stop with the notion that the ‘work group’
merely suppresses or avoids the basic assumptions. In this way he leaves open
for study, exploration and further discovery a limitless range of possible
arrangements between work and ba and how development of different
cultures occurs, of how the conflicts between ‘group mentality’ and individual
desires can be resolved.
He [Freud] postulates an individual outside the primitive group, who
possessed his own continuity, his self-consciousness, his traditions and
customs, his own particular functions and position. He says that owing to
his entry into an ‘unorganized’ group, the individual had lost his distinctive-
ness for a time. In my view the struggle of the individual to preserve his dis-
tinctiveness assumes different characteristics according to the state of mind
of the group at any given moment. Group organization should give stability
and permanence to the work group, which is felt to be much more easily
submerged by the basic assumptions if the group is unorganized; individual
distinctiveness is not part of the life in a group acting on the basic assump-
tions. Organization and structure are weapons of the work group. They are
the product of co-operation between members of the group, and their effect
once established in the group is to demand still further co-operation from
the individuals in the group. … Action inevitably means contact with reality,
and contact with reality compels regard for truth and therefore imposes
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 53

scientific method, and hence, the evocation of the work group. (ibid.
pp.135–136)
Here Bion, more explicitly than Freud, puts the individual in a social systems
context. Bion places himself and us deep in the context of a group-
as-a-whole, and in so doing would not seem to support the model of a distant,
authoritarian group analyst so often attributed to him.

‘Proto-mental’ phenomena: A meta-psychological construct

…there were no observations at present available to the psychiatrist to
explain why emotions associated with a basic assumption were held in com-
bination with each other with such tenacity and exclusiveness. In order to
explain this linkage and at the same time to explain the fate of the inopera-
tive basic assumptions, I propose to postulate the existence of ‘proto-mental’
phenomena… Starting, then, at the level of proto-mental events we may say
that the group develops until its emotions become expressible in psycholog-
ical terms. (ibid. pp.100–101)
In this way Bion leaves unanswered, wisely so, it seems to me, the question of
whether the observations presented in these papers as ‘basic assumptions’
represent ‘instinctual drives’ or learned response-patterns. He does attempt
further to formulate the relationship between ‘ba’ and ‘work’, between the
basic group and the sophisticated group. In doing so, he comes to the idea of
‘proto-mental’ phenomena, positing events and/or a domain of activity
which are observable only upon the accomplishment of developmental group
work. In introducing this concept, he uses the phrase ‘expressible in psycho-
logical terms’ which characteristically, I believe, leaves open the question of
whether the ‘psychological terms’ are observable behaviors or subjectively
known experiences. Here and throughout his subsequent work, it seems to
me, Bion attempts to reconcile the requirements of psychoanalytic study and
knowledge with the scientific methods of his time. He honors both empirical,
objective reality and subjectivity, experiential knowledge and ‘common
sense.’
The emotional state associated with each basic assumption excludes the
emotional states proper to the other two basic assumptions, but it does not
exclude the emotions proper to the sophisticated group. …there is, however,
a conflict between the group that is formed through co-operation between
individuals at a sophisticated level – the sophisticated group – and the basic
group, and in this respect the relationship between sophisticated and basic
54 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

group differs from the relationship that obtains between the emotional
states associated with the three basic assumptions. There is no direct conflict
between basic assumptions, but only changes from one state or another,
which are either smooth transitions or brought about through intervention
of the sophisticated group. They do not conflict, they alternate; conflict
rises only at the junction between the basic group and the sophisticated
group. (ibid. p.96)
Although Yalom (1995, 3rd edition) as well as Rutan and Stone (1984)
represent Bion’s theory as stating that the ‘work group’ alternates with one of
the ‘basic assumption groups’, it seems clear here that Bion conceptualized the
matter quite differently. Bion’s view is of group dynamics in which the group’s
work efforts are saturated or colored with differing amounts of one of the
‘basic assumption’ clusters of emotions, attitudes and beliefs. Tensions and
conflicts are not between groups dominated by different ‘basic assumptions’,
but rather between the ‘work’ group (dominant in the ‘sophisticated’ group)
and the ‘group mentality’ (which is given expression through the mental
activity of one of the ‘basic assumptions’).
The interventions of the sophisticated group are diverse, but they all have
this in common: they are expressions of a recognition for the need to
develop rather than to rely upon the efficacy of magic; they are intended to
cope with the basic assumptions, and they mobilized the emotions of one
basic assumption in the attempt to cope with the emotions and phenomena
of another basic assumption. (ibid. pp.97–98)
Bion is clearly interested in putting his theoretical insights to empirical test,
on the scale of large social systems. Experiences in Groups includes evidence of
the broad scope of his interests, curiosity and ambition. He opens the possi-
bility of applying his learning from his study of groups to questions of the
relationship between cultural characteristics and occurrence of certain
illnesses.
Tuberculosis is known to be very sensitive to developments in the
psychology of a group, numbers fluctuating in what appears to be some kind
of sympathy with the changes in mentality of the group. … The existence of
these facts has led often, before a tubercular lesion was demonstrated, to
suggestion that the patient was malingering (Wittkower, 1949), or to use my
terminology, that baD is the teleological cause of the patient’s disorder, but
for reasons I have given I cannot regard baD as a cause of any kind; it is the
mental state with which tuberculosis is affiliated, and is therefore neither
cause nor effect. (ibid. p.107)
 RE-DISCOVERING BION’S EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS 55

I am not aware of references to these ideas in other reviews of Bion’s work.

Given the many contemporary social problems and illnesses, e.g., domestic
and school violence, homelessness, AIDS, and chemical dependence, Bion’s
inquiry into the relation of culture and illness deserves serious attention. As
suggested by Steven Brown (cf. Chapter 6 in this volume), it may well be that
William Stephenson’s Q-methodology is the empirical tool that will make
further exploration and development of this aspect of Bion’s vision possible.

Further reflections
In his biography of Bion, Gérard Bléandonu (1994) provides us with an
excellent understanding of Bion’s intellectual development and clinical con-
tributions. At the end of a section describing Bion’s work with groups,
Bléandonu represents, I believe, a core characteristic of Bion’s leadership,
relentlessly reaching but reluctantly assertive, politically and interpersonally.
In other words, Freud’s idea that the family group is the basic prototype of
all groups seemed to him to have some basic validity, but it seemed
inadequate in that it left obscure the origins of some of the most powerful
emotional forces in a group.
The more stable the group, the more it reflects the Freudian view. The
more disturbed the group, the closer it approaches the mechanisms and
primitive phantasies described by Melanie Klein. Freud considered group
psychology from the starting point of whole-object relations and neurotic
defences, whereas Bion considered the group in terms of part-objects and
more psychotic defences. It seems that although he wanted to liberate
himself from being constrained by existing theories, Bion was hesitant to
begin a Copernican revolution in which family life and psychonanalysis
would be specific examples of a more generalized group dynamic.
(Bléandonu 1994, p.94)
In his address as Chair of the Medical Section of the British Psychological
Society early in 1947 Bion (1948) proposed a critical and broad agenda for
psychiatrists, his group of colleagues. In this address he outlined the need to
accept the challenge of developing methods for ‘dealing with the underlying
emotional tensions in human relationships’ [and] it is precisely these primitive
unconscious tensions which present the fundamental problem in all human
relationships (Bion 1948, p.83). Bion makes it clear that he would take
psychiatry beyond the dyadic doctor–patient relationship. He sets his sights
on studying the dynamics and interpreting the needs of groups and society: ‘I
consider nothing but Western Civilization’ (ibid. p.82).
56 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

In 1947, in his opening address as chair to the British Psychological

Society, Bion sets forth a vision and a mission:
There is no corpus of knowledge that does for the study of the group what
psycho-analysis does for the study of the individual. The material which is
relevant for our study is embedded in the information amassed by several at
present widely separated disciplines… In the field of emotional and intel-
lectual development, the situation is very different [from that of the
scientific field of acquiring of technical skills of the mechanical type];
mimesis is of no value and, indeed, is a great danger, for it produces a
spurious appearance of growth; no method of communication of emotional
development has yet been found which is not hopelessly limited in its field
of influence… Hope…must depend on the development of a technique of
emotional development, and, one would imagine, that is precisely what we
in this society are concerned to provide. (Bion 1948, p.84)
Bion went first, often alone, to the edges of new knowledge. Later in his
career, perhaps, as Bléandonu says, Bion was reluctant to declare the
revolution, and reluctant even more perhaps, to mark himself as the flag-
bearer, target in battle. Nevertheless, he moved the frontiers forward for
colleagues, students, analysands, and for us. Bion has staked out new territo-
ries of knowledge for us to explore, settle, and develop though our own
efforts and individual experiences.

References
Bion, W. R. (1948) ‘Psychiatry in a time of crisis.’ British Journal of Medical Psychology 21, 2,
81–89.
Bion, W. R. (1961) Experiences in Groups. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Bion, W. R. (1962) Learning from Experience. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Bléandonu, G. (1994) Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897–1979. London: Free Association
Books. New York: Guilford Press.
Eisold, K. (1985) ‘Recovering Bion’s contributions to group analysis.’ In A. D. Colman and
M. H. Gelder (eds) Group Relations Reader 3. Jupiter, FL: A. K. Rice Institute.
Eisold, K. (1993) ‘Changing group relations: Some problems and symptoms.’ In T. W. Hugg,
N. M. Carson & R. M. Lipgar (eds) Changing Group Relations: The Next Twenty-five Years in
America. Proceedings of the ninth scientific meeting of the A. K. Rice Institute. Jupiter, FL:
A. K. Rice Institute.
Ezriel, H. (1950) ‘A psychoanalytic approach to group treatment.’ British Journal of Medical
Psychology 23, 93–100.
Gustafson, J. P. and Cooper, L. (1979). ‘Collaboration in small groups: Theory and technique
for the study of small group process.’ Human Relations 31, 155–171.
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Lawrence, W. G., Bain, A. and Gould, L. (1996) ‘The fifth basic assumption.’ Free Associations 6,
37, 28–55.
Lieberman, M. A. (1990) Personal communication.
Lipgar, R. M. (1993b) ‘Bion’s work with groups: Construed and misconstrued.’ In S.
Cytrynbaum, and S. A. Lee, (eds) Transformations in Global and Organizational Systems:
Changing Boundaries in the 90s, 98–106. Proceedings of the Tenth Scientific Meeting of the
A. K. Rice Institute. Jupiter FL, A. K. Rice Institute.
Malan, D. H., Balfour, F. H. G., Hood, V. G., and Shooter, F. H. G. (1976) ‘A long-term
follow-up study of group psychotherapy.’ Archive of General Psychiatry 33, 1303–15.
Pines, M. (ed) (1985) Bion and Group Psychotherapy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Rutan, J. S. & Stone, W. N. (1984) Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy. New York: Macmillan,
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Sutherland, J. D. (1985) ‘Bion revisited: Group dynamics and group psychotherapy.’ In M.
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Yalom, I. D. (1995) Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. (4th ed., 1995; 3rd ed., 1985;
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Suggested reading
Edelson, M. & Berg, D. N. (1999) Rediscovering Groups: A Psychoanalyst’s Journey Beyond
Individual Psychology. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Grinberg, L., Sor, D. and Tabak de Blanchedi, E. (1977) Introduction to the Work of Bion. New
York: Jason Aronson, Inc.
Grotstein, J. A. (ed) (1981) Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? Beverly Hill, CA: Caesura.
Lipgar, R. M. (1992) ‘A programme of group relations research: Emphasis on inquiry and the
trial of techniques.’ Group Analysis 25, 365–375.
Lipgar, R. M. (1993a) ‘Views of the consultant’s role: A Q-methodology study.’ In T. W.
Hugg, N. M. Carlson and R. M. Lipgar (eds), Changing Group Relations: The Next
Twenty-Five Years in America, 57–70. Proceedings of the Ninth Scientific Meeting of the A.
K. Rice Institute. Jupiter, FL: A. K. Rice Institute.
Meltzer, D. (1978) The Kleinian Development. Clunie Press for the Roland Harris Trust Library.
Reading, Great Britain: Radavian Press.
Rice, A. K. (1965) Learning for Leadership. London: Tavistock Publications, Ltd.
Rioch, M. J. (1975) ‘The work of Wilfred Bion on groups.’ In A. D. Colman and W. H. Bexton
(eds) Group Relations Reader 1. Jupiter, FL: A. K. Rice Institute.
Thelen, H. A. (1984) ‘Research with Bion’s concepts.’ In Pines, M. (ed) Bion and Group
Psychotherapy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
58 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Endnotes
1. Since Bion acknowledges that dealing ‘with the psychological difficulties of its mem-
bers’ is at least one of many work group tasks, it is appropriate to examine his experi-
ences and thoughts as they may apply to how we conduct psychotherapy treatment
groups, as well as providing insight into general laws of group life.
2. Pierre Turquet (1974) has identified ‘oneness’ as a fourth basic assumption. W. Gordon
Lawrence, Alastair Bain, and Laurence Gould (1996) have argued for a fifth basic as-
sumption which they call ‘me-ness.’ Earl Hopper, Chapter 8 of this volume, identifies
another basic assumption.
3. Bion offers this description of his method of conducting groups in ‘Group dynamics,’
the final paper in Experiences in Groups: ‘There are times when I think that the group has
an attitude to me, and that I can state in words what the attitude is; there are times when
another individual acts as if he also thought the group had an attitude to him, and I be-
lieve I can deduce what his belief is; there are times when I think that the group has an
attitude to an individual, and that I can say what it is.’ (Bion 1961, pp.142–143)
4. When Bion reflects on defensive uses of the doctor role, we can better see the relevance
and meaning of his earlier rather unexpected statement that his comments are ‘matters
of no importance to anyone but myself.’ He wisely points out here (pp.114–15) how
important it is to resist the temptation to avoid the complexities of the group situation
by recreating a kind of individual psychotherapy or psychoanalytic relationship within
the group.
5. Although Eisold (1985, p.39) among others has puzzled over Bion’s statement in
‘Group dynamics,’ the final chapter of Experiences in Groups, that belief in the group is
regressive, there seems to be little doubt here that Bion believed the face-to-face group
situation allowed the examination of human behavior not otherwise available for study
in dyadic circumstances. In this sense the group is something other than, if not more
than, a collection of individuals. For further discussion of this chapter, see M.
Sanfuetes’ Chapter 4 in this book.
6. This reading of his aims is, I believe, in contrast to the goals attributed to Bion’s
method by Rutan and Stone (op. cit.). They describe his approach as one which would
result in increasing the individual’s capacity for good ‘peer relations’ as though the aim
of the Bion/Tavistock group were the enhancement of one’s ability to form or join co-
hesive groups. It seems to me that Bion’s aim is much broader and that a thoughtful
employment of his model would require an understanding of his concern for human
growth and development, psychological achievements much broader than improved
‘peer relations.’ Bion aims to enhance members’ capacities to articulate group tasks, ap-
preciate and manage task and other boundary issues, and to engage creatively with in-
terpersonal and inner experiences of deepest human consequence and import.
 2

Bion’s War Memoirs:

1
A Psychoanalytical Commentary
Living Experiences and Learning from them:
Some Early Roots of Bion’s Contributions
to Psychoanalysis

Paulo Cesar Sandler

2
Judgements and mindlessness
That evening I went to see The Boy… There were lots of lights, brilliant
scenes, nice banging music, loud-voiced and shrieking actors…ridiculous
old men sat about and laughed at silly jokes. Electric light and noise – that
was all there was, as far as London was concerned. That London show was a
nightmare, and France was a nightmare – but the latter was positively
healthy in comparison. [About a theatre show to which his mother had
insisted on taking him during two days’ leave from the front; Bion 1917-19,
p.153]
War Memoirs may be regarded as the autobiographical counterpart of Cogita-
tions (1992) in the sense that both contain preparatory notes – a laboratory? –
for books that were written later but published at an earlier date. Cogitations
contains the foundations and musings that led to Learning from Experience,
Elements of Psycho-Analysis and Transformations (1962b, 1963, 1965). That is,
in Cogitations, one has the experiences and thoughts that allowed Bion to
formulate verbally a mental function that ‘de-sensefies’ external and internal
stimuli (which he called beta-elements, felt as things-in-themselves) that are

59
60 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

apprehended by the sensory apparatus, in order to transform those stimuli

into elementary ‘elements’ (he called them alpha-elements). Those ‘al-
pha-elements’ are useful to think, to dream, to store in the form of memories.
3
Bion’s daughter Parthenope once compared alpha-elements to Lego blocks,
and the human mind has the same playing – I would say, free associative –
capacity as a child’s mind. It also has the foundations of Bion’s search of the
processes of knowing, seen as one of the human links, born from instinctual
needs. He described three links, indistinguishable from emotional experi-
ences, initially between baby and breast: the L link (standing for Love), an
expression of the life instincts; the H link (standing for Hate) an expression of
the death instincts; and the K link (standing for Knowledge), an expression of
the epistemophilic instincts. Those are links of the mind with itself and
between human beings. Also, some discriminations between dream and
hallucination, apprehension of reality and falsehood and special characteris-
tics of the mother–baby relationship form the core of his book Learning from
Experience (1962b). The two other books quoted above (Elements of
Psycho-Analysis and Transformations) further the epistemological investigation
of psycho-analytic theory, of the reliability (and lack of it) and bearings of the
analyst’s interpretations that try to apprehend psychic facts as they are. Bion
assembles a special ‘epistemological gauging device’ to train the analyst’s
intuition and to evaluate the epistemological status of any statement uttered in
a session, which he called ‘the Grid’.
The Grid, which was further developed in Transformations (1965),
Attention and Interpretation (1970) and The Grid and Caesura (1977c), is a still
underrated, not widely used and much misunderstood device especially by
those who see it as an attempt to mathematize psycho-analysis – which it is
not. It is also not a periodic table such as the one used in chemistry – another
common misunderstanding based on a superficial formal resemblance
between the two. Bion was not wholly satisfied with it and continuously tried
to improve its usage4. It is a two-dimensional highly dynamic, functional tool
made with the constant conjunction of two perpendicular axes drawn visually
into a Euclidian plane, which is construed from Hume’s, Locke’s, Freud’s and
Klein’s contributions. Both axes have a developmental ethos. Or, in other
words, they represent a possibility of development within some patterned
spectrums. The horizontal axis represents graphically, by numbers (from 1 to
6) Freud’s functions of the ego, and the spectrum of those functions is
augmented by two functions devised by Bion. One of them, Level 1, is deeply
embedded with a Kantian ethos, linked to innate preconceptions; he calls
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 61

them ‘definitory hypothesis’, simply the assessment of a starting point from

which thought may spring. The vertical axis is genetic and its levels are repre-
sented by letters (A to H). It posits a spectrum ranging from cruder phases or
states of development of thoughts to the most sophisticated. The cruder
phases (level A) are pure sensory stimuli, yet with no obtrusion of thought
processes. Bion called them ‘beta-elements’, apprehended by the individual
as things-in-themselves, felt as sensations of having grasped absolute truth;
from them may evolve level B, which Bion called ‘alpha-elements’,
‘de-sense-fied’ elements which are useful to think, to dream and to store as
memories. One should say, those are building blocks that allow for thought
processes, duly detoxified of their sensory-based, concrete materialness.
From them evolves level C, dream processes, preconceptions, concepts,
reaching scientific deductive systems and algebraic calculus. Bion leaves
space for future developments of thought processes yet unknown, unnamed
(Sandler 1990).
Any specific level of this vertical, genetic axis must function constantly
conjoined with any specific level of the horizontal axis. Level C interests us
here in a very special way, for it contains a hitherto unavailable, deepening
study on the function of dream work (always following Freud) and myths as
tools that uncover and give further knowledge of the human mind. As Bion
observes in the paper Tower of Babel (1960) and dwells on in the theme of
Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963), Freud, as a scientist investigating a problem,
was confronted with the search for a solution to it that required the applica-
tion of the old Greek myth Oedipus. In doing so, he did not discover the
Oedipus complex – it was already discovered by the ancient Greeks. From his
search resulted the discovery of psychoanalysis. It remains to be discovered,
through a practical work, by any single psychoanalyst who is fully involved in
emotional experience, being and thinking. The most effective way to
accomplish this task is a personal analysis. How to do it through the publica-
tion of verbal written formulations? Perhaps it is doomed to failure, in many
degrees. But those observations allow for a hypothesis: is the whole autobio-
graphical cycle written by Bion a gigantic effort to formulate verbally a
universal human myth conjoined with a specific individual’s experiencing of
it, a parable around the pain and growth involved in realizing mindlessness,
bestiality, phantasies of superiority, arrogance and all manifestations of death
instincts, especially lies and lying? In Freud’s terms, ‘insight’. In Klein’s terms,
the working through of the depressive position. In Bion’s terms, War Memoirs
may be regarded as an exercise in the C category of the Grid – ‘the function of
62 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

the narrative form is to enable the individual and the race to observe and to
maintain this constant conjuction’ (Bion, circa 1960, p.226). Musically
speaking: an ‘Impromptu in C’.
It is also interesting here how Bion made verbal formulations trying to
describe some types of transformations that reality undergoes when knowing
attempts to take place: rigid transformations, corresponding to the classical
concept of transference; projective transformations, corresponding to the
concept of projective identification; transformations in hallucinosis, which
seem to compose the bulk of social life, transformations in ‘K’ (talk about
something, understanding) and transformations in ‘O’ (the symbol that Bion
uses to depict Kant’s noumenic realm), which correspond to becoming and
being – the realm of insight, of contact with ‘all sins remembered’ or a free
movement towards the depressive position as observed by Melanie Klein.
Bion uses many epistemological definitions such as selected fact (borrowed
from Poincaré) and constant conjunction (borrowed from Hume). From these
definitions he proceeds and aptly uses, for the first time in human science,
Dirac’s epistemological concept of invariances and transformations (Dirac
1930; Sandler 2002), narcissism and social-ism, tropisms, among others; and
some quasi-mathematical symbols such as PS« D and %&. The former
depicts Melanie Klein’s model of the developing mind, the tandem, transient,
dynamic, to-and-fro movements from paranoid–schizoid to depressive
positions and the latter, that which he called container/contained relation-
ship, one of the elements of psychoanalysis, whose paradigm is breast/mouth
and whose counterpart in adult life is vagina and penis, expressing the basic,
elementary creative couple. Cogitations (1992) sets out his ‘laboratory’ to
develop all of this and much more and the papers display the compacted final
form of the experiences. The verbal and symbolic devices are drawn from
classical psychoanalytic theory, from philosophy and from science (Sandler
1997a).
War Memoirs, Bion 1997, in its turn, embodies experiential material and
dialogic verbal formulations that are similar to those of A Memoir of the Future
(1975a, 1977a, 1979a; Sandler 1988) and The Long Week-End (1982). He
abandons resorting to more conventional, scientific verbal formulations and –
we now know – returns to a commonsensical colloquial mode to attempt
communication. Hardly surprising, for Bion, together with Winnicott but in a
much more explicit way, did for the psychoanalytic movement the same that
Wordsworth did for poetry and Bertrand Russell for philosophy, namely, he
replaced the pompous, rarefied ‘jargonized’ phraseology with real life speech.
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 63

In War Memoirs and in Cogitations the notes make for a useful synthesis in the
sense that they contain the seeds of the subsequent works. Descriptions of
psychotic states, and the use that the psychotic part of the personality makes
of the neurotic part, states of shared hallucinosis (suggested in the quotation
that heads this paper; see subsection on ‘Splitting, denial and absolute truth’
p.75; see also Bion 1919. pp.40–51, 54, 61, 94, 103, 106, 200, 216), as well
as profound and living human experiences and obstacles to them indicated in
The Long Week-End and in the A Memoir of the Future trilogy seem to me more
marked and in a certain sense less elaborated in War Memoirs.5
Not counting Francesca Bion’s introduction and Parthenope Bion
Talamo’s postface, there are three parts in War Memoirs. Even the first one,
young Captain Bion’s report, is more than a ‘war report’. It is the description
of a real life, of a real analysis, of Hamlet’s ‘ocean of difficulties’. It is also a
profound study of human groups. Does human life as it is differ from the
descriptions of an army captain and his tank?
The book starts with an account by a young man, who seems to be in the
grip of a psychotic bout. He joined millions of Europeans, in one single week,
in the main capitals of the Old Continent. Other people experienced this
event quite differently. I refer to people who not only willingly engaged in
war, but were in the same places, so had the opportunity of the same experi-
ences. Three of them, who in the future would be a psychoanalyst, a soldier
and a politician and would be known as Dr Bion, Field Marshall Montgomery
and the Führer Hitler were in the very same Flanders fields, the Somme mud,
in the same days. Adolf Hitler’s accounts glorified those experiences, that
seemed to be containers for his inner hate, contempt of life and disregard of
truth he stated that this time of his life was ‘pure happiness’ (Fest 1963;
Bracher 1968; Bullock 1997). Field Marshall Montgomery’s also offers a
good comparison. The so-called apolitical or perhaps the non-medical
minded soldier displays an interest in inanimate objects rather than in
animated beings (Law, 1958). Bion’s description is closer to Siegfried
Sassoon’s, Robert Graves’s, and in a certain sense, Rupert Brooke’s, Winston
Churchill’s and Ernst Jünger’s. Why did the mud of France feel ‘positively
healthy’ to the young Captain Bion? Perhaps because it bore witness in its
depths to the undisguised cruelty of which human beings are capable, with
‘London’ as a hallucinated environment; social hypocrisy, a feature much
emphasized by Freud (for example, when he comments on money and sex)
plays a predominant role here. Perhaps it was an early manifestation of a
concern for truth and life, which Bion would later expand (e.g. in ‘Compas-
64 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

sion and Truth’, circa 1960, in Cogitations, p.125; and ‘Metatheory’, op. cit,
specially pp.246 and 249) – and soon he was revealing his love of truth. It
seems that he was doomed to have to face the issue again, as described in
Attention and Interpretation (specially ‘The mystic and the group’; see also
Oliver Lyth’s obituary on Bion, 1980).
One is prone to regard that fateful European ‘week of joining’6 in the
restrictive social sense, namely the military meaning of the word. Perhaps the
psychoanalytic view made possible by Bion’s extensions of Freud’s observa-
tions on malignant narcissism and Klein’s observations on the
paranoid–schizoid position features, specially those contained in ‘A Theory of
Thinking’ (Freud 1911, 1914; Klein 1946; Bion 1962a, pp.116 and 119)
enables us to perceive it as a joining of value judgements constantly conjoined
with feelings of possessing what can be called ‘the absolute truth’. This led to
enlisting ‘for the only truth’, ‘against evil’. Bion was unable to write to his
parents – one may infer from the writings, especially to his mother – during
the time he spent at the front. The diary was intended as a compensation for
this telling failure. Telling of what? Of the envious hate of the breast, and dif-
ficulties in capacity to love, and concern for truth, as he would write later
(Bion circa 1960), difficulties in attaining the depressive position. Years later
– many years later – he would choose a Shakespeare line (‘…all my sins be
remembered’) to depict the same compulsively repeated fact of lack of
compassion and immobilized clinging to the paranoid–schizoid position. It
presented itself in a seemingly new form; in fact it was the persistence of a hal-
lucination, ever-repeating, reproducing, as a transference phenomenon, what
Melanie Klein was able to enlighten as hate toward the nourishing breast.
This time, his first wife and his first daughter would be the concretised goals,
as a ‘past presented’, of this still unresolved hate (Bion 1975, p.70). He stated
that he neglected his first wife Betty, and that he was responsible for her dying
during the delivery of his first daughter, who was also object of the same lack
of compassion he had towards his mother. He displayed a distinct preference
to stay with his past analyst and now friend, Rickman, to dedicate himself
more fully to their experiences at the Northfield hospital with mentally
disabled servicemen, according to himself, and thus derived from the
darkness of unconscious drives an awful, ineffable pain for the rest of his life.
The real encounter with a real woman was postponed during that difficult
time between 1917 and 1950; and he seemed to be a man with a rare capacity
to learn from experience (to the point of writing a book on it), for his second
marriage was marked by an interruption of the patterned behaviour. To Bion,
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 65

as perhaps with any human being, ‘war’, or in Freud’s notation, the manifesta-
tion of death instincts, would prove not to be restricted to external,
extra-psychic facts.
Does the practising analyst need to make use of the Kantian tradition of
critique?7 Elsewhere I try to show that Freud used it regarding outward,
external appearances, and in doing so he discovered and practised
psychoanalysis (Sandler 1997b). Perhaps coming from another source of
influence, often defined as the Jewish scholarly tradition, he added to this
philosophical and scientific criticism a criticism directed at himself. This
tradition of criticism enabled Freud to develop psychoanalysis: he abandoned
his theories at least three times. War Memoirs, as I see it, enlightens as a specific
contribution stemming from psychoanalytical practice, an unnoticed use that
transforms scientific criticism and self-criticism into something destructive: it
shows that any criticism, under the aegis of the death instinct, is manifested as
hetero-criticism.8 Under the aegis of the life instinct it transforms itself into
self-criticism. This is the origin of one of Bion’s legacies that seem to me
exceptionally useful to the practising analyst: the ‘sense of truth’ (Bion 1962a,
p.119). A sense of truth arises when one makes a constant conjunction of two
views on the object. The constant conjunction of two opposite experiences
allows for the achievement of a special correlation; the object is loved and the
object is hated. Those passions usually cloud the fact that the object is the
same – an integration that according to Klein appertains to the working
through of depressive position but can take many years to attain some stability
in the self. As Oscar Wilde puts it in the introduction of The Picture of Dorian
Gray: people initially think that dad and mom are the greatest people on earth,
later on they despise and hate them and still later on, they pardon them.
Deprived of this sense of truth, we may lose contact with reality (‘O’-truth).
This implies lack of discrimination between false and true; it usually leads to
value judgements of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, which tend to replace, respectively,
‘true’ and ‘false’. This is a special and very common case of splitting, which
usually passes for normal. Bion made it explicit in ‘A theory of thinking
(1962a). It emerges when omniscience seems to be a replacement for the dis-
crimination between truth and falsity, or reality and hallucination. One
achieves the ‘sense of truth’, out of the perception that the loved object and
the hated object are the same and only object, which is the same as saying that
there is an important counterpart of the integration of the whole object
observed by Klein in the area of thinking. Psychoanalytically speaking, one
may state that judgemental values (Bion, 1962a, p.114) are an attempt to
66 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

compensate for the lack of capacity to appreciate and apprehend truth and lie.
It is doomed to failure. Judgemental values (right or wrong instead of true or
false) are linked to what Bion would make explicit in later years as the psychic
facts he grouped within the semantic field of verbal formulations such as ‘hy-
perbole’ (Transformations, 1965) and ‘violence of emotions’ (’Metatheory’, c.
1960, in Cogitations, 1992). The young Bion judged (splitting), while adding
contempt and denial to judgement. He assessed everything and everyone
according to criteria of certainty, of absolute truth. Judging and despising, as
inanimate manifestations of the death instinct, can be found on pages 6–8, 65
and 71 of War Memoirs. The importance of the discrimination between
judgement and appreciation (or assessment) cannot be overstressed when it
comes to a real psychoanalyst’s intra-session work. To present the real self to
someone else, or to introduce one to oneself, or to propitiate conditions to a
psychoanalytical insight precludes judgement and values.

Projective identification, hetero-criticism and self-criticism

War Memoirs provides practical lessons of what Melanie Klein called ‘projec-
tive identification’, i.e. the omnipotent fantasy of the capacity of splitting,
denial and expulsion of undesired aspects of the mind, and, eventually, often
as a consequence, of the mind itself and of the whole personality (Klein
1946), followed by the fantasy of having inoculated those painful and
undesired aspects – including personal authority and responsibility – into the
mind of other people. Let us take Bion’s early descriptions of Major de Freine,
of the officers Aitches, Clifford, Homfray, and Bargate, as reproduced in the
Diary (see War Memoirs). He endows them with many characteristics he hates
in himself, including what he saw as cowardice and physical evasion during
action, or refusal to go into battle. It does not mean that those people did not
possess such characteristics: the question for the practising psychoanalyst is
their use, as ‘deposits’ or ‘containers’. Conversely, when the young Bion saw
something in someone else that, his own criteria, possessed a positive quality,
he would nullify and deny it. The embryo of the depressive position still
coupled with self-envy would make him deny it when it appeared in himself
as well as in other people. Bion speaks of certain attitudes worthy of an officer;
one can see that he emulated his Major. This can be found, for instance, in the
‘not speaking too much’ attitude. The Major had it, but it took many years for
Bion to recognize that he was inspired by him; the first report suggests that
this posture was parthenogenetic, born from himself, and thus it would be not
an emulation, as it was fact. This posture countered the widespread tendency
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 67

of the combatants to display and advertise self-eulogic triumphalism,

over-exaggerating non-existent victories and denying failures and defeat.
The same occurred with an excess of jokes and banality, connected with a
flight from reality, as if there was no war and heavy killing. Later all of this
could be understood as propaganda, which Bion would later synthesize in the
fourth chapter of Transformations (1970). Freud had already pointed out the
‘awful truth’ that could underlie the banalization of facts through jokes, that
denies reality as it is – in fact this was one of the roots of psychoanalysis. Let us
examine this point with the aid of Bion’s text:
Hauser and I talked over all those matters and resolved to counteract these
tendencies as best we could by pretending, in future, to enjoy action and to
discourage in mess and elsewhere all talk of ‘wind up’ and that kind of thing.
We had seen already where casual joking in that way led to…looking back
on it all now, I can see how the standard rose as a result. It was no longer
funny to talk of ‘wind up’ and ‘beating it’ and so on…people discovered
that such talk was not expected of an officer. But this all took time. There
was little chance for improvement till bad seniors like Clifford & Co. were
cleared out. Later, as we gained in position, things became easier. I really
believe this was the start of a better fighting spirit in the battalion. I don’t
mean to suggest that we were responsible for courage or anything in others.
But I do think that we gave good officers who came to our company a
chance to show their mettle. They did not immediately have their spirit
undermined by foolish and beastly talk. (Bion 1970, p.89; author’s italics)
Despite all his limitations of perception, it is remarkable how this 20-year-old
9
man seems to have a fine perception of the fact that projective identification is
a phantasy: ‘I don’t mean to suggest that we were responsible for courage or
anything in others’. I would dare to hypothesize that this kind of natural pre-
disposition that shows itself at an early age, coupled with a capacity to learn
from painful experiences, may have made a more mature Dr Bion also a more
permeable patient, enabling him to grasp in a smooth, natural way the many
truths that Mrs Klein tried to show to the psychoanalytic movement – thirty
years later – and perhaps to himself, in analysis.
How can one deal with other people’s limitations without attacking
them? I think that one way is to realize the phantastic nature of projective
identification, which is the same as saying, to understand and be responsible
for one’s own states of mind. In a later account, sub-titled ‘Amiens’ (1958), the
same Major de Freine is seen as trying to retain a minimum of comfort amidst
the horror of the slaughter. In 1919 he was seen merely as a corrupted official.
How can arrogance be transformed into self-respect?
68 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

I believe that some considerations on the realization of the hallucinatory

nature of transference phenomena and of projective identification, explicitly
stated by Freud in 1912 and by Klein in 1946, as well as by Bion many times
(as for example, Bion 1965, p.132) but often lost sight of, are fundamental to
the analytical formation. Also, the psychoanaytical movement is prone to the
acritical idolization of many of its personalities, either in universal terms (as
with Freud) or in more parochial terms. Idolization and idealization are fairly
well understood in terms of transference phenomena under the aegis of
narcissistic projection and projective identification, but perhaps its use in
group terms leaves much to be desired, if one observes the splitting wars
among psycho-analysts that still prevail in the psychoanalytic movement (as
opposed to psychoanalysis proper). A fresh look at these problems may
consider that through their attitude, training analysts set an example for
candidates. In terms of transference, this is what parents offer their children.
Children usually imitate their parents (which is called identification) and
gradually can leave this primeval model to set up in motion their own unique
traits, becoming who they are in reality; adolescence is a contradictory,
turbulent, painful interregnum, not always successful, of transgression or
from those imitated patterns towards the true self (in Winnicott’s terms and
also described by Bion in ‘Emotional Turbulence’ (1977b). As he became
older, Bion perceived that he was making projective identifications of his own
feelings (even if they were unaccompanied by actions) of cowardice and fear
into these people. Bion is seen to try to forgive himself and, consequently,
Major de Freine and his previously despised colleagues, the ‘bad guys’, who
functioned as containers to his projective identifications in the Commentary
of 1972 (see War Memoirs 1997a). Is it a manifestation of gratitude and
concern for life, in the sense of Klein’s depressive position? He also seems to
test his writing method which we might call ‘an inner dialogue’, later used in
the A Memoir of the Future trilogy (1975a and 1977a). Let us recall that in the
whole autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical cycle (composed of the
trilogy, the Long Week-End and this volume, War Memoirs) he ascribes his most
immature aspects to the ‘Bion’ character.
Myself: I thought your comment that they had gone into Tanks to avoid
fighting [p.8] was quite breath-taking in its disparaging insolence. Do you
10
still mean it?
Bion: Let it stand, like my lack of culture, [reference to his lack of knowledge
when young] as a monument to my effrontery. I am ashamed and would like
to cross it out.
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 69

Myself: As long as it serves as a reminder of what we are really like, and not as
a slur on ‘them’.
Bion: I feel that much of the diary will appear, on this reading, to be an
exercise in sheltering my complacency from the chilling blast of truth’ (F.
Bion 1997 p.201)
Myself: Your description of Méaulte, which was admittedly a horrible camp,
a horrible Christmas, and a period of low morale in the troops, is certainly
evocative, but I am disagreeably impressed by your sanctimonious priggish-
ness – not only in the Army, but at Oxford where you wrote your account. I
cannot believe that your army were as bad. If so, it was not surprising that
Cook, Homfray and Clifford disliked you as much as you did them.
Bion: I think the ‘diary’ is a fair enough reflection of me (F. Bion 1997,
p.208; author’s bold)
Do these comments on companions-in-arms differ from the not-so subdued,
behind-the-scenes, ‘corridor talks’ during coffee-breaks in meetings at psy-
choanalytical societies or conferences? Is this disdainful mode any different
from the references many a psychoanalyst makes about his or her colleagues? I
can observe the existence of a ‘critical sense’, a product of intelligence and
scientific unrest. I regard it as a manifestation of the epistemophilic instinct
(Freud 1909, p.245; Klein 1932, pp.115, 153, 247). Under the aegis of the
death instinct and immobilized in the paranoid–schizoid position, it
expresses itself as hetero-criticism and violence. It transforms itself into
morality. Under the aegis of the life instinct it moves freely from the
paranoid–schizoid to the depressive position and vice-versa, and it is
expressed as self-criticism, love of truth and compassion. It is transformed into
ethics and discipline. The pattern is not an outside being, entity or code; it is
the person vis-à-vis him/herself.
As he grew more mature, Bion used characters named after friends to
express parts of himself. ‘Hauser’s’ conversation with the professional soldier
‘Carter’ indicates an appreciation of what occurs when love is split off from
hate. It also displays with fine detail what happens when a given social reality
has a ‘stimulating’ function or whatever it be. For ‘social reality’ I understand
the encircling context, either macro or micro social environment. For
example, this social reality may be a sick organization; too often, social envi-
ronments are overcast with projective identifications. In this case, ‘stimulating’
should be seen in the sense of providing a perversely ‘good container’ for
projective identifications, which follow unobserved, in an authentic
70 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

‘cross-fire’. Hate follows undisturbed, in the form of contempt of life, lack of

scruples and a cunning use of projective identification. Politicians and all sorts
of group leaders use it, either conscious or unconsciously. In many focal geo-
graphical areas (in Africa, Far East, Middle East, some parts of Central and
South America and now in the Balkans again) it lingers in the explicit, more
easily apprehended form of the sensuous–concrete counterpart in reality that
the word ‘war’ conjures. But in some periods of history, such as our epoch, the
post-World War II age, the formidable caesura of explicit, generalised
concrete war does not exist. If it existed, it could more readily display to us the
impressive, albeit unobserved, continuity of the death instinct in seemingly
more peaceful times. Bion himself talks about ‘war among psycho-analysts’ in
Memoir of the Future, Vol. II (1977a); careful publications such as The
Freud–Klein Controversies (King and Steiner 1991) display the state of mind
underlying the burning of books and, therefore, ideas as a timeless posture,
which does not dispense with menaces of survival to those who are
considered wrong, for they can be deprived of their means to earn a living,
even if they are not physically eliminated on the spot. Even within the
psychoanalytical movement, a cunning ability to get rid of personal responsi-
bility and ethics, and an abuse of projective identification are too often
regarded as ‘political ability’:
‘Ah, yes,’ said Hauser bitterly, ‘this war, like the last war, is to be the war to
end war; and the next war, like this war, will be a war to end war, and so on
ad infinitum. And all the breakthroughs are the last possible breakthroughs
which will break through everything of course, naturally.’
‘I see you are in very good form too – sarcastic as usual. Still, I
sympathize with you. I can’t honestly say that I believe that this is going to
be the last war, and in fact I think it would be a damned bad thing if it was.’
Hauser snorted. ‘You had better be careful how you say that kind of
think to the Christian contingent. I don’t think I should be inclined to air
your views too much to Bion and his pals if I were you.’
‘No’, said Carter, ‘I don’t think I would. Still, they’re not a bad lot in
their way. The trouble about these damned Christians is, of course, that
although they’re so full of high ideals, and so packed with enthusiasm, and
so determined that right will triumph, they fail to appreciate some of the
more seamy sides of this business. Then when at last it does get through
them, they have a nasty way of cracking up – in my opinion. I remember one
poor devil. We used to think the world of him, but he just went west when
he discovered his colonel was trying to do a bit of graft on him and had
thwarted his possibilities of promotion simply because the colonel himself
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 71

was afraid that if he promoted such a promising officer, his own job would
be jeopardized. He became unstuck, and the next thing he did was to have a
kind of breakdown. This had the effect of proving that the Colonel was
quite right, when in fact he was quite wrong.’ (Bion 1997a, p.232)
Does the psychoanalytic movement offer a brighter perspective on the rela-
tionships between its members? Are they amenable to be managed with
well-intentioned laws and bylaws intended to regulate the relationships
between human beings whose internal, intrapsychic relationships still follow
on under the aegis of the death instincts split off from the life instincts? After
World War II, Bion would return to this point:
To me it seems that in so far as man has set about the regulation of external
relationships by law, he has been tolerably successful; the failure arises when
it comes to producing any method for dealing with the underlying tensions
in human relationships. And yet it is precisely these primitive unconscious
tensions that present the fundamental problem in all human relationships.
Whenever they obtrude themselves as an intrinsic element in the problem
that is being studied, men retreat into further exploration of the possibilities
of external regulation. This repeated preoccupation with machinery, being
themselves nothing more than a by-product of the failure to grapple with
the main problem, never achieves any higher level than the technicalities of
police operations, no matter how magnificent the language they are clothed
in. (Bion 1947, p.341)

The depressive position

With the aid of his self-criticism Bion maintained a sour, paradoxical relation
to his war decorations, some of them ranking among the highest to be
awarded for gallantry and skill. There are written indications that he valued
them, alongside his university degrees. But how did he value them? In Bion in
New York and São Paulo he stated his strong opinion that the gas chambers in
Auschwitz should be preserved in order to prevent forgetting. He always
declared that his Distinguished Service Order medal (DSO, one of the highest
decorations for non-commissioned officers, second only to the VR) was his
‘mark of shame’. All these self-critical ‘second thoughts’ were included with
typically British humour in the A Memoir of the Future trilogy (1975a, 1977a),
and they turn bitter in its complement, The Long Week-End (Bion 1975, 1977,
1979, 1982, 1985). The crystal-clear statements of the Diary, linked with
Amiens (1958) and the Commentary (1972) (see F. Bion, 1997), might
decisively contribute to prevent self-appointed followers and disciples
72 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

creating a ‘cult of heroes’. This term was used by Freud in a talk with a friend,
the gifted writer Arnold Zweig, when trying to dissuade him from writing
Freud’s biography and ‘idolization’, as Hans Thorner observed. The
Commentary seems to be almost violent in its self-criticism towards a young
Bion perhaps recovering from a psychotic bout, but still intoxicated,
occupying the paranoid–schizoid position, with fantasies of superiority and
leaning towards hiding the truth through splitting and denial. In the
Commentary Bion tries to restore what which had once been his own earlier
perceptions of ‘O’ truth. Those perceptions, which were painful and were
denied by the young officer, have been transformed up to the point of
distortion. In fact, the ‘O’ truth is ultimately unknowable, but the perception,
intuition or using of it are ever at our disposal. We can obtain the truth about
Bion’s unfavourable opinion of himself when he was 20 years old. It was
repressed and denied, transformed to the point of distortion into its contrary,
appearing as self-praise, propaganda. Thirty-eight years later, Bion agrees
with himself: his opinion is expressed to himself. This leads to the sense of truth.
To be faithful to himself: a product of analysis (‘we hope to introduce the
person to his ‘real’ self’; Bion 1977a, p.44). To be nourished by Truth, the
food of the mind – as he puts it in the studies published in Cogitations (1960),
Learning from Experience (1962b), Transformations (1965) – and till the end of
this life.
In some circles of people who knew Bion personally, there is often a
question which I believe false, in so far as it tries to reach absolute truth: was
Bion a good soldier? According to himself, he was not. According to some
11
superiors and friends, he was. Such a contradiction, unlike a paradox,
obstructs the sense of truth and common sense. What was he? We – those who
are alive now and were not witness of facts – shall never know. Enjoying his
hard-won maturity, he was nearer his own common sense. Then he admitted
that he had been – in his own view, and this does not depend on other
people’s views – a bad soldier even though he wished to be a good one.12 And
he said it ‘loud and clear’ to himself without depression or guilt, without
evasion or subterfuge, which appears to me to constitute a sense of truth; he
shelters now the good and bad object, that in the end are himself, or his true
self. This process is often complicated because in some cases one may overtly
downsize oneself through verbal self-recriminations with a view to obtaining
external consolation; the denial does not subside. In those cases there is a
mimicry of the depressive position, which turns out to be untrue. The ‘false
depressive position’ is usually full of verbal acknowledgements of guilt
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 73

devoid of the living experience of insight into it; a kind of propaganda that
often successfully advertises something that person is in reality avoiding
experiencing. I think that those living examples, written in a literary form, can
really contribute to the more precise observation of the obtrusion of that
which Bion himself puts into more theoretical terms, such as ‘hyperbole’ and
‘violence of emotions’, in his earlier published work, for example, in the last
three chapters of Transformations. There he dwells on Klein’s observation that
it is not only the hate that endangers the object, but also violent love (Klein
1934, p.286). Bion many times said that the wish to be a good analyst (to act
out memory and desire) precludes being an analyst. To wish to be a good
parent, child, soldier, whatever it be, precludes being a real parent, child,
soldier, analyst.

Splitting, denial and absolute truth

There are states of mindlessness linked to splitting (in the sense given by Melanie
Klein) which result in destructive value judgements:
The rest of the day passed more or less uneventfully except for the fact that
the Boche smelt a rat and started to shell our little area. We took cover and
lost neither men nor tanks. We simply had the misery of enduring an hour
13
and a half ’s desultory strafe from 5.9’s. In the evening we were cheered by
the arrival of three artillery officers who were going up to observation posts
to reconnoitre. They stopped to talk, and we had the usual flow of ‘news’.
The artillery are notorious liars and always cheerful liars. They assured us
the enemy would attack the next morning and that they would suffer
hopeless defeat; King George had been assassinated and Horatio
14
Bottomley had seized the throne; the Germans had sued for peace, which
would probably be signed within three days. With this and earnest protesta-
tions of truthfulness they departed! It’s a funny thing, but cheeriness was every bit
as infectious as gloom, and those yarns, with the method of telling, quite set us
15
up for the night. But we were to have a rude shock. Clifford had not been
near us since he had departed to Brigade HQ in a state of panic. We had been
left entirely to our own devices. (F. Bion 1997, pp.60–61; my italics)
Just before action, the company had found a false refuge in a convent near
Meteren:
At this date things were very bad. It is very difficult to stop in a line for days
and expect an enemy attack at any moment. The strain on the nerves is very
great, especially when you know there is nothing between the enemy and
the sea but your line of troops. Idiot jokes in mess and open talk of fear all
74 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

contributed to lower one’s spirits, and, as you will hear, I was already in a
very low state.
The night’s rest and the good food made us feel very much better. We
were hardly disturbed by the enemy’s shelling of the convent as his fire was
erratic; and although there were casualties, they occurred in a different part
of the building. (ibid p.89)
A kind of progressive self-attack on his own perception, turning him, albeit in
a hallucinated way, into an insensitive person, oblivious to the danger and far
from self-preservation (depleted of the life instincts) took the young official
over as the war went on. To the practising analyst, this entails the impossibility
16
of ‘smelling’ the ‘O’ truth. There is an exacerbation of the destructive mental
situation of splitting. From page 93 onwards the account shows how Bion’s
survival depended increasingly on chance, as well as on his precocious
capacity of discernment. The latter naturally proved to be useful in his later
psychoanalytical practice.
It was a weird business – the heat, and the nightmares out of which one
started up suddenly in a kind of horror to find the sweat pouring down one’s
face. It was almost impossible to distinguish dream from reality. The tat-tat-tat of
the German machine-guns would chime in with your dream with uncanny
effect, so that when you awoke you wondered whether you were dreaming.
The machine-gun made you think everything was genuine, and only by
degrees you recovered yourself to fall into uneasy sleep again. (ibid. p.94; my
italics)
The situation was extremely serious and it seems that Bion was finally able to
get his sense back. The dangerous, life-threatening state would be further
elaborated in studies in Second Thoughts (1967): the person is neither
dreaming nor awake, there is no discrimination between dead and alive, the
psychotic personality does not distinguish animate from inanimate. A forced
splitting occurs (Cogitations, p.133; Learning from Experience, p.9 and also
Chapter V) or ‘anti-alpha-function’, as I have proposed to name it (Sandler
1990, 1997a). See also in many parts of A Memoir of the Future:
The dreamless sleep ended. The day was as empty of events – facts proper to
daytime – as the night had been empty of dreams. Meals were served to both
girls. It occurred to them that they had no memory of the food; the ‘Facts’ of
daytime and night were defective, mutilated. They were having dreams –
mutilated dreams – lacking a dimension like a solid body that cast no
shadow in light. The world of reality, facts, was no longer distinguishable
from dreams, unconsciousness, night. Thoughts with and thoughts without
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 75

a thinker replaced universe where discrimination ruled. Dreams had none of

the distinguishing characteristics of mind, feelings, mental representations,
formulations. The thinker had no thoughts, the thoughts were without
thinkers. Freudian dreams had no Freudian free associations; Freudian free
associations had no dreams. Without intuition they were empty, without
concept they were blind. (Bion 1975a, p.41)
Having thus rid himself of the apparatus of conscious awareness of internal
and external reality, the patient achieves a state which is felt to be neither
alive nor dead (Bion 1956, p.38; see also 1957, p.46)
I would begin to be a bit suspicious about that patient: I would wonder
whether she really knows the difference between a dream and waking life,
or whether she knows the difference between courtship – a love affair – and
a psychoanalysis (Bion 1975b, p.5)
It did not take long for interest in life to die out. Soon I found myself almost
hopeless. I used to lie on my back and stare at the low roof. Sometimes I
stared for hours at a small piece of mud that hung from the roof by a grass
and quivered to the explosion of the shells. Then suddenly one day I heard
that the South Africans on our left were playing the fool. They used to crawl
out onto the road on their left at night and try to get hit by the German
machine-gun that fired down the road. The news had a curiously bracing
effect. I don’t know now whether the tale was true – certainly it had been
common enough in the earlier part of the war – but I felt things now could
be no worse and that actually a gleam of hope had appeared – it was always
possible to get badly wounded or perhaps even killed… life had now
reached such a pitch that horrible mutilations or death could not conceiv-
ably be worse…After all, if you get a man and hunt him like an animal, in
time he will become one. I am at a loss now to tell you of our life. Such
worlds separate the ordinary human’s point of view from mine at that time,
that anything I can write will either be incomprehensible or will give a quite
wrong impression (’Amiens’ in F. Bion 1997, p.94)
The state of mind that phantasizes possession of absolute truth was gradually
seen as dangerous to life itself. In later years, Bion would profit from this
experience when he brought into the psychoanalytical realm the actuality of
the fantasies of possessing absolute truth, ideas of full contact with
beta-elements, Kant’s ‘Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself ). As the war continued,
this dangerous state of mind became more frequent:
…a curious kind of excitement that used to come over us in action… I told
Hauser that I thought the only thing we could do if we were to be any use at
76 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

all was to get out of our place and get with our men. He agreed. I may as well
say now that from that point of view of sheer unadulterated lunacy what
followed was the maddest and most dangerous thing I ever did. I must have
been very nearly mad to do it. But I never thought more clearly in my life
(’Amiens’ in F. Bion, 1997, p.106; Bion’s italics)

Femininity
Slowly, the multitude of judgements start to disappear – perhaps in the way
that good mothers do not judge their children. After several months of cruel
battles Bion begins to use the high temperature of the exhaust pipes of the
tanks to boil water in containers improvised from gasoline cans, thus
conjuring up a serious manifestation of ‘Britishness’ otherwise unthinkable:
hot tea. Later on, Bion would ingeniously and maternally find a way of
getting round still another strenous job which his men had to face for more
than ten uninterrupted hours before battle. They had to sweep mile after mile
of ground behind the tanks, to erase the trail left by the tank tracks, which
could be spotted by aircraft or reconnaissance balloons. Bion attached a kind
of giant sweeper to the back of the bestial weapon, which could thus automat-
ically sweep behind itself.
Can human beings attain happiness? This provides us with a link between
motherhood and a baby’s expectations. Is happiness a word that has any
counterpart in reality? Or can we human beings only experience ‘unreal
felicity’? Whatever it may be, there is a transience in this event. If the
individual is under the aegis of the pleasure/unpleasure principle, he/she
abhors the transient nature of life. Those doubts coincide with feminine
expressions of care and life among the soldiers: the beer in the canteen, hot
meals, good cigars and an officer playing ‘Träumerei’ on the violin. Unpleasant
surprises put an end to the gaiety: Mount Kemmel, which had been
considered a firm conquest, was lost again. ‘We got up and looked at the
pleasant room and the cheery fire and wondered why we had ever been such
fools as to believe they were real’ (‘Diary’ in War Memoirs, p.99). The same
situation repeats itself with the episode of the drowning of the noise of the
Handley Page bombers protecting the infantry men (ibid., p.103). Is there a
moment in life after the stage of the mother–baby pair, when projective iden-
tification is not just a phantasy?
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 77

The unknown
Apparently Bion faced rather early the need for a kind of discipline and care
which he would later call Attention and Interpretation. Perhaps this kind of
discipline allows for a real analysis, a real life which deserves this name, a life
which is not locked in unconsciousness, unconcern, the commonplace, little
learning, contempt toward the animated world, superficiality, arrogance,
illusion. The micrometric following, by the analyst, in an observant and lively
manner, of ‘each’, as it were, psychic movement in the session seems to me
another of Bion’s contributions to analytical practice and to psychoanalysis.
Foreshadowing this is the need to live through five hours to advance just one
mile inside a steel cage filled with carbon monoxide, continuously risking a
direct hit which would blow it up instantaneously. This was the tank (Bion
1977, pp.44–45). Is there any practising analyst who endures session after
session in order to reach what is often much less than a ‘psychic mile’ – which
in real terms should be called a ‘micro-mile’ – and is entitled to be exempted
from such an effort? What is waiting for us after an insight? Usually, it is a
resistance. What is waiting for our perception after the real experiencing of
the depressive position? A renewed experiencing of the paranoid–schizoid
position, if the analysis proceeds. Bion formulated this often denied aspect of
Melanie Klein’s work, the living tandem movement that dynamically depicts
the interplay of the paranoid–schizoid position with the depressive position
17
through a quasi-mathematical symbol: PS–D. The unknown – Freud
unearthed the forgotten insights of the German Idealism and called it the
18
unconscious, and later, the id – is the life of an analyst. At least, to those who
do suspect that, during a session, the whole of the psychoanalytic theory can
constitute a vast paramnesia to fill the void of our ignorance (Bion 1976,
1977b). To try to use the already available body of knowledge as a shield to
‘becoming’ and to ‘being’ what one really is, equals scientific push into the
unknown. It means that one avoids using theories either as a priori
pre-patterned moulds repeatedly used to fit clinical data into a priori theories
or ad hoc theories that fit the clinical data. Bion, because of his war experience,
19
the analyst in real analysis, the patient undergoing a real analysis, can
probably report their experience in the same way: ‘You felt you were being
pushed into the unknown’ (Bion 1997, p.79).
This seems to be a counterpoint of the bard’s insight: ‘It’s like a barber’s
chair, that fits all buttocks’ (Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well II, ii, 18).
Bion’s philosophical background had firm bearings in his life experience. Let
us continue with the tank experience: the engine simply did not work for a
78 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

whole day, but he did not give up: ‘The infantry were warned that my tank
wouldn’t be able to go in after all. We started up again, however, and to our
surprise it went like a bird that time to the end!’ (F. Bion 1997, p.47). To
someone who had this experience and managed to learn from it, David
Hume’s observation on the pitfalls involved in inductive reasoning becomes
crystal clear, rather than a subject of sterile, brainy, philosophical dispute.
This is a delicate, and in my opinion still little understood, point in Bion’s
work – what he said about reality and truth, about common sense. I propose the
following steps: first, to put up with the multi-dimensional nature of three
views, i.e. A Memoir of the Future, The Long Week-End, War Memoirs. Second, to
couple this with a paradoxical fact without any attempt to resolve it: the views
were written by, and correspond to, four ‘different’ people: the youngster, the
experienced analyst and the older man that are simultaneously the fourth, i.e.
one person called Bion. If what I propose proves to be acceptable, we have a
situation – the whole of Bion’s autobiographical cycle – analogous to the five
human senses (or six as Freud suggested, when he regarded consciousness as
the sense organ for the perception of psychic reality). Hence we become
capable of achieving common sense – each view being analogous to each
human sense. Bion, after Locke and Hume, brought into light the common-
sense nature of psychoanalysis, already existing in the work of Freud and
Klein. It must be neither confused with ‘commonplace’ nor with ‘good sense’,
a concept used by Descartes and by religion. It concerns the fact that all the
‘senses’ can apprehend the same reality, even if we do not know exactly what
this reality is. It must not be confused with Bachelard’s use of the term in
French (Bachelard 1938). The common sense is either individual or
collective: having at least two senses in common, or, even better, more than
two. It allows getting closer to ‘O’, even if this closeness is transient and
fleeting as the Demiurge and the forms, demanding constant adjustment.20
This concept of common sense in Bion’s work is identical to that originally
created by Locke, a fact which has generally been overlooked. Given the solid
scientific grounding that Bion had in Oxford, it is not surprising to find it in
his work. Like Freud, he continuously made use of Bacon, Locke, and Hume,
and he allied them with Kant. We cannot know what really happened in the
muddy fields of Flanders – ‘O’. A verbal transformation can take the form of
‘incarnate horror’. The lack of life goes on there. Today most of those who
witnessed that life are dead and we do not know what it was. But we know
that it was and we may intuit its nature.
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 79

Doubts regarding the human possibilities of love and concern for truth
seem to me this book’s leitmotiv. What is the reality of love? What is its possi-
bility in social terms, ‘passionate love’, according to Bion the highest
expression of ‘O’ itself, or its complementary, matching antithesis in the anti-
thetical pair, ‘beastly hatred’? Passionate love is also made apparent in some
passages in War Memoirs (e.g. p.215) as well as in the very existence of the
whole autobiographical cycle in its published form. After all, it is the work of a
creative couple, Wilfred Bion and his dedicated wife Francesca. Perhaps love
is a permanent state of doubt, of rejecting policies of ‘property’, or ‘thus far
and no further’, as he writes in the trilogy, on the subject of life and love. Life
and love is a flame that is eternal as long as it lasts:
Myself: What upsets you most?
Bion: Your success, I think. I hesitate to say it, because it sounds ungrateful. I
cannot imagine what was wrong, but I never recovered from the survival of
the Battle of Amiens. Most of what I do not like about you seemed to start
then.
Myself: As you had not realized it then, I am surprised that you say so little
about events that in retrospect seem utterly horrible.
Bion: I should have thought that there was nothing material excluded .
Myself: Possibly. It may not have struck you as dramatic enough to mention
the time, long before Ypres, when you were asleep on the stone floor of a
farmhouse that had been levelled in previous fighting. That sickly, sweet
stench of corpses which…
Bion: …we couldn’t locate. I remember perfectly. What about it?
Myself: Nothing: that was what was so awful. You were not even frightened.
By the time you got to Oxford, you had ‘forgotten’ it. I don’t remember it,
but my gut does. I was and am still scared. What about? I don’t know – just
scared. No, not even ‘just’ scared. Scared.
Bion: That ‘sweet smell of the dead’ I remember. It was pervasive. Where was
that? I know it was before we had tanks.
Myself: And how could you have been such a damned fool as to let that
Boche drag you to the dug-out where his dead pal was? On August 8th it
was.
Bion: I remember. Asser was about to die – refusing to surrender. He could
have been fighting for something of which I could not be aware. But his
80 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

death killed me. At least, it made me feel I could never be a man of such
intensity that I would knowingly embrace certain death.
Myself: Years after, many years after, I learned that I could hardly claim to
love a woman because the woman’s love included her love of the father of
her children. I do not know. I can only aspire to such love and suffer the
uncertainty that it is only an aspiration of which I fall short.
Bion: I had no doubt – do not ask me why, but I repeat no doubt – that Asser,
nearly a year younger than me, was such a man. I do not feel that about you,
who I have survived to become.
Myself: I certainly do not claim it. I am still ‘becoming’, though. It depends if
death forestalls my growth. I can hardly claim more time as of a right. (Bion
1977, pp.209–210)

Acknowledgements
to Mrs. Francesca Bion and Dr Robert Lipgar, who kindly reviewed the
original text with painstaking care, granting me the privilege of their many
corrections as well as suggestions; to Drssa Parthenope Bion Talamo, for her
reading and suggestions; to Prof. Marc de La Ruelle, for his correction of the
English language.

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Brazilian version, São Paulo, Abril Cultural, 1974.
Bracher, K. (1968) The German Dictatorship. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Bullock, A. (1997) Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. (revised edition, 1998) London: Fontana.
Dirac, P. (1930) The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. Fourth edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2001.
Eksteins, M. (1989). A Sagração da Primavera. Brazilian version, by R. Eichenberg. Rio de
Janeiro: Rocco, 1991.
Fest, J. (1963) The Face of the Third Reich. English version, by M. Bullock. London: Pelican
Books, 1979.
Freud, S. (1909) ‘A Case of Obsessional Neurosis.’ Standard Edition X.
Freud, S. (1911) ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia.’ Standard Edition XII.
Freud, S. (1912) ‘The Dynamics of Transference.’ Standard Edition XII.
Freud, S. (1914) ‘On Narcissism.’ Standard Edition XIV.
Freud, S. (1930) ‘The Goethe Prize’ Address delivered in the Goethe House at Frankfurt
Standard Edition XXI.
Freud, S. (1938) ‘Constructions in Analysis’ Standard Edition XXIII.
King, P. and Steiner, J. (1991) The Freud–Klein Controversies. London: Routledge.
Klein, M. (1932) The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-Analysis, 1959.
82 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Klein M. (1934) ‘A Contribution to the psycho-genesis of the manic-depressive states.’ In

Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1950.
Klein M. (1946) ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms.’ In Developments in Psycho-Analysis. M.
Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, J. Riviere, (eds) Developments in Psycho-Analysis London; The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1952.
Law, B. [Viscount Montgomery of Alamein] (1958) The Memoirs of Field Marshal the Viscount
Montgomery of Alamein, K.G. New York: Signet Books.
Lyth, O. (1980) ‘Obituary: Wilfred Ruprecht Bion.’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 61,
269.
Sandler, P. C. (1987) ‘The Long Week-End.’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 14, 273.
Sandler, P. C. (1988) Introdução a ‘Uma Memória do Futuro’, de W. R. Bion. Rio de Janeiro: Imago
Editora Ltada.
Sandler, P. C. (1990) Fatos: A tragédia do conhecimento em psicanálise. Rio de Janeiro: Imago
Editora Ltada.
Sandler, P. C. (1997a) ‘The apprehension of psychic reality: Extensions of Bion’s theory of
alpha-function.’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 78, 43.
Sandler, P. C. (1997b). A Apreensão da Realidade Psíquica. Vol. I. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora
Ltada.
Sandler, P. C. (1999) ‘Um desenvolvimento e aplicação clínica do instrumento de Bion, o
Grid.’ Rev. Bras. Psicanál 33, 13, 38.
Sandler, P. C. (2000) A Apreensão da Realidade Psíquica. Vol. III: As Origens da Psicanálise na Obra
de Kant. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora Ltada.
Sandler, P. C. (2002) ‘O Desassossego de Russell, as Irrelevâncias de Dirac’ (Origens inéditas
du obra de Bion) IDE 35, 69–84.
Tálamo, P. B. (1997) ‘Aftermath.’ In W. R. Bion War Memoirs. London: Karnac Books.
Taylor, A. J. P. (1950–1967) Europe: Grandeur and Decline. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Thorner, H. A. (1981) ‘Notes on the desire of knowledge.’ International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 62, 73.

Endnotes
1. As soon as this paper was completed, the psychoanalytic movement was struck by an
unpleasantly sad surprise: the untimely disappearance of Drssa. Parthenope Bion
Talamo. As was the custom in a four-year history of mutual collaboration, Drssa.
Parthenope Bion Talamo was reviewing this manuscript; she already had kindly given
some ideas on it. I dedicate the present text to her memory.
2. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations refer to War Memoirs (Bion, 1997). The
reader must bear in mind that all the names Bion use in his books are fictional, out of
his natural courtesy and deep respect to his fellow men.
3. At second ‘ Bion’s Writings Around the World’, extra-official meeting at IPAC, San
Francisco, 1995.
4. I proposed elsewhere an aid to grasp its meaning and usage though a tri-dimensional
version of the Grid; it was awarded the ‘Durval Marcondes Prize’, given by the
Associação Brasileira de Psicanálise to papers written by training analysts, 1999
(Sandler, 1999).
 BION’S WAR MEMOIRS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL COMMENTARY 83

5. The choosing of a literary presentation sometimes fuels hostile questioning about the
psychoanalytical status of some works. One may be reminded that Freud won a Litera-
ture Prize (the Goethe Prize, 1930). Bion’s autobiographical cycle is useful to the prac-
tising psychoanalyst. It resembles Freud’s and, perhaps surprisingly, Goethe’s work.
Not only in the formal, dialogic structure but also in the way that Goethe, just like
Freud and Bion, was one of those wise men whose broadness of knowledge was so re-
markable that it defies any attempt at classification. Goethe was a scientist, a poet, a
philosopher. His autobiographical cycle, Wilhelm Meister, which I take to include
Dichtung und Wahrheit, Werther and Faust, is one of the most effective testimonies of real
human nature. Shakespeare inspired Goethe; both inspired Freud and Klein; those four
were perhaps Bion’s most fundamental intellectual forebears.
6. During one week in 1914 two million young men from the main European capitals en-
thusiastically enlisted themselves to fight (Eksteins 1989; Sandler 1987).
7. Kant’s ‘criticism’ or critique is a method first expounded in his work Critique of Pure
Reason. He displays the flaws of rational thinking and formal, classical logics when the
issue is the apprehension of reality, especially deductive and inductive methods, as well
as showing some of the traps of dogmatic metaphysics. Freud based his discovery of
psychic reality and the unconscious realm as a form of existence of its own, vis-à-vis
material reality, on Kant’s differentiation of immanent, sensuously apprehensible phe-
nomena and the transcendent, ultra and infra-sensuous realm of noumena. The investi-
gation of the roots of psychoanalysis in the work of Kant is published elsewhere
(Sandler 1997b, 2000).
8. I am using a concept that tries to make a constant conjunction of two observations:
Bion’s linkage between arrogance and self-respect (On Arrogance, 1957) and T. S.
Eliot’s observation that self-criticism produces poetry and hetero-criticism (criticism
directed at persons other than oneself ) produces poetry.
9. In a seemingly psychotic adolescent foolhardiness, young Bion moved heaven and
earth to enlist at 17, after being rejected on the grounds of age and perhaps augment-
ing it artificially, using his father’s prerogatives as a colonial engineer serving in India.
See The Long Week-End (Bion, 1982, pp.98–118).
10. In the beginning of the Diary (F. Bion 1997), Bion boasts that the tank soldiers are su-
perior people; and he also records his opinion that more seasoned infantry soldiers
joined the Tank Corps in order to evade direct combat.
11. For the differentiation between contradictions and paradoxes, see Sandler 1997b.
12. I had the opportunity to confirm this interpretation of mine with Mrs Bion’s ideas and
experience with her husband. She, kind as ever, was gracious enough to confirm to me
that Dr Bion maintained deep respect towards those who he saw as ‘real soldiers’, even
though he would not include himself among them. Hence the paradoxical situation,
that one can observe under the paradox of the sense of the truth, without trying to re-
solve it, regarding his war decorations as ‘marks of shame’, as he depicts them in A
Memoir of the Future and The Long Week-End, while at the same time he used these deco-
rations of war on important occasions in his whole life, including them with his titles,
following his name as the author of many of his books.
13. This refers to the diameter, in inches, of fragmentation howitzers with very precise
aiming which were utterly destructive and hazardous projectiles, much feared by sol-
diers because they cruelly injured people in an almost indescribable, appalling way.
They were a typically German military speciality: maximum destructive power with
maximum mechanical precision and speed.
84 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

14. King George was a known alcoholic who lacked competence to be a real king. As a re-
sult some demagogues and professional speakers, seasoned in the skills of rhetoric,
perceived a void in which to act – and to make money. Among these Horatio
Bottomley was perhaps the most successful. He showed a striking similarity to John
Bull, which gave him mythical clout. He made a remarkable fortune with his ‘patriotic’
speeches.
15. The battalion commander at that moment.
16. Or ‘pursuing truth O’ (‘Reality: psychic and sensuous’, in Attention and Interpretation).
17. The more popular interpretation of Klein’s original interplay between the positions
debased it into a static concept pervaded with idealized ideas of cure. The so-called
‘neo-Kleinians’ understand that PS should be regarded as madness, a pathological
state. Conversely, they regard D as the goal of that which they see as a successful analy-
sis, as if mind could be a paralysed entity allowing its ‘beholder’ to live in a para-
dise-like ‘cured’ or ‘analysed’ state.
18. ‘The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as
the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as
is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.’ (Freud 1900, The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, p.613; Freud’s italics).
19. ‘P.A.: Mystery is real life; real life is the concern of real analysis, Jargon passes for psy-
cho-analysis, as sound is substituted for music, verbal facility for literature and poetry,
trompe l’oeil representations for painting.’ (Bion 1977, p.80)
20. Bion was explicit in many of his works, as for example, Transformations (for example,
pp.136, 136, 147) and A Memoir of the Future (for example, vol. I, p.56) of his respect
towards Plato’s dialogues especially The Republic, whose metaphor of the cave and
shadows he quoted often. One of the most used photos of him displays his own copy
of Plato’s works. Bion’s emphasis on Plato served as an inspiration to my own research
on Freud’s origins in Plato’s observations. These observations also caused some of Ar-
istotle’s attacks on him. Plato posited the existence of ideal forms, or simple forms, that
corresponded to the unknowable ultimate reality that were, nevertheless, real and the
origin of everything else. Plato also formulated the existence of an untiring and
ever-erring demiurge, a mythological entity that tried to copy the forms, being
doomed to eternal failure and eternal reformulation. This corresponds, according to
my own research, to Freud’s concept of unconscious and conscious; and to Kant’s
noumenic and phaenomenic realms (Sandler 1997b).
 3

Gregariousness and the Mind

Wilfred Trotter and Wilfred Bion

Nuno Torres

Devil: …I do not cultivate theories; theories are a symptom of gregarious

animals when they function as members of a group. I am special, individual,
a victim of disapproval.
Bion, The Dawn of Oblivion (1979)

It is reasonably consensual that Bion’s scientific production can be divided

roughly at least into two clear stages: the ‘group period’ and the ‘psy-
cho-analytic period’. Both periods are clearly marked by his analysts. The first
1
period is marked by the analysis with John Rickman, and the second one
with Melanie Klein. One of John Rickman’s ultimate aims was to apply psy-
choanalytic knowledge to the study of groups (Rickman, 1957) and Bion
shared it; they’ve worked together on groups for many years. In Bion’s words:
‘There is no corpus of knowledge that does for the study of the group what
psychoanalysis does for the study of the individual…a subject which today
has begun to assume clearer outlines’ (Bion 1948, p.82).
Later, Bion would follow Melanie Klein’s advice and abandon the group
studies in favour of psychoanalysis of individuals. The separation of these two
periods is so sharply linked to Rickman and Klein, that Bion wrote and
published ‘Group dynamics: a review’ (Bion 1952), his last paper on groups,
the year after Rickman’s death on July 1951. He reformulated his earlier
group dynamics theory as manifestations of psychotic mechanisms described

85
86 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

by Klein, and would not write again on groups until 1970 (Attention and Inter-
pretation),
It is the aim of this paper to show that there is a third major influence on
Bion’s scientific ideas, although much hidden in the background: Wilfred
Trotter. Trotter represents one influence that can be considered no less funda-
mental than Rickman and Klein, and certainly more inclusive, as it can be seen
traversing all of Bion’s work, unlike that of Rickman and Klein which are in
some ways mutually exclusive.2 In Wilfred Trotter we can find the conceptual
roots for several original propositions and fundamental conceptions
concerning group dynamics and the functioning of the mind in general,
which were foreign to earlier psychoanalytic propositions:
(a) the study of the factors which lead to group morale (good group
spirit)
(b) preference for groups with ‘suspended leadership’ instead of
authority-based ones
(c) man as a gregarious animal
(d) group mentality, and its conflict with individual needs
(e) the triad of group instinctual basic behaviour, plus a social valency
(f ) the mind’s necessity for truth and certainty, and the problem of
intolerance to uncertainty
(g) the importance and difficulties of learning by experience
(h) the focus on the ‘development of the mind’ instead of the alleged
‘cure’
(i) the conflicts between the new idea and establishment (status quo)
(j) the importance of accepting mental turbulence instead of adherence
to stable-minded states
(k) the crucial need for an adequate system of communicating ideas
(l) the mental ‘digestion’ of raw sensory material into food for thought
(m) the mind as a muscle
(n) the danger of human extinction.
The analysis of these issues is not merely an exercise in historic archaeology. It
can throw some light onto some of Bion’s conceptions, frequently taken as
‘enigmatic and deliberately half-formulated’ (Hinshelwood 1994, p.ix).
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 87

Who was Trotter?

Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter (1872–1939) was, according to Strachey, one
‘English man of science and wide education born at the middle of the
nineteenth century’ (Cheshire and Thoma 1991), a surgeon and sociologist
whose writings on the behaviour of man in the mass popularised the phrase
‘herd instinct’. He had been a surgeon at the University College Hospital,
London, since 1906, a professor of surgery there since 1935, and held the
office of honorary surgeon to King George V from 1928 to 1932. In the
history of surgery he is especially noted for his work on the regeneration of
sensory nerves in the skin.
Furthermore, his role in the history of the British psychoanalytical
movement is a pioneering and central one; he had attended the first Interna-
tional Congress of Psychoanalysis in April 1908, and brought its ideas to
England. He was the great friend and staunch supporter of Ernest Jones. The
latter says that he was, ‘apart from Freud, the man who mattered most in my
life’ (Jones cit. in Gillespie 1979). According to Ernest Jones:
He was one of the first two or three in England to appreciate the significance
of Freud’s work, which I came to know through him…he followed the
development of Psycho-Analysis to the end of his life (he revised the trans-
lation of the Moses book, for instance)… He was a member of the Council
of the Royal Society that conferred their Honorary Membership on
Professor Freud and he attended him medically after his removal to
England. (Jones 1940)
In 1905, Trotter and Jones shared an office in Harley Street, and they shared
enthusiastically theoretical interests:
Together they discussed far-reaching plans for improving the future of civi-
lization based on a full knowledge of the biological, including psycholog-
ical, motivation of man… Jones and Trotter had begun their study of
abnormal psychology by reading William James, Frederic Myers and Milne
Bramwell, then the French school, and above all Janet…Then, through
Trotter, Jones discovered Freud, first through reading the Dora analysis…
Trotter and Jones had already appreciated that the secrets to be discovered
were outside of consciousness, but they did not know how to explore
unconscious mental processes until Freud showed the way, namely by the
technique of ‘free association’. (Gillespie 1979, pp.276–277)
With a growing interest in Freud’s workings, Trotter and Jones decided to
learn German for the purpose of going into the matter further (Jones 1945).
For a variety of reasons, their professional ways separated; Jones become a
88 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

psychoanalyst and Trotter remained a brain surgeon. Nevertheless, they

would be linked by family for ever; in 1910 Trotter married Jones’ sister.
Trotter was also the role model for the editorial policy decision about the
terminology of the existing standard edition of Freud’s works (Cheshire and
Thoma 1991, p.433). According to MacCurdy, Jones borrowed from Trotter
the use of the word ‘rationalization’, an assertion which is strongly contested
by James Glover (Glover 1924.)
In his masterpiece, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), Trotter’s
main idea is that there exists one instinct that was as yet incompletely
described by psychology, the herd instinct. This instinct would represent the
natural tendency to association – i.e. gregariousness – of some biological
organisms. Charles Darwin had referred to the existence of a social instinct
deeply ingrained in all social animals as the origin of moral and consciousness
in man (Darwin 1871). Trotter not only retakes Darwin but also the contribu-
tions of Karl Pearson and Boris Sidis about the biological and psychical sig-
nificance of gregariousness. According to Trotter, Pearson called attention to
the enlargement of the selective unit effected by the appearance of gregarious-
ness, and to the fact that therefore within the group the action of natural
selection becomes modified. (Trotter 1916, p.24). Sidis’ concept inspiring
Trotter is the idea of suggestion as a mechanism to serve gregariousness. In
short, the assumptions underlying the concept of herd instinct are: a) gregari-
ousness is a natural vector of living beings, which gives advantage to the
species facing the laws of natural selection b) the weaknesses of the rational
mind are consequences of suggestibility imposed by herd instinct c) the main
problem of the human species is how to reconcile the rational mind and gre-
gariousness, both of which are the foundations of its evolution.
These ideas were received quite enthusiastically at those times. The book
was printed six times from 1916 to 1921, but with time it was relegated to a
merely historic status and nowadays is only available in second-hand book
shops, even though it was re-edited in 1953. In 1917, it was given a long and
favourable notice by William A. White in the Psycho-analytic Review.
Augusta Bonnard, in her review of the book, wrote:
What remains is a storehouse of brilliant and stimulating inferences, leading
to curiously faulty conclusions. For instance, Trotter’s postulation of a ‘gre-
garious instinct’ may be quite wrong, but his working through of its modes
of operation is descriptive of much that still awaits clarification in our theory
in regard to the ego-ideal and the superego. When one combines this sub-
ject-matter with his plea that the otherwise much praised new discipline of
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 89

psycho-analysis gives too little due to the repressing forces which success-
fully vanquish unwelcome instincts, he provides a remarkable forecast of
the redresses still being made in metapsychology.
That this book on sociology, written by a distinguished surgeon for the lay
public, should still call for republication is the most practical proof of its
intrinsic value. (Bonnard 1954)
Actually, the criticisms made of Trotter by the Freudians are centred in their
3
refusal of a social/herd instinct per se distinct from sexual instinct or libido.
Freud himself always refuted the concept of a primary social instinct, and
always saw social intercourse and group phenomena as manifestations of a)
libido ‘diverted from its aims’, and b) identification (Freud 1913, 1921). In the
1980s Friedman proposed that they were both right, and tried to reconcile
Trotter’s and Freud’s ideas grounded on ‘what evolutionary biologists are now
calling the altruistic line of motivation in human life’ (Friedman 1985).
Furthermore, Trotter’s ideas were not only crucially important in Bion’s
concepts along his entire work, as we shall see, but they represented also an
important paradigm discussed in Freud’s (1913, 1921) incursions into
groups, and Hadfield’s (1923) conception of instincts.4 Trotter, among others,
‘provided the basic material for most British students of social psychology
during the 1930s, including Bion and Rickman’ (Harrison 2000, p.27), and
Rickman actually noted that he agreed with the ‘herd instinct’ (Rickman
1950, p.165). Malcolm Pines mentions also that Trotter was one great
influence on Norman Glaister, one of the ‘forgotten pioneers’ of the thera-
peutic community movement (Pines 1999).

Wilfred Trotter and Wilfred Bion

The role of Wilfred Trotter in Bion’s life is a very remarkable one. They met
around 1927 when Bion did his medical housemanship at University College
Hospital, having won the Gold Medal in Surgery, as Trotter’s attendant
dresser. Bion greatly admired Trotter (Lyth 1980; Bléandonu 1994;
Francesca Bion 1995); Trotter, this mature and honest man, who was also a
gifted brain surgeon, left an outstanding impression on Bion’s personality:
Towards the end of his life Bion acknowledged that Trotter had remained a
role model for him through his professional career…Trotter won the young
man’s loyalty…identifying with Trotter and his self-confidence helped
Bion to modify his severe super-ego. He could tolerate making mistakes, as
90 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

even a past master like Trotter could sometimes be wrong (Bléandonu 1994
pp.38–39).
In what concerns Trotter’s influence in Bion’s scientific production, the
situation is not so clear: ‘In his autobiography Bion does not make mention
that Trotter was the first to turn his mind to the problem of the psychology of
group behaviour’ (Bléandonu 1994, p.39).
Trotter’s book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War was to set Bion to
thinking (Boris 1986, p.161), and was to prove an important influence on
Bion’s interest in, and nascent theories about, group behaviour (Francesca
Bion 1995). Francesca Bion went a step further when she, by accident, came
across that book and read it:
Trotter makes observations which remind one strongly of Bion’s later views.
He speaks of man’s ‘resistiveness to new ideas, his submission to tradition
and precedent’; of ‘governing power tending to pass into the hands of a class
of members insensitive to experience, closed to the entry of new ideas and
obsessed with the satisfactoriness of things as they are’; of ‘our willingness
to take any risk other than endure the horrid pains of thought’. (Francesca
Bion 1995)
However, Bion’s explicit references to Trotter are actually slender, and even
contradictory. Only once did he place Trotter’s book Instincts of the Herd in his
bibliographic references: in ‘Group dynamics: a review’ (Bion 1952) but only
to follow Freud in refuting the idea of the ‘herd instinct’, while in the previous
chapters Bion borrows Trotter’s concepts of gregariousness and man as a herd
animal (Bion 1961, p.91, 95), as we shall see in detail later. In 1973–74 he
refers to Trotter as ‘my chief surgeon’, curiously as a prelude to talking about
common wisdom:
We like to think that our ideas are our personal property, but unless we can
make our contribution available to the rest of the group there is no chance of
mobilising the collective wisdom of the group which could lead to further
progress and development. (Bion 1978, p.29)
In a Memoir of the Future he referred to Trotter twice, presenting him as the
author of the idea that the ‘group as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts’
and also in a personal way (Bion 1991, pp.111 and 223).
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 91

The background ideas of Trotter in Bion’s work

As we have said, Trotter’s ideas can be seen traversing all of Bion’s work,
however much in the background, and they seem to have worked as seeds in a
fertile land.

The focus on the morale of the group

One of the aims of Trotter, initially impelled by First World War issues, was to
apply the newborn science of psychology to the study of the functioning of
the morale of the social group. In the preface of Instincts of the Herd in Peace and
War Trotter states:
If it is war becoming…more and more completely a contest of moral forces,
some really deep understanding of the nature and sources of national morale
must be at least as important a source of strength as the technical knowledge
of the military engineer and the maker of cannons (Trotter 1916, p.6)
and also:
A satisfactory morale…gives smoothness of working, energy and
enterprise…while from the individual it ensures the maximal outflow of
effort with a minimal interference from such egoistic passions as anxiety,
impatience and discontent. A practical psychology would define these
functions and indicate means by which they are to be called into activity
(ibid p.7)
Precisely the focus on morale was shared and developed by Bion in his first
three papers (Bion 1940, 1946; Bion and Rickman 1943). In “The War of
Nerves”: Civilian reaction, morale and prophylaxis (1940), Bion analysed war from
the point of view of phantasy and anxiety of the enemies, as a ‘war of nerves’ –
a real ‘contest of moral forces’ – between the enemies. Some prophylactic
measures to prevent the lowering morale of civilian populations submitted to
air raids are proposed.
In ‘Intra-group tensions in therapy’ (1943), written with Rickman, the
problem of the morale in a rehabilitation wing is centrally addressed, and
devices were ready to transform the Northfield Hospital into a battalion ready
to fight against neurosis. Bion’s and Rickman’s aim was the ‘acquisition of
knowledge and experience of the factors which make for a good group spirit’
(Bion and Rickman 1943), disregarding the traditional mental hospital
culture of individual care and sedatives. What they searched for was a totally
different approach, the morale of the group-as-a-whole, one which clashed
92 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

with a culture which gave precedence to the health of the individual

(Hinshelwood 1999). This morale-oriented device, although abruptly
terminated in six weeks under circumstances analysed elsewhere (Trist 1985;
Hinshelwood 1999; Harrison 2000), was to leave a profound influence on
the people who worked with Bion and Rickman and was to be integrated in
the second Northfield experiment, mainly in the activity-oriented groups.
One of the most prominent was Tom Main (later one of the leaders of the
so-called ‘therapeutic community movement’), who approached the larger
system of the whole hospital in the same manner as Bion approached the
Rehabilitation Wing (Hinshelwood 1999).
In ‘The Leaderless Group Project’ (1946), Bion again takes up Northfield
and the theme of morale as a therapeutic agent: ‘morale had to be raised to the
point where the real enemy could be faced. The establishment of morale is of
course hardly a pre-requisite of treatment; it is treatment, or a part of it’ (Bion
1946, p.79). In this revolutionary idea of transforming the traditional ward
into a ‘therapeutic community’, one can hear the echo of Trotter’s proposal
that a good morale would ‘cure’ neurotic symptoms such as anxiety, impatient
and discontent, while regretting ‘that atmosphere of the consulting room and
the mad-house which does so much to detract from its pretensions to be a psy-
chological system of universal validity’ (Trotter 1916, p.91).

The ‘suspension of leadership’ group approach

The ‘suspension of leadership’ was one of the main characteristics of Bion’s
group technique. This ‘suspension of leadership’ must not be understood as
‘anarchic’ or ultimately leaderless. It is rather a revised notion of traditional
leadership, which stressed the ‘participatory/democratic set of relations
among members in a sophisticated group’ (Lipgar 2000, personal communi-
cation). As Bion stated: ‘The group always make it clear that they expect me to
act with authority as the leader of the group, and this responsibility I accept,
though not in the way the group expect’ (Bion 1961, p.82). Bion’s style of
leadership tried to resist the emotional pressure the group throws on the
leader to support the idea that he can ‘magically’ solve problems. Its sole
activity was instead to make interpretations of the phenomena in the group as
these developed. In this way he gave back to group members the responsi-
bility for dealing with the problems of being in a group as grown-up people,
which was, according to Bion, precisely the best way for starting really to
resolve them. This ‘suspension of leadership’ approach was present in the very
beginning of Bion´s work with groups in the army: a) the ‘leaderless group
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 93

project’, b) the ‘regimental nomination experiment’ and c) the ‘Northfield

experiment’, and goes on to the Tavistock experiences from 1948 until 1951.
In the ‘leaderless group project’, established for the War Office Selection
Boards (WOSB), the main idea was to observe a group of candidates in a
real-life situation in which no lead was given about organisation or
leadership: ‘these were left to emerge and it was the duty of the observing
officers to watch how any given man was reconciling his personal ambitions,
hopes and fears with the requirements exacted by the group for its success’
(Bion 1946, p.78).
In Northfield groups and seminars, ‘he allowed the group to evolve, and
would then comment only when it became clear to him what might be
happening. This approach usually left the group feeling perplexed and
wondering what the relevance of his contribution was’ (Harrison 2000,
p.187–8).
This ‘suspended leadership’ position, which deliberately refused the
mythical role of ‘the Doctor’ contrasted with that of other psychiatrists – for
instance, with the Foulkes’ more traditional leadership style in Northfield, in
which Foulkes ‘took the position of an educator and discussion tended to
revolve around his comments’:
Foulkes tended to get people thinking about the details of therapeutic
practice. He was a healer dedicated to create more healers. Bion, in contrast,
had another aim. It was not to heal – not in a direct sense. He wanted the
group members to assist in thinking about the group for themselves – it was
an ontological research: What is the nature of a group? And what is the place
of a human person within a group of other persons? Bion came to see this
research, in itself, as having curative properties, as it would advance the
maturity of the members of the group who undertook the research.
(Hinshelwood 1999, p.477)
The ‘suspension of leadership’ device was maintained and developed in his
‘experiences in groups’ at Tavistock Clinic. There, the group movements
anxiously in search of a leader obtained the first insights.
The advantages of this, as we could call it, subversion of values was
addressed by Trotter (1916),5 in analysing the factors that gave advantage to
England in the First World War, and reflecting about leadership: ‘Suscepti-
bility to leadership is a characteristic of relatively primitive social types, and
tends to diminish with increasing social complexity (Trotter 1916, p.248).
This conclusion springs from the division of gregariousness, or herd instinct,
into socialised and aggressive types, represented respectively by England as
94 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

‘bees’ and Germany ‘wolves’. Trotter’s conclusion was that the victory in one
of ‘nature’s august experiments’ (First World War) belonged to the socialised
type. The altruistic and moral equality of its members won over the aggressive
type, with its severe limitations on the participation of the individual in the
social unit, rigid segregation of society and social instinct, which express
themselves through leadership:
During the war itself the submission to leadership that England showed was
…to a great extent spontaneous, voluntary, and undisciplined, and gave
repeated evidence that the passage of inspiration was essentially from the
common people to its leaders rather than from the leaders to the common
people. When the current of aspiration sets persistently in this direction…it
is very plain that the primitive type of leadership that has led so many civili-
sations to disaster is no longer in unmodified action (Trotter 1916, p.249)
Both quotations found feedback in, and clarify, Bion’s ‘suspension of leader-
ship’ approach. The selection of officers in the WOSB was achieved through a
6
‘spontaneous, voluntary, and undisciplined’ experimental situation. In the
‘Regimental nomination experiment’, the passage of inspiration from the
common people to its leaders, addressed and prescribed by Trotter, is even
more obvious:
Bion proposed that, in addition to the usual nominees (to officer posts)…a
regiment that had shown itself to be a good unit should be given the
privilege of sending to a Board candidates voted on by every soldier in the
name of the regiment… Each man entered on a secret ballot the names of
those he considered should go forward to a WOSB. (Trist 1985, p.12)
As regards the ‘primitive character of the sensibility to the leadership’,
proposed by Trotter, Bion’s words are clearly congruent: ‘Either the desire for
a leader is some emotional survival operating uselessly in the group as an
archaism, or else there is some awareness of a situation, which we have not
defined’ (Bion, 1961, p.39).
Trotter’s and Bion’s mistrust of traditional leadership had very similar
reasons: both considered that it was a phenomenon ruled by atavistic instincts,
eventually detached from contact with reality and thinking processes.
According to Trotter, the preconception according to which the leaders are a
fortiori more competent than the common people to solve the problems of the
group is a serious mistake:
There need [to be a political leader] be no specially arduous training, no
great weight of knowledge either of affairs or the human heart, no recep-
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 95

tiveness to new ideas, no outlook into reality. Indeed, the mere absence of
such seems to be an advantage; the successful shepherd thinks like his
sheep, and can lead his flock only if he keeps no more than the shortest
distance in advance. He must remain, in fact, recognisable as one of the
flock, magnified no doubt, louder, coarser, above all with more urgent
wants and ways of expression than the common sheep, but in essence to
their feeling of the same flesh with them. (Trotter 1916, p.116)
In addition, traditional leadership had more to do with superficial appearance
than with reason or true merit:
This instinctive feeling inclines them to the choice of a man who presents at
any rate the appearance and manners of authority and power rather than to
one who possesses the substance of capacity but is denied the shadow.
(Trotter 1916, p.117)
Bion persisted in his ‘suspension of leadership’ approach, in spite of all the
anxiety and mistrust raised by it. His experiments in the army were systemati-
cally terminated as if victims of sabotage by the system, at least in Bion’s way
of feeling. (Sutherland 1985; Trist 1985). In what concerns the groups in
Tavistock:
His [Bion’s] role was stressful much of the time, and Rickman and I were not
sufficiently on his wavelength to take the pressure off…despite the denial
mechanisms in the group the impact was profound; two members developed
duodenal ulcer symptoms before the group finished, and three decided to
have personal analysis subsequently. (Sutherland 1985, p.52)
One can suspect that this inner strength was in part inspired by Trotter’s
prophetic words:
If society is to continue to depend for its enterprise and expansion upon
leadership, and can find no more satisfactory source of moral power, it
is…highly probable that civilizations will continue to rise and fall in a
dreadful sameness of alternating aspiration and despair. (Trotter 1916,
p.247)
In fact, Bion took to pieces the group’s unconscious idealisation of him as an a
priori God-like type of leader, and valued the conscious co-operation of all the
members of the group.
96 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Theoretical advances in ‘Experiences in Groups’

Trotter’s ultimate assumption about ‘group psychology’ was that it was
continuous with individual psychology, an idea that precedes Freud’s similar
argument (Freud 1921). As Trotter puts it:
Sociology has, of course, often been described as social psychology and has
been regarded as differing from ordinary psychology…the assumption
being made that society brings to light a special series of mental aptitudes
with which ordinary psychology, dealing as it does essentially with the
individual, is not mainly concerned. It may be stated at once that it is a
principal thesis of this essay that this attitude is a fallacious one… The two
fields – the social and the individual – are regarded here as absolutely
continuous; all human psychology…must be the psychology of associated
man, since man as solitary animal is unknown to us, and every individual
must present the characteristic reactions of the social animal if such exists.
(Trotter 1916, p.11–12).
Trotter considered man a social/gregarious animal, and the mental
phenomena were directly deductible from that condition: ‘The gregarious
mental character is evident in man’s behaviour, not only in crowds and other
circumstances of actual association, but also in his behaviour as an individual,
however isolated’ (Trotter 1916, p.42). This is also Bion’s assumption in his
Experiences in Groups, and the conceptions presented there can only be clearly
understood if we bear that in mind: ‘In fact, no individual, however isolated in
time and space, should be regarded as outside a group or lacking in active
manifestations of group psychology’ (Bion 1961, p.169); and also: ‘that part
of the individual’s mental life, which is being incessantly stimulated and
activated by his group, is his inalienable inheritance as a group animal’ (ibid.
p.91)
Trotter’s main idea was that there exists one instinct – besides sex,
self-preservation and nutrition – that was not yet described by psychology, the
herd instinct. This instinct would represent the natural tendency of biological
organisms to associate, first in multiple-cell (metazoa) forms and then in
gregarious forms as bee-swarms, herds, hordes and societies. Bion, while
assimilating this idea, replaced the term ‘herd instinct’ by the physi-
cal-chemical term valency: ‘The counterpart of co-operation in the basic
assumption group is what I have called valency – a spontaneous, unconscious
function of the gregarious quality in the personality of man’ (Bion 1961,
p.136). Furthermore, Bion’s conception of a triad of basic instinctive group
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 97

dispositions (flight/fight, pairing and dependence basic assumptions) is

parallel with Trotter’s triad of basic instincts: self-preservation, sex, nutrition.

Trotter (1916–18) Bion (1948–51)

Basic instincts: Basic assumptions:
Self-preservation Flight/fight
Sex Pairing
7
Nutrition Dependence
Factor of group cohesion: Factor of group cohesion:
Herd instinct/gregariousness valency/groupishness

Table 3.1 Some Parallel Concepts in Trotter and Bion

According to Trotter, the interference of the herd instinct in reason would be

the cause of man’s inability to use his rational potential, in spite of possessing
a very potent mind:
It is of cardinal importance to recognise that belief of affirmations
sanctioned by the herd…goes on however much such affirmations may be
opposed by evidence, that reason cannot enforce belief against herd
suggestion, and finally that totally false opinions may appear to the holder
of them to possess all the characters of rationally verifiable truth (Trotter
1916, p.39).
Trotter had stated that this impairment of rational abilities in the group should
be one of the main themes of investigation in psychology (ibid. p.39). And, in
what looks like a true dialogue with his old master who had passed away a
decade before, Bion states:
The group accordingly will often wrestle with intellectual problems that,
one believes, the individual could solve without difficulty in another
situation… One of the main objects of our study may well turn out to be
precisely the phenomena that produce these perturbations of rational
thought in the group. (Bion 1961, p.40)
Bion confronted these same rational impairments in his Experiences in Groups,
and stated very similar ideas that we can identify as an empirical confirmation
of Trotter’s theoretical formulation. As did Trotter, Bion pointed to the
valency/herd instinct as responsible for the mindless states associated with
group life:
98 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

I wish also to use it [valency] to indicate a readiness to combine on levels that

can hardly be called mental at all but are characterised by behaviour in
human beings that is more analogous to tropism in plants than to purposive
behaviour. (Bion 1961, pp.116–117)
The ‘sense of vitality’ that according to Bion was achieved in these instinctual
states, the basic assumption groups, is well described by Trotter: ‘for
re-embodiment in the herd at once fortifies courage and fills the individual
with moral power, enthusiasm, and fortitude’ (Trotter 1916, p.143).
The concept of group mentality has also a parallel in Trotter, at least in its
characteristics of a primitive kind of uniformity and unanimity in opinions
and conduct among the group, which belongs more to an irrational herd than
to a human set. Trotter refers to it as ‘sensitiveness to the behaviour of the
herd’, and ‘voice of the herd’:
manifestations of the same tendency to homogeneity are seen in the desire
for identification with the herd…each of us in his opinions and his conduct
… is compelled to obtain the support of a class, of a herd within the herd…
anything which tends to emphasize differences from the herd is unpleasant.
In the individual mind, there will be an unpleasant dislike of the novel in
action or thought. It will be ‘wrong’, ‘wicked’, ‘foolish’, ‘undesirable’, or as
we say ‘bad form’… It is sensitiveness to the behaviour of the herd which
has the most important effects upon the structure of the mind of the
gregarious animal, and therefore of that of man. The effect of it will clearly
be to make acceptable those suggestions which come from the herd, and
those only… Of two suggestions, that which the more perfectly embodies
the voice of the herd is the more acceptable. The chances an affirmation has
of being accepted could therefore be most satisfactorily expressed in terms
of the bulk of the herd by which it is backed…anything which dissociates a
suggestion from the herd will tend to ensure such a suggestion being
rejected. (Trotter 1916, pp.32–33)
Bion’s definition of group mentality stresses also the pleasant uniformity, but
he went much further and pointed out the anonymous and unconscious
nature of it:
Any contributions to this group mentality must enlist the support of, or be in
conformity with, the other anonymous contributions of the group. I should
expect the group mentality to be distinguished by a uniformity that
contrasted with the diversity of thought in the mentality of the individuals
who have contributed to its formation. (Bion 1961, p.50)
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 99

This term [group mentality] I use it to describe…the unanimous expression

of the will of the group, an expression of will to which individuals
contribute anonymously. (ibid. p.59)
Group mentality is the unanimous expression of the will of the group, con-
tributed to by the individual in ways of which he is unaware, influencing
him disagreeably whenever he thinks or behaves in a manner at variance
with the basic assumptions. (ibid. p.65)
These two parallel concepts have the advantage of overcoming the vague and
imprecise concept of ‘suggestion’, hitherto used in group psychology. The
voice of the herd and group mentality are expressions of a tacit, unspoken
agreement between the elements of a group as to what issues are acceptable to
the well-being of the whole, and no more a mysterious kind of passive
credulity, as implied in the concept of suggestion.
The conflict between group mentality and individual needs was another
idea developed from a sketchy thought by Trotter:
The appearance of the fourth instinct [herd instinct] introduces a profound
change, for this instinct has the characteristic that it exercises a controlling
power upon the individual from without…with the social animal controlled
by herd instinct it is not the actual deed which is instinctively done, but the
order to do it which is instinctively obeyed. The deed, being ordained from
without, may actually be unpleasant, and so be resisted from the individual
side and yet be forced instinctively into execution. (Trotter 1916, p.48)
Bion coined the term group culture to denote the product of this conflict
between group mentality/voice of the herd and the individual:
…it is the nature of the group to deny some desires in satisfying others, but I
suspect that most resentment is caused through the expression in a group of
impulses which individuals wish to satisfy anonymously, and the frustration
produced in the individual by the consequences to himself that follow from
this satisfaction…the group meets this challenge by the elaboration of a
characteristic culture of the group (Bion 1961, p.54–55)
The theoretical advances in understanding experiences in groups allowed a
new vision of group phenomena; the human association could now be seen as
a whole entity (and not as a sum of individuals), in which several powerful,
unconscious/instinctual forces bind the individual elements even when these
are physically isolated. These forces are seen as the legacy of the gregarious
condition of the human animal, or at least a product of the earlier emotional
experiences in the basic social/gregarious unit – the family – and are
100 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

independent of the development of the intellectual machinery of rational

thinking.

Epistemology and the growth of the mind

After leaving his work on groups, Bion centred his attention in the psychoses.
This transition is less abrupt than it appears at first glance, since the last con-
clusions in his last paper on groups are as follows:
The understanding of the emotional life of the group…is only comprehen-
sible in terms of psychotic mechanisms. For this reason advances in the study
of the group are dependent upon the development and implications of
Melanie Klein’s theories of internal objects, projective identification, and
failure in symbol formation and their application in the group pheno-
mena… (Bion, 1952 p.247)
In the following stage of his work, he applied and developed Klein’s theories
in a very creative and productive manner, but it is not the aim of this paper to
analyse this so vast domain. His thinking becomes gradually more and more
independent of strictly Kleinian theories (and eventually critical of them and
of his own use of them). He developed his own theories, and the problem of
scientific status of psychoanalysis and other epistemological matters become
his prime concern. It is in the ‘epistemological period’, from 1962 onwards
(Bléandonu 1994), that Trotter’s background influence can be seen regaining
importance. Simultaneously, the continuity of individual and group
psychology become once more the focus, and in 1970 Bion retakes group
psychology (see Attention and Interpretation). Trotter seems to be one of the
links between epistemology and group psychology in Bion’s thinking.
Bion introduced the epistemological debate into psychoanalysis as no one
had done before. It was a matter of growing importance to search for truth
instead of the apparent cure or improvement of the patient, alongside his work
on individual psychoanalysis. He ended up addressing the ultimate truth, ‘O’,
a mystical approach (Amaral Dias 1991, 1992; Grotstein 1993), and the
result of love of truth and aesthetic sensibility (Grinberg et al. 1975).
If epistemology is the inquiry into the human conditions for knowledge,
it can also be seen as an inquiry into the natural tendency of the human mind
for accepting lies, which prevents the cognition of truth. This ‘lie question’
was a high priority agenda to Bion. However, Lie and Truth are in themselves
ideal concepts devoid of practical significance if we don’t attach to them some
sensory-based models – as Bion did: truth is the nourishment of the mind,
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 101

while lies are its poison. As the human intellect does not have the abilities to
embrace truth most of the time, the simple answer to a question is a poison for
its developing, since it is doomed to become a lie because of the inadequacy of
the intellect to grasp its new meaning. As the empiricist trend, well repre-
sented by Hume, proposes, followed by both Trotter and Bion, ‘suspension of
judgement’8, is required to prevent the lie:
the judgements of conscience vary in different circles and are dependent on
local environments…they are not advantageous to the species to the
slightest degree beyond the dicta of the morals current in the circle in which
they originate. (Trotter 1916, p.41)
Almost any answer appears to make truth contingent on some circumstance
or idea that is itself contingent. (Bion 1965, p.38)
Heisenberg and his principle of uncertainty become one of Bion’s references.
However, there is another problem: the human mind needs certainty, the sense
of truth; as Trotter stated, ‘the desire for certitude is one of profound depth in
the human mind, and possibly a necessary property of any mind’ (Trotter
1916, p.34), and Bion completed: ‘the failure to bring about…a common
sense view induces a state of debility…as if starvation of truth was somehow
analogous to alimentary starvation’ (Bion 1962a, p.119). Owing to this need,
humans are likely to easily give up the mental pain of uncertainty, and
exchange it for the common-sense view, a sense of correlation (Bion 1962a)
between the members of the group. From that can spring the paradox that one
isolated man’s belief can easily be a delusion, while one delusion shared by the
group can easily be a belief. Very frequently the latter happens in the group, as
in Bion’s -K link (‘the protective coat of lies’) and R (‘theory used as a barrier
against the unknown’ – Bion 1963, p.18). Once more Trotter, ‘amused by the
mysterious viability of the false’ (Kothari and Mehta 1998) had pointed it out
earlier:
…it is of cardinal importance to recognise that belief of affirmation
sanctioned by the herd…goes on however much such affirmations may be
opposed by evidence, that reason cannot enforce belief against herd
suggestion and finally that totally false opinions may appear to the older of
them to possess all the character of rationally verifiable truth, and may be
justified by secondary processes of rationalization which it may be
impossible directly to combat by argument. (Trotter 1916 p.39)
The idea of intellectual impairment inherent to the functioning of the group
was not new in Bion’s and even Trotter’s days. It springs from Le Bon, was
102 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

referred to by McDougal, Freud, amongst others and can even be traced back
earlier, to Kierkegaard, in his famous assertion ‘wherever there is a crowd
there is an untruth.’ (Clark 1999). What is new in Trotter, again developed
from Hume’s conceptions (the fallacious nature of the human mind), is the
idea that intellectual impairment is not limited to the physical mob. Rather it
is present in the mentality of the individual, because he is under the influence
of the group even when he is alone:
Man is not, therefore, suggestible by fits and starts, not merely in panics and
in mobs…but always, everywhere, and under any circumstances. The
capricious way in which man reacts to different suggestions has been
attributed to variations in his suggestibility. This…is an incorrect interpreta-
tion of the facts which are more satisfactorily explained by regarding the
variations as due to the differing extent to which suggestions are identified
with the voice of the herd. (Trotter 1916, p.33).
This is also Bion’s innovation: the moral outlook that suffocates both intellec-
tual development and learning from experience is not only a result of group
collusion but is ultimately characteristic of a preponderance of the super-ego
over the functions of the ego (Bion 1965, p.38). Meanwhile, Freud in Civilisa-
tion and its Discontents (1908) had defined the super-ego as a coercive entity
simultaneously inner and external; the guardian of consensus and correlation
of conduct, as we might say, controlling objective behaviour as well as
repressing and moulding subjective desires and thoughts.
The empiricist, the one who searches for truth from empirical data instead
of from the judgements of the mind (ideas), proposes that experience,
9
combined with suspended judgement, is the only learning method to trust.
When empirical data, evidence, doesn’t fit the dictates of morality – the
shared assumptions of the herd – humans must evade evidence and
experience:
Man’s resistiveness to certain suggestions, and especially to experience, as is
seen so well in his attitude to the new…the new has always to encounter the
opposition of herd tradition… Experience, as is shown by the whole history
of man, is met by resistance because it invariably encounters decisions based
upon instinctive belief. (Trotter 1916, pp.34–35)
…The acceptance of any proposition is invariably the resultant of
suggestive influences, whether the proposition be true or false, and…the
balance of suggestion is usually on the side of the false, because education
being what it is, the scientific method – the method, that is to say, of
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 103

experience – has so little chance of acquiring suggestionizing force. (ibid.

p.40)
These ideas are very close to Bion’s formulation of the hatred of learning by
experience:
They [patients in the group] also show, as in psychoanalysis, that they do not
have much belief in their capacity for learning by experience… Now all this,
and more like it, really boils down to the hatred of the process of develop-
ment … there is a hatred of having to learn by experience at all, and lack of
faith in the worth of such a kind of learning. A little experience of groups
soon shows that that this is not simply a negative attitude; the process of
development is really being compared with some other state…something
like arriving fully equipped as an adult fitted by instinct to know without
training or development exactly how to live and move and have his being in
a group. There is only one kind of man that approximates to this
dream…the man who is able to sink his identity in the herd. (Bion 1961,
p.89)
This hatred is ultimately a characteristic of the basic assumption group and of
the psychotic part of the personality, both of which are grasped as two sides of
the same coin by binocular vision.
Trotter had stated that anxiety, i.e. mental pain, is the price to pay for the
process of learning – mental growth: ‘In matters that really interest him, man
cannot support the suspension of judgement which science so often has to
enjoin. He is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know (Trotter 1916,
p.35). According to Freud, anxiety is the result of the danger of destruction of
libidinal cathexis of the ego, or loss of personal meaningfulness (Grotstein
1991), and it can be so intense that the individual would discard his own
apparatus for empirical reception – consciousness – and so become psychotic
(Bion 1962a, 1962b). Bion’s idea of psychosis as an attack to the thinking
apparatus is partially linked with the failure of maternal love (reverie), i.e.
primary libidinal cathexis, in Freudian language. The circle closes at the point
when the group implies psychotic-like operations of preventing learning by
experience. At this conceptual crossroads, we find the basis for the idea that
social systems are associated with primitive defences against psychotic anxiety
(Elliot Jacques (1955), Isabel Menzies-Lyth (1959), an issue also elaborated
by Bion:
the assumption underlying loyalty to the K link is that the personality…can
survive the loss of its protective coat of lies, subterfuge, evasion and halluci-
nation and may even be fortified and enriched by the loss. It is an
104 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

assumption strongly disputed by the psychotic and a fortiori by the group,

which relies on psychotic mechanisms for its coherence and sense of
well-being. (Bion 1965, p.129)
– and also addressed by Trotter: ‘reason intrudes as an alien and hostile power,
disturbing the perfection of life and causing an unending series of conflicts
(Trotter 1916, p.35).
Bion was very sensitive to the epistemological criticisms of psychoanal-
ysis as a science, and worked hard to deal with them. Trotter, the ‘biological
father’ of British psychoanalysis, pointed out a question that would cross
Bion’s work at least from 1962 onwards: is psychoanalysis promoting mental
growth or only adaptation to the conformed, stable-minded norm, despising
the search for truth?10 In the words of Trotter:
However precious such a cure [psychoanalytic] may be to the patient, and
however interesting to the physician, its value to the species has to be judged
in relation to the ‘normal’ to which the patient has been restored – that is, in
relation to the question as to whether any move, however small, into the
direction of an enlargement of the human mind has been made. (Trotter
1916, p.90)
Almost in direct response to that, Bion stated: ‘In psychoanalytic method-
ology the criterion cannot be whether a particular usage is right or wrong,
meaningful or verifiable, but whether it does, or does not, promote develop-
ment’ (Bion 1962b).
Trotter’s remark was an extension of his concepts of normality and mental
instability, and the social pressure to neutralise disturbing new ideas:
The mental stability, then, is to be regarded as, in certain important
directions, a loss; and the nature of the loss resides in a limitation of outlook,
a relative intolerance of the new in thought, and a consequent narrowing of
the range of facts over which satisfactory intellectual activity is possible.
(Trotter 1916, p.55)
Trotter believed that the mental instability was the result of a conflict between
rational independence and pressure of the norm by herd instinct, and an inner,
unresolved conflict between lies and search for truth. The subjugation of the
type of people who were mentally unstable and termed degenerates, and
incarcerated in mental hospitals, and the dominance of stable-minded types of
people in society forced the narrowing of mankind’s intellectual develop-
ment. This was responsible for many cyclic social disruptions. The consensus
of the stable-minded group was achieved through discarding possibilities of
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 105

intellectual progress and evolution. Bion transported this question straight

into the psychoanalytic institutional group:
…[I] repeat reasons for mistrusting ‘cure’ or ‘improvement’…because the
tendency to equate psycho-analysis with ‘treatment’ and ‘cure’ with
improvement is a warning that the psychoanalysis is becoming restricted;
limitation is being placed on the analysand’s growth in the interest of
keeping the group undisturbed. (Bion 1967, p.157)
He also said:
…even psycho-analysts seem to be unaware of the expanding nature of
their universe… If my suspicion that this is so is found by experience to be
correct, the difficulties of the patient…are significant for both the
analysand and analyst when growth is taking place. (ibid. p.137)
From this problem spring many original and disturbing contributions by
Bion. The desire for ‘cure’ starts to be seen by him with suspicion, and it was
quickly extended to desire in general, as well as memory and even under-
standing (Bion 1970) as far as they block out new meanings by total
saturation of the preconception. The importance in Bion’s work of accepting
mental turbulence and preventing the ‘poisonous’ nature of stable-minded
saturation of preconception is addressed in Chapter 7 of this book by Robert
Hinshelwood.
However, the set of epistemological problems doesn’t end in the eventual
production of truthful enunciates – mental growth – through learning by
experience. Once some degree of mental sophistication is achieved by an
individual, how does he communicate it to his fellow men? Trotter stressed that
the capacity for adequate and precise intercommunication between human
minds would make the difference in the possibility of human evolution.
Exactly like communication between cells and organs is the essential form of
co-ordination of complex organisms.
The enormous power of varied reactions possessed by man must render
necessary for his attainment of the full advantages of the gregarious habit a
power of intercommunication of absolute unprecedented fineness…how
momentous is the question as to what society does with the raw material of
its minds to encourage in them the potential capacity for intercommunica-
tion. (Trotter 1916, p.62)
From the date on which Bion started to work in psychoanalytic training, the
‘accuracy of communication’ issue emerged: ‘I have experience to record, but
how to communicate this experience to others I am in doubt. This book
106 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

[Learning from Experience] explains why’ (Bion 1962b). The self-revision of his
earlier papers presented in Second Thoughts (Bion 1967) is dominated by the
same concern; how to communicate accurately (to patients, colleagues,
laymen, and even to himself) psychoanalytic experience? This issue became a
first order concern: ‘If this communication cannot be made, the future devel-
opment of analysis is imperilled and the successful discoveries made so far
could be lost to the world’ (Bion 1992, p.173).
Trotter’s analogy between human groups and a complex biological
organism takes us up to another point of our inquiry.

Psycho-somatic and somato-psychic parallelisms

Maybe one of the most enigmatic concepts proposed by Bion was the
proto-mental system. Although, as far as we are aware, from 1952 onwards the
term ‘proto-mental’ disappears from his writings, the idea and theoretical
elaboration of phenomena in which mental and physical are undifferentiated
continues under other terms (e.g. ß elements; soma-psychotic portion of per-
sonality; psychosomatic innervations), and in other contexts (Meltzer, 1984).
This concept is the extreme corollary of the integrated ‘binocular vision’
between somatic and psychological which Bion used in his work. It was not
totally well received in Klein’s vertex, which stressed the purely psychological
object relations in contrast with the instinctual/physiological ground of
Freud’s model of the mind (Gomez 1997; Sutherland 1985). In order to
clarify his psycho somatic/soma-psychotic models, Bion justified himself in a
very expressive way:
For myself, I have found it impossible to interpret the material presented to
me by these patients as a manifestation of purely psychological development
divorced from any concurrent physical development. I have wondered
whether the psychological development was bound up with the develop-
ment of ocular control in the same way that problems of development linked
with oral aggression co-exist with the eruption of teeth. (Bion 1950, p.22)
This protomental vertex can be traced back to Trotter’s original intuitions. It
was Trotter’s attempt, apparently in the footsteps of Darwin, to make
psychology and sociology a consistent part of evolutionary biology (Miller
1983), and in this he was fertile in finding somatic-based correspondences to
psychic phenomena: ‘It [gregariousness] was not at all widely looked upon as
a definite fact of biology which must have consequences as precise and a
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 107

significance as ascertainable as the secretion of the gastric juice or the

refracting of the eye’ (Trotter 1916, p.21).
Furthermore, we can also find in Trotter’s somatic analogies the seeds of
Bion’s contributions in the themes of (a) the conflicts between the new idea
and status quo, (b) the mind as a muscle, in evacuatory phenomena, and (c) the
mental ‘digestion’ of raw sensory material into food for thought, in psychic
integration and growth. According to Trotter:
‘The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein
and resists it with similar energy…a new idea is the most quickly acting
antigen known to science’ (Trotter 1939, p.186). From this visionary
assertion, Bion developed a series of reflections concerning the reception of
new ideas by the mind and the group, and the possible outcome of this
conflict (Bion 1970).
According to Bion’s model of the mind, the psychic entities can be
ultimately divided into two fundamental categories: unassimilated (ß) and
assimilated (") by the mind. The unassimilated elements are also the ones
expelled by ‘the ability to believe in the possibility of ridding himself of
unwanted emotions’ (Bion 1992, p.181), just like foreign bodies which
gravitate around the self ’s perception: ‘any unwanted idea is converted in a ß
element, ejected from personality, and then becomes a fact of which the
individual is unaware, though he may be aware of feelings of persecution
stimulated by it’ (Bion 1992, p.182). The very act of expelling an idea/
thought/emotion is made possible by the inability to distinguish between
thoughts and things, an idea suggested by Trotter: ‘Feeling has relations to
instinct as obvious and fundamental as are the analogies between intellectual
processes and reflex action’ (Trotter 1916, p.15). Following Trotter, Bion
used the attention to muscular reflex actions to understand the schiz-
oid–paranoid mechanism of evacuation of ß elements:
His failure to distinguish thoughts from things contributes to a sense that
the actual meaning of the words, as that would be understood in a rigid
motion transformation, is expelled as air from his lungs is expelled. Con-
formably with this the patient seems to feel that his mind is an expelling
organ like a lung in the act of expiration…the patient is using his eyes, and
the mental counterpart of his capacity for vision, as evacuatory musculature.
(Bion 1965, p.131)
The assimilated elements are the metaphorically digested ones, which can be
used for non-psychotic mental functioning and mental growth. Trotter also
referred to the digestive model of the mind: ‘An event experienced is an event
108 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

perceived, digested, and assimilated into the substance of our being and the
ratio between the number of cases seen and the number of cases assimilated is
the measure of experience’ (Trotter 1932, p.98) – and was closely followed
by Bion: ‘I am reminded that healthy mental growth seems to depend on truth
as the living organism depends on food. If it’s lacking or deficient, the person-
ality deteriorates’ (Bion 1965, p.38).
The first assimilation of raw sensory data into the mind (T"), or mental
digestion, must be made with the help of maternal reverie. Bion even
proposed the idea of a ‘psychosomatic alimentary canal’ in the baby, which
received love (reverie) instead of milk (Bion 1962b, p.34).
All these somatopsychic/psychosomatic models can be framed into a
vision of sociology and psychology as a part of evolutionary biology.11 In
Bion’s model, the development of the mind follows embryonic-like steps
which are grounded in biological process, and that reveal their origins in the
primitive (psychosomatic/somatopsychotic) processes presented in psychosis
and group dynamics.12 Just as the biological maturation of the human embryo
recapitulates all the evolution of life on earth, the psychic and social character-
istics of humans are based on an adaptation and development of primeval
characteristics:
P. A. I have no doubt of the ‘fact’ of religion as a part, perhaps an unalienable
part, of human character. I have even seen a mouse assume what looked like
an attitude of religious beseeching when being tortured by a cat that had
caught it. Is that a religious impulse? Or is it an attitude we have learned
from animals – to take when in a hopeless situation – (Bion 1979, p.87)
In much the same way, the processes of thinking are seen as grounded and
intimately linked with somatic (including physiochemical) processes:
P. A. If it is true that living matter derives from the heat engendered by the
reaction of oxygen with protoplasm then I can see that brain substance
might derive from the ‘decay’ of involuntary muscle, and the mind likewise
from the energy released by the degeneration of athletic ability (ibid. p.39)
This vertex allowed Bion also some curious and amusing games of words. In
the next one, intestinal problems and a social institution are equated:
P. A. It had never occurred to me that the costum[e]s authorities were socio-
logical haemorrhoids, but I see what you mean. (ibid. p.73)
In the following example, the parallels of biological and psychic conception,
and somatic and mental pain, are emphasised:
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 109

Somite Twenty-four: I’ve got a stomach-ache.

Alice: At last – something I do understand; I have the advantage of knowing
pregnancy.
Fourteen years: Neither of you knows how painful it is to have an idea.
Twenty-two years: You? I didn’t know you ever had an idea.
Fourteen years: I and my friend Thirteen have had ideas – even religious ones.
(ibid. p.29)
Some subsequent contributions concerning the beginning of mental life in
the foetus use Bion’s concept of protomental (Bianchedi, E.T. et al., 1997;
Mancia, 1981; Proner 2000), a concept where not only biological and
psychic but also social phenomena are taken as undifferentiated. The
apparently odd conception of man as a developing global organism in which
biology, psyche, and society (cells, individuals, groups, etc.) are completely
continuous and interdependent as a vital flux, is getting more and more
evidence in this globalisation era. However, these ideas were far from straight-
forwardly optimistic to both Trotter and Bion.
The concept of ‘group diseases’ (Bion 1961, pp.102, 108) springs from
13
this vertex. J. A. Halliday addressed the primary function of emotional
conflict in psychosomatic affection stressing the environmental settings,
including cultural demands, over the needs of emotional expression of indi-
viduals. He proposes the concept of the ‘sick society’, linking social group
dynamics, individual psychology and somatic diseases:
The prevalence [of psychosomatic diseases] is related to changes in the
communal environment considered psychologically and socially. The
incidence of a psychosomatic affection in a community rises and falls in
response to the changes of social environment, that is, to changes of envi-
ronment regarded in its psychological aspects rather than its physical
aspects. (Halliday 1948, p.48)
14
Eric Wittkower found, in an immense study of hundreds of tuberculosis
patients, that ‘situations which rouse aggressiveness or endanger the delicately
poisoned security system of the patients often precede the onset of symptoms
of tuberculosis’ (Wittkower 1949, p.137). Bion tried to articulate both these
contributions in his concept of the protomental system and ‘group diseases’. A
‘group disease’ would be the manifestation of an impairment of the transfor-
mation of bodily and emotional raw experiences into meaning and thinking,
impairment which was forced by the sophisticated group culture (Bion 1961,
110 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

p.102). The conceptual seeds of these scientific hypotheses can also be traced
back to Trotter, who had pointed out the theme of psychosomatic/
somatopsychic group diseases:
Certain mental and physical manifestations, which have usually been
regarded as disease in the ordinary sense, are due to the effects upon the
mind of the failure to assimilate the experience presented to it into a
harmonious unitary personality. We have seen that the stable-minded deal
with an unsatisfactory piece of experience by rejecting its significance. In
certain minds such a successful exclusion does not occur, and the
unwelcome experience persists as an irritant, so to say, capable neither of
assimilation nor rejection… Now, we have already seen that a gregarious
animal, unless his society is perfectly organised, must be subject to lasting
and fierce conflict between experience and herd suggestion. It is natural,
therefore, to assume that the manifestations of mental instability are not
diseases of the individual in the ordinary sense at all, but inevitable conse-
quences of man’s biological history and exact measures of the stage now
reached of his assimilation into gregarious life. The manifestations of
mental instability and disintegration were at first supposed to be of compar-
atively rare occurrence and limited to certain well known ‘diseases’, but they
are coming to be recognised over a larger and larger field, and in great
variety of phenomena. (Trotter 1916, p.56–57)
The rationale of ‘group diseases’ was also addressed by Freud (1908) in his
paper ‘Civilised sexual morality and modern nervous illness’. There, Freud
establishes a causal connection between the morality of the civilisation
(repression of sexuality and aggressiveness) and the growing rate of psycho-
neuroses in the population. The direct link between social rules and disease
has a radical expression in the case of the taboo (one of the first society rules)
in primitive societies. The violation of the taboo often leads to a sudden
mysterious illness and death of the violator, correlated with its own anguish
and dread (Freud 1913).

The dread of human extinction

As a scientist of the 19th century, Trotter was strongly impressed by the
‘Copernican revolution’ made by Darwin and other pioneer scientists, which
took mankind away from the centre of the putative preference of deity, and of
Nature’s favour. As any other species, man evolved from primitive beings, and
was equally subject to a possible extinction:
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 111

Without some totally revolutionary change in man’s attitude towards the

mind, even his very tenure of the earth may come to be threatened…after all
man will prove but one more of nature’s failures, ignominiously to be swept
from her work-table to make way for another venture of her tireless curiosity
and patience. (Trotter 1916, p.65)
One of Trotter’s influences was surely Sir Charles Lyell, the great pioneer of
geology, whose conclusions suggested that all species, including man, were
ephemeral (Wilson 1999). Painful as it is, this idea was quickly out of fashion
in the post-war zeitgeist until thermonuclear threats and, above all, ecological
impairments, started to become evident in the late 20th century. Bion,
however, insisted on it throughout his entire work, from Group Dynamics:
History of life on this planet shows that decay of a species is often associated
with over-development of some portion of its organism … is there a possi-
bility of similar over-development of mental functioning? (Bion 1952,
p.247)
– to The Dawn of Oblivion:
P. A. …I do not see why he [the man] should not be another of Nature’s
discarded experiments. (Bion 1979, p.91)
This emphasis evokes an aura of oracular dread and gravity, that brings to the
foreground the fragility of our existence and the responsibility for our destiny,
for we are the only animal able to think about how our mind directs our
thoughts and actions.

Trotter and Bion, the missing link

One of the questions that certainly arise is ‘Why didn’t Bion quote Trotter
more often?’ The answer could be the simplest one: he forgot him. Francesca
Bion tells us that Trotter’s book Instincts of the Herd (1916) was not in Bion’s
personal library and ‘It may have been among those he lost during air raids
over London in the early thirties and by the fifties it was out of print’
(Francesca Bion, 1995). When Bion wrote Second Thoughts (and in
commenting on the ‘Imaginary twin’ paper) he observed that ‘he [the patient]
must have been the first patient to make me wonder whether the idea of cure
was not introducing an irrelevant criterion in psychoanalysis (Bion 1967
p.135). This statement attests to the fact that by that time Bion had totally
forgotten the link between this idea and its author, Wilfred Trotter.
112 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Interestingly, later in the same book Bion made some curious comments
about forgetting important papers:
Only in this way [forgetting] is it possible to produce the conditions in
which, when it is next read, it can stimulate the evolution of further develop-
ment. There is time to do this only with the best papers; but only the best
papers have the power to stimulate a defensive reading (of what the paper is
about) as a substitute for experiencing the paper itself – what I have
elsewhere called transformation under K as contrasted with transformations
under O. (Bion 1967, p.156)
Malcolm Pines has observed that we must look also for other reasons, like
identification and rivalry (Pines 2000, personal communication). In what
concerns identification, the process of forgetting would be a part of the trans-
formation under O. Trotter seems to be an intimate part of Bion’s personality,
one of its functions or factors. It would also be worthwhile to inquire if
Wilfred Trotter would not be in some way an ‘imaginary twin’ of Wilfred
Bion.

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Professor Robert Hinshelwood for his encouragement in the
elaboration and publication of this paper and to Malcolm Pines and Robert
Lipgar for their thoughtful and helpful suggestions on earlier versions. I also
thank Zé Gabriel for his revision, Luis Sousa Ribeiro for his teachings and
inspiration, and my wife Filipa for her support. This research was conducted
with funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundção para
a Ciência e a Tecnologia) of Portugal.

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Endnotes
1. Rickman was in his turn analysed by Freud, Ferenczy and Melanie Klein. In Bion’s
words (about the Wharncliffe Memorandum): ‘It was a fascinating account… punctu-
ated with generous tributes to the merits of what were assumed to be my ideas, but
never once betraying the least awareness of how much the scheme he was describing
was the child of his own [Rickman’s] creative imagination (Payne 1957, p.12). A dis-
cussion concerning Rickman’s decisive influence on Bion’s earlier work in groups can
be found in Tom Harrison’s book Bion, Rickman, Foulkes and the Northfield Experiments
(see References).
2. Although Rickman considered himself for many years a Kleinian, Mrs Klein and
Rickman never seemed to get along, mainly because of theoretical disagreements
(Bléandonu 1994, p.47). Mrs Klein seemed to be ‘out of sympathy, if not actively hos-
tile’, to Bion’s work with groups (Sutherland 1985).
116 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

3. A contemporary (1927) discussion of this theme can be found in the paper ‘Sexual and
social sentiments’ by J. C. Flügel (see References).
4. J. A. Hadfield was the ‘only person with a psychodynamic orientation working in a
British University…at University College, where Bion studied medicine’. Later, Bion
was analytically trained by Hadfield in the Tavistock. The ‘Hadfieldeans’ were a pow-
erful group in the Clinic in the 1930s (Bléandonu 1994, pp.42–43). Hadfield dis-
agreed with Freud about the aetiology of psychoneuroses. According to him neuroses
were due to a feeling of deprivation of protective love in childhood, and not to the re-
pression of sexual love (Hadfield 1950, p.121). Bion would somehow reconcile their
discordance in his study of groups: ‘Since the pair relationship of psychoanalysis can
be regarded as a part of the larger group situation, the transference relationship could
be expected…to be coloured by the characteristics associated with the pairing group.
If analysis is regarded as part of the total group situation, we could expect to find sex-
ual elements prominent in the material there presented’ (Bion, 1961, p.166).
5. Trotter’s work addressed this much earlier than papers by Lewin and Lippitt (1938)
and French (1941) on democratic and leaderless groups, which are considered by Har-
rison (2000) as the influences in Bion’s ‘Leaderless group project’.
6. In fact, one of the procedures in the leaderless group situations in the Edinburgh’s
WOSB was called ‘spontaneous situations’ (Trist 1985, p.7).
7. The connection between the nutrition instinct and dependence basic assumption is aug-
mented by a spiritual factor: ‘the first assumption is that the group exists in order to be
sustained by a leader on whom it depends for nourishment, material and spiritual’
(Bion 1952, p.235) The placement of spirituality in Bion’s ‘dependence’ basic as-
sumption can be seen as partly inspired by Rickman’s ideas of (a) ‘a need to believe in
God’ (Rickman 1938), and (b) the correlation between dependency on the group and
endowment to it of phantasised characteristics of the idealised parents (Harrison
2000, p.51). Hadfield also puts emphasis on the dependence of the child upon its par-
ents for comfort, happiness and life itself (Hadfield 1954, p.20), as do J. L. Halliday
(1948) and E. Wittkower (1949), both of whom are central references in the elabora-
tion of Bion’s protomental system (Bion 1961).
8. ‘A total suspension of judgement is here our only reasonable resource’ (David Hume,
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1777)).
9. Parenthetically it must be said that Bion expanded empiricism to the idealist domains
when he, following Freud, considered that the ‘psychical qualities’ received by con-
sciousness are also to be considered empirical data as much as sensory data received by
the senses. This epistemological position allowed him some rest in what concerns the
scientific status of psychoanalysis. A discussion of this theme can be found in Cogita-
tions in the chapter ‘Need for study of scientific method’.
10. A problem that is in other terms also addressed by R. D. Hinshelwood’s recent ethi-
cally-based question Psychoanalysis: Therapy or Coercion?. However, the importance of
this question to both Trotter and Bion was more than an ethical issue, it corresponded
to worries about the survival of man on the face of the earth. In those days Ernst Jones
wrote his paper ‘The concept of a normal mind’ (1942) in an attempt to solve Trotter’s
challenge. Later, in 1963, Robert S. Wallerstein takes up this theme in his paper ‘The
problem of the assessment of change in psychotherapy’ (1963).
11. It is beyond the remit of this paper to discuss the importance of the ‘quantum revolu-
tion’ in the process of abandoning mechanistic/inanimate models in contemporary
science, which so deeply affected Bion. We will only stress that this subject was impor-
tant enough to him:
 GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE MIND: WILFRED TROTTER AND WILFRED BION 117

‘I hope that in time the base will be laid for a mathematical approach to biology,
founded on the biological origins of mathematics, and not on an attempt to foist on bi-
ology a mathematical structure which owes its existence to the mathematician’s ability
to find realisations that approximate to his constructs, amongst the characteristics of
the inanimate.’ (Bion, 1965, p.105)
12. It is interesting enough that even the development of a ‘group-mind’ can be seen as an-
alogue to the development of the infant’s mind, starting in a baby-like phase with a
‘circumscribed regression of the psychic systems to oral stage derivatives’, and subse-
quent maturation of the social intercourse of the group into more sophisticated, Oedi-
pal and post-Oedipal stages (Saravay, 1975).
13. Halliday was also supported by John Rickman.
14. Who also worked with Bion in the ‘Leaderless Group Project’.
 4

‘Group Dynamics: A Re-view’

Matias Sanfuentes

Introduction
In reviewing the first edition of Bion’s paper ‘Group Dynamics: A Re-view’
(1952), published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, it dawned on me
that this version of the article was different from the one published by him
three years later. It was apparent that important aspects of the second variant
of the paper did not appear in the first edition. This motivated me to review
both versions and attempt to analyse the principal changes that Bion made to
his first paper. This paper tries to describe the principal differences that exist
between them, and to clarify what may have influenced him to make these
modifications. I will briefly describe the main characteristics and conceptual
developments of the first edition. Then I will analyse the principal changes
that Bion would make. To this end I will organise the discussion into five
sections that represent, for me, the most substantial theoretical advances in his
ideas about groups. These sections examine the following topics: 1. Bion’s
relation to Freud’s group concepts; 2. regression; 3. thought; 4. countertrans-
ference; 5. psychotic mechanisms and early stages of the Oedipus complex.
Wilfred Bion has been one of the major figures in the history of psycho-
analysis. He generated important ideas both in the field of individual psycho-
analysis and group processes. These ideas have had great sway in the develop-
ment of both fields. As Malcolm Pines stresses with regard to the group
sphere, Experiences in Groups is probably the shortest and most influential text
in group psychotherapy’ (Pines 1985, p. xiii). Bion started his work with
groups in the 1940s. He developed creative and productive experiences
during the Second World War, working as a military psychiatrist in the

118
 GROUP DYNAMICS: A RE-VIEW 119

selection and rehabilitation of soldiers. From 1946 onwards, he directed the

Tavistock Clinic’s multiple group projects, which included group activities
with students, industrial managers and patients. He was trying to find a
conceptual frame of reference for the group situation, homologous with the
psychoanalytic method, that would enable him to deal with the clinical
material that emerged in it (Trist 1985). The result of these experiences was
published in Human Relations (1948–51). He left his work with groups
towards the end of the forties, instead dedicating himself exclusively to
individual psychoanalysis. As he said in 1977, ‘I have not abandoned groups
but the urgency of work to be done with individual analyses leaves me no
time for anything else’ (Bléandonu, 1990 p.88).
In 1952 Bion published his paper ‘Group Dynamics: A Re-view’. This
paper was published three times from 1952 to 1961. The first version
appeared in a special issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis
dedicated to M. Klein on the occasion of her seventieth birthday. The second
one was part of the book that reproduced the papers published in the special
issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and other additional ones.
This book was edited by M. Klein et al. under the title New Directions in Psy-
cho-analysis, and was published in 1955. The paper’s third appearance was in
1961 as part of the book Experiences in Groups that compiled some of the
papers written by Bion concerning group dynamics.
It is interesting to highlight that Bion modified some sections of the first
version of the article, when it was published for the second time in 1955.
Although most of the original text kept its former organisation, he changed
some parts of the previous edition. He utilised new psychoanalytic concepts
for the comprehension of group processes, such as the early stages of Oedipus
complex and regression. Moreover, he included some clinical material, drawn
from group sessions, in order to support his ideas. He incorporated headings
into the text to organise the development of his principal concepts, and two
summaries about the principal ideas discussed: one in the middle of the text
and the other at the end. He also increased the length of the paper by several
pages. This second version was re-published again in the compilation of 1961
without new modifications.
I have found in the secondary literature few references concerning these
changes. Most of the literature fails to highlight the differences between these
two. They seem to presuppose that the paper was published three times
without modification. However, Bléandonu (1990 p.84) mentions the
importance that the Kleinian theory acquired in Bion’s group concepts, when
120 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

‘Group Dynamics: a Re-View’ was republished in 1961. Sutherland (1985

p.66) for his part, in allusion to the first version of the paper, maintains that
‘the culmination of his works on group dynamics did not become widely
manifest until ten years later’. However, the paper’s theoretic transformations
had occurred several years before, and not in 1961, as these authors suggest.
By contrast, Scheidlinger clearly distinguishes between the two variants
of the article. In a painstaking study, he analyses Bion’s work with groups and
he clearly specifies that they are quite different papers. ‘In his later contribu-
tion in 1955 Bion went even further, claiming that “basic assumption”
phenomena could be understood only in terms of “psychotic” mechanisms’
(Scheidlinger 1960, p.36). Yet, he neither analyses the differences between
the articles, nor gives any clues on to what might have encouraged Bion to
develop his paper a bit further. Rather, he sharply criticizes Bion’s group ideas
by detailing what are, according to him, his main theoretical weaknesses.
Consequently, the causes of the paper’s modifications have to be searched
in the period from 1952 to 1955. Bion himself left the main clues in the first
version of the paper, in which he stresses the necessity to continue the investi-
gation of the topic in the light of the Kleinian ideas. ‘Advances in the study of
the group are dependent upon the development and implications of Melanie
Klein’s theories of internal objects, projective identification, and the failure in
symbol formation and their application in the group situation’ (Bion 1952,
p.247). For this reason we need more evidence for what Bion was doing
during these years.
He was fully dedicated to individual psychoanalysis and to the study of
the relationship between thought and language in psychosis. He, along with
Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld, was analysing psychotic patients, almost
without any modification of the classical technique, inspired by Klein’s work.
Bion presented a paper in 1953 to the ‘18th International Psycho-analytical
Congress’ called ‘Notes on the theory of schizophrenia’, which was published
in 1954 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Later he modified this
paper and published it in 1955 under the title ‘Language and the schizo-
phrenic’ in the book New Directions of Psycho-Analysis. Both papers represented
his evolution in the study of schizophrenic thought, which he would continue
developing during the following years. The series of articles that he published
in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis during the 1950s were the result of
this productive research.
Bion had been in analysis with Melanie Klein since 1945, and her ideas
had permeated his own views with great intensity. His analysis finished in
 GROUP DYNAMICS: A RE-VIEW 121

1953, and important changes had taken place in his life during the course of
it. He had been accepted as a member of the British Psycho-analytical Society
in 1950 after reading his membership paper ‘The imaginary twin’. He had
become one of the most distinguished of Klein’s students. He had got married
for the second time in 1951, and his wife had given birth to a boy in 1952. In
1955 he was father again for a third time. As Bléandonu (1990, p.93) points
out, during these years, ‘he found a new psychic equilibrium’. Both his
marriage and work became the support and focus of his life. He was able to
build a family and to father two more children. His intellectual activity was at
its height as he published a new paper almost every year. Psychoanalysis
awoke his powerful creativity and sharp wit, enabling him to expand the
scope of his observations and ideas.
Within this context Bion published ‘Group dynamics: A re-view’ for the
first time. In this paper he reviewed his previous ideas that were related to his
work with groups during the last decade, and which he had published in
Human Relations some years before. The author picked up the distinction that
he had formerly established between two different states of mind that individ-
uals in a group can develop: the ‘work group’ and the ‘group basic assump-
tions’. He also resumed discussion of the phenomena of the proto-mental
system and specialised work groups. He re-examined these ideas from the
Kleinian perspective that, at this period, represented for him the most
important theoretical reference point.
Therefore, what made this paper distinct and different from his previous
works about group dynamics was the incorporation of Kleinian ideas. It gave
him the possibility to think afresh his previous work, in the light of the
Kleinian theory of the early phases of mental development, and the patholog-
ical forms of such development. The consequences of this productive review
appear clearly illustrated in Eric Trist’s (1985) account of his experiences
working with Bion as an observer in the therapeutic groups that the latter ran
at the Tavistock Clinic. According to Trist, something that really bothered
Bion was the difficulty in grasping what caused the alternation of the basic
assumptions during group processes. He was only able to solve this problem
when ‘he sought an explanation in Melanie Klein’s theory of the early
psychotic phases of personality development’ (Trist 1985, p.34).
Consequently, Bion found in the psychotic mechanisms described by
Klein, a new framework for the comprehension of emotional life in groups. In
the paper’s first version he considered that her theories of internal objects, and
the mechanisms of projective identification, helped him to understand the
122 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

operation of the basic assumptions. He also related these latter phenomena to

Klein’s ideas of failure in the capacity of symbol formation. According to him,
in the work group, individuals employ the symbol formation in the process of
verbal communication. On the other hand, in the basic assumptions they are
not in a condition to use these verbal abilities with the precision conferred by
the capacity to form and use symbols. In the latter, words are not interpreted
as symbols ‘but as sounds having pre-verbal significance’ (Bion 1952, p.246).
Therefore, in the basic assumption the individuals lose the capacity of sym-
bolisation and they remain unaffected by the stimuli that would prompt the
development of such a capacity. ‘In the basic assumption group the individual
is the totem animal. He is not identified with it, or equated with it, he is it’
(ibid. p.245).
At the end of this edition, Bion affirmed that progress in the study of the
group would be dependent on the developments of Kleinian theory. He left a
gate open for further elaborations, and he clearly stated in the article’s conclu-
sions three possible groups of phenomena that may direct following investi-
gations on the subject. They were the process of depersonalisation, the failure
in symbol formation, and the comprehension of the basic assumptions in
terms of psychotic mechanisms. Bion actually continued the work that he had
previously left unfinished. In spite of the fact that he did not carry on new
clinical activities with groups, he applied the concepts he built up in the field
of the individual psychoanalysis to the understanding of group phenomena.
These developments were part of the second version of his article that was
published in 1955.
In order to analyse the main differences between both articles, I will try to
establish the principal modifications that he made to the first edition, and
what might have influenced him to do so. I shall organise the discussion into
five sections, in which I will pick up what I consider to be the most important
conceptual variations.

1. Bion’s relation with Freud’s group concepts

Between both versions, Bion’s attitude towards Freud’s group work changed
considerably. Scheidlinger (1960) states that in the paper’s second version,
Bion appeared less critical with Freudian group theories than in the previous
one. In the first article, he thought that his own group ideas were divergent
from Freud’s ones. ‘We have reached a point at which my description of the
group is sufficiently far removed from that which Freud proposed’ (Bion
1952, p.237). He attributed these differences with Freud to the fact that the
 GROUP DYNAMICS: A RE-VIEW 123

latter derived his group ideas from a bi-personal psychoanalytic setting. By

contrast, in his last work, Bion saw his own perspective as a complement of
the Freudian group outlook. ‘Freud’s view of the dynamics of the group seem
to me to require supplementation rather than correction’ (Bion 1955a, p.475;
1961, p.187).
In the last work, Bion specified his own ideas more accurately with regard
to Freud. He felt himself more confident to demarcate his conceptual differ-
ences with Freud. ‘Groups would, in Freud’s view, approximate to neurotic
patterns of behaviour, whereas in my view they would approximate to the
patterns of psychotic behaviour’ (Bion 1955a, p.470; 1961, p.181). This
sense of confidence and certainty concerning his theories is also depicted
through the discussion that Bion developed about the mental process that
governs the relationship between group members and the leader. In 1952 he
discussed the relationship between the group and the leader using the
mechanisms of splitting and projective identification to conceptualise it,
without relating his perspective to Freud’s. ‘The individual splits off his
aggressiveness and projects it into the leader’ (Bion 1952, p.245). In his
second version, Bion contrasted directly his own vision with Freud’s. For the
latter, the identification of the individuals with the leader depends on the
process of introjection. For Bion, this identification depends ‘not on
introjection alone but on a simultaneous process of projective identification’
(Bion 1955a, p.467; 1961, p.177).
Thus in his new paper, Bion dared, with more clarity and precision, to set
out and specify different solutions to what Freud had stated before. It reveals
Bion’s independence of mind, allowing him to search for new answers when
the previous ones did not satisfy him, and to envisage the phenomena studied
by him, even though it meant moving away from the paths of his predecessors.

2. Regression
In the first paper Bion maintained that one of the phenomena that may lead to
further investigations in the group field was the process of depersonalisation.
There, he stated that individuals in the group lose their ‘individual distinctive-
ness’ in a process ‘indistinguishable from depersonalisation’ (Bion 1952,
p.246). Three years later he conceptualised this depersonalisation as a
phenomenon of regression that individuals suffer as being part of a group.1 I
think we need to emphasise the point that this was the first time that Bion
used and applied the concept of regression in the course of his work. The
author affirms that the individual, who is in contact with the emotional life of
124 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

the group, resorts, as a massive regression, to primitive mental mechanisms

typical of the earliest phases of mental life. He stresses that this contact ‘would
appear to be as formidable to the adult as the relationship with the breast
appears to be to the infant’ (Bion 1955a, p.441–442; 1961, p.141–142).
Thus, according to Bion, the group has a mobilising quality for the
individual, who experiences an intense process of regression in his/her mode
of mental functioning. The individual in the group has the task ‘to meet the
demands’ that the group life involves. Failure to satisfy such demands
discloses a regressive phenomenon, which entails the individual losing
his/her ‘individual distinctiveness’ indistinguishable from depersonalisation.
What may explain the change and evolution that Bion suffered in relation
to this topic? Perhaps his greater comprehension of the primitive layers of
mental functioning, and of the deep levels of regression that individuals
experience in psychoanalytic treatments, especially psychotic patients?
Maybe he could have been influenced by Heimann and Isaacs’ paper on
regression, published in 1952 in Klein and her collaborators’ anthology,
Developments of Psycho-analysis? Although this paper was originally presented
in 1943 as part of the ‘controversial discussions’ that took place within the
British Psychoanalytical Society, the publication of the book in 1952 may
have swayed Bion. When it was published it had important repercussions,
becoming ‘the clearest, most systematic and comprehensive account of her
[Klein’s] theory of the developmental positions’ (Bléandonu 1990, p.96). Far
from establishing a final answer, these explanations offer some useful traces
for possible causes of his theoretic development.
It is important to highlight that Bion has a particular viewpoint
concerning the eliciting regressive pull that group life exerts. Many other
group theorists do not share this perspective. In fact they strongly criticise this
viewpoint. As Schermer points out, Bion is more inclined to consider that the
bringing into play of the group’s regressive influence through the primitive
basic assumptions states is ‘omnipresent’ (Schermer 1985, p.143). Thus
something inherent in the group would provoke retrogressive movements in
group dynamics, which would not be attributed to conditions of group mal-
function. According to Bion, such inherent characteristics of groups would be
constituted by psychotic patterns of functioning, which are the ultimate
wellspring of group life.
With regard to these issues, Miller (1998), through what he calls the
‘biogenetic perspective’, offers a different outlook to the ‘psychoanalytic’ one
that predominated in the papers written by Bion about groups during the
 GROUP DYNAMICS: A RE-VIEW 125

1950s. The author describes, as part of the infant’s instinctual primate inheri-
tance, the existence of an instinct of ‘groupishness’. He depicts this as ‘a
propensity to combine with others in collective, simultaneous, and instanta-
neous mobilisation of survival drives directed to survival of the group’ (Miller
1998, p.47). He also considers as part of this instinctual inheritance, the
existence of ‘instinctive survival drives towards dependency and fight–flight
and the (latent) drive to reproduction’. He sets out that the combination of
both groups of drives entails an instinctive tendency towards the emergence
of the group’s three basic assumption states. The author concludes that these
forms of group functioning always exist, and they are never completely
supplanted by the work group. They are the result of the regressive
‘instinctiveness’ that is elicited from the group phenomenon. This
instinctiveness, according to Bion, would arise in the individual’s mental life
not as a consequence of new instincts that are brought into play. These
instincts are always in play, and moreover they form part of the individual’s
‘equipment as a herd animal’ (Bion 1952, p.239). Accordingly, for the author,
the physical congregation of a group only allows for the demonstration of
group characteristics, ‘but it has no significance for the production of group
phenomena’ (ibid. p.238–9; 1955, p.461; 1961, p.168).

3. Thought
In the second edition Bion resumed the discussion developed in his previous
work about the role of symbol formation in the group member’s mental life. In
his first work he stressed that ‘the “language” of the basic assumption group is
therefore a method of communication devoid of the precision conferred by a
capacity for the formation and use of symbols’ (Bion 1952, p.245). In the
second publication he added more by stating that the ‘language’ of this group
mentality, rather than primitive, is ‘debased’. ‘Instead of developing language
as a mode of thought, the group uses an existing language as a mode of action’
(Bion 1955a, p.474; 1961, p.186). This important statement would come
from the study of the language and thought of psychotic patients, which he
dealt with during these years. As he stated in his paper ‘Language and the
schizophrenic’ (1955b, p.226), the schizophrenic employs language ‘as a
mode of action in the service either of projective identification or of splitting
the object’. He ‘uses words as things, or as split-off parts of himself, which he
pushes forcibly into the analyst’.
Therefore he might have applied these ideas, drawn in the field of
individual psychoanalysis, to the comprehension of group phenomena,
126 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

especially of thought perturbations observed by him in the groups that he had

run. Moreover, through the idea of ‘the language as a mode of action’ he was
adumbrating what some years later he was going to conceptualise as the
mental apparatus’s manipulation of ‘beta elements’. In accordance with the
author’s later developments, ‘beta elements are not amenable to use in dream
thoughts but are suited for use in projective identification…they are objects
that can be evacuated or used for a kind of thinking that depends on manipu-
lation of what are felt to be things in themselves as if to substitute such manip-
ulation for words and ideas’ (Bion 1962, p.6).

4. Countertransference
Bion formed part of the group of psychoanalysts that during the fifties
stimulated the utilisation of the mechanism of countertransference as a tool to
facilitate access to the patient’s inner world. In the second version of the paper,
he illustrated through some clinical material the operation of the mechanism
of projective identification in group phenomena and the countertransference
responses that the analyst experiences as a result. ‘In group treatment many
interpretations, and amongst them the most important, have to be made on
the strength of the analyst’s own emotional reactions… The experience of
countertransference appears to me to have quite a distinct quality that should
enable the analyst to differentiate the occasion when he is object of projective
identification and when he is not’ (Bion 1955a, p.446; 1961, p.149). Three
years before, Bion only described the role of projective identification in the
group, and he did not make reference to the analyst’s employment of the
countertransference mechanism as a clinical tool. ‘The individual splits off his
aggressiveness and projects it into the leader. His wish to fight, to nourish, to
choose a partner or his parents, all are in turn deposited in some external
figure’ (Bion 1952, p.245).
Hinshelwood (1999) states that Bion, along with Segal and Rosenfeld,
had an important role in the post-Kleinian developments of a new conception
of countertransference. This new conceptualisation stressed the ‘relational
aspects of the transference–countertransference’ by linking them with the use
of the mechanism of projective identification. The author also affirms that
Bion (1959, 1962) initiated a different form to describe and envisage the rela-
tionship between analyst and patient. By utilising the model of the mother
and the infant, he describes it as the ‘container and contained’. The function
of ‘containing’ the distress of the infant (patient) on the side of the mother
(analyst) arises as a central feature. This implies the latter’s capacity of trans-
 GROUP DYNAMICS: A RE-VIEW 127

forming distress into a metabolised experience more able to be tolerated by

the former. ‘The knack is to feel the dread and still retain a balance of mind’
(Hinshelwood 1999, p.802).
Perhaps Bion’s advances in the study of the analyst’s management, in the
psychoanalytic setting, of the primitive object relations and defensive
mechanisms that the psychotic patient employs, gave him the clarity and
conviction to describe the utilisation of this mechanism in the context of the
group. He was using countertransference responses in his work with schizo-
phrenic patients as a powerful guide. ‘My interpretation depends on the use of
Melanie Klein’s theory of projective identification, first to illuminate my
countertransference, and then to frame the interpretation which I give the
patient’ (Bion 1955b, p.224). Yet, as Bléandonu (1990, p.108) states, ‘when
the concept of countertransference began to appear in the psychoanalytic
literature of the 1950s, Bion had encountered the phenomenon a good ten
years earlier’. Therefore, Bion’s experiences with groups gave him an intuitive
knowledge that some years later he was able to conceptualise and then apply
to group processes. This happened when the evolution and maturity of his
ideas allowed him to do so.

5. Psychotic mechanisms and early stages of the Oedipus

complex
When Bion finished his article in 1952, he knew that a better comprehension
of the functioning of the basic assumptions could be achieved through his
advances in the study of the psychotic mechanisms. ‘The understanding of the
emotional life of the group, which is a function of the basic assumptions, is
only comprehensible in terms of psychotic mechanisms’ (Bion 1952, p.247).
After three years, his conceptions on the subject had progressed enough. In
this context, he picked up the figure of the Sphinx in the Oedipus myth. He
identified the leader of the work group with the ‘enigmatic, brooding, and
questioning sphinx from whom disaster emanates’ (Bion 1955a, p.456; 1961,
p.162). He maintained that the analyst’s interventions provoke intense levels
of anxiety and extremely primitive fears. According to him, when the group is
an object of inquiry, it establishes contact with ‘primitive phantasies about the
contents of the mother’s body’, which are characteristic of the para-
noid–schizoid position. Thus, psychotic anxieties connected with primitive
Oedipal conflicts are brought about when investigation is carried out on the
level of the basic assumptions. Bion envisaged that the basic assumptions arise
as reactions against fundamental phenomena that he links with an ‘early
128 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

primal scene worked out on a level of part objects, and associated with
psychotic anxiety and mechanisms of splitting and projective identification’
(Bion 1955a, p.457; Bion 1961, p.163).
Thus, what Bion had enunciated before, as a possibility for the develop-
ment of his research about groups, was some years later conceptualised in a
more definitive form. He employed Klein’s concepts of the primitive stages of
the Oedipus complex, and the connection of epistemophilia with the early
sadism of the first phases of language development, in order to understand the
group’s primitive forms of mental functioning. According to him ‘the central
position in group dynamics is occupied by the more primitive mechanisms
that Melanie Klein has described as peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid and
depressive positions’ (Bion 1955a, p.475; Bion 1961, p.188). These psy-
chotic patterns entail for him ‘the ultimate sources of all group behaviour’
(Bion 1955, p.476; Bion 1961, p.189). He states that these patterns need to
be unfolded within the group in order to achieve any therapeutic progress.
Accordingly, he is very sceptical that any successful therapy might be
developed before the working through of these primitive aspects.
Therefore, what Bion was using for the comprehension of the schizo-
phrenic thought he was utilising to apprehend group dynamics as well.
Perhaps his work with schizophrenic patients and the ideas that he drew from
this task exerted such a strong power on his thought, that he felt the necessity
to re-examine his conceptions about group life? His last paper depicts how
these ideas intensively pervaded his group outlook. With this paper he
concluded a deep reinterpretation of the ideas that he had formulated by
working with groups during the 1940s. In this reinterpretation, the power of
the destructive psychotic aspects that are characteristic of the early phases of
personality development created a strong explicative force for the under-
standing of the deepest features of group life. They allowed him to
re-conceptualise the fragile and unstable nature of group dynamics. From this
new framework, the group arises as the ideal arena for the unfolding of the
dismembering action of the group members’ psychotic aspects on their
thought and their connection with reality.

Conclusion
From the analysis of both papers it is possible to conclude that Bion made
important changes to the second version. He included some Kleinian
concepts as well as his own ideas drawn as the result of studying psychotic
thought. This was in fact his last attempt to comprehend group dynamics in
 GROUP DYNAMICS: A RE-VIEW 129

an integrative form. He returned to the analysis of groups in his book Attention

and Interpretation that was published in 1970. However, this later conceptual
foray was not the result of being re-engaged in the world of group projects,
but rather, a revision from a ‘different vertex’.
What stands out for me, from the differences found between both
versions, was Bion’s wish to give the article a more definite form. It implied
variations either in his conceptual developments or in the presentation of his
ideas. The later edition appears more formal and better organised. It includes
clinical examples to illustrate his concepts, and it does not leave open
questions undeveloped, as he had done in his previous work. From this per-
spective, his former article could be seen as a first effort to re-examine group
dynamics in the light of Kleinian ideas, but ultimately, as an unfinished
theoretic attempt. Therefore, it is possible to say that his new endeavour was
the result of the evolution that Bion’s thought had taken during these years.
In the course of these years Bion was achieving a new stability. As
Bléandonu (1990, p.103) stresses, ‘after his second marriage, the story of his
life began, slowly, to be eclipsed by his work’. And this work was closely
linked with the evolution not only of his life and personal ideas, but also of
the British psychoanalytical context in which he was inserted2. Kleinian
theory had acquired a more definite status, and its followers began to apply it
to cultural and social phenomena as well as the clinical field. In the latter is
highlighted the application of Klein’s ideas to the study of psychosis, which
represented in these years one of the most attractive fields of research.
It is difficult to answer with precision how this context could have
influenced Bion in his task of reviewing his previous work about groups.
However, the context would, no doubt, have been important in a period in
which he ‘considered himself first and foremost a Kleinian’ (Bléandonu 1990,
p.91). Perhaps as Miller affirms, it was the second instance of ‘Bion’s
deference to her [Klein’s] theories’ (Miller 1998, p.43). Anyway, what arises
with more clarity is that Bion perhaps felt something to be unfinished in his
first text; three years later he returned and completed it.

Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Bob Hinshelwood and Robert Lipgar for their
helpful comments and valuable encouragement on the development of this
paper.
130 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

References
Bion, W. R. (1948–51) Experiences in Groups.’ Human Relations vols. I-VII.
Bion, W. R. (1952) ‘Group dynamics: A re-view.’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 33,
235–247.
Bion, W. R. (1954) ‘Notes on the theory of schizophrenia.’ International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 35, 113–118.
Bion, W. R. (1955a) ‘Group dynamics: A re-view.’ M. Klein et al. (eds) New Directions in
Psycho-Analysis. London: Maresfield Library, 1985.
Bion, W. R. (1955b) ‘Language and the schizophrenic.’ M. Klein et al. (eds) New Directions in
Psycho-Analysis. London: Maresfield Library, 1985.
Bion, W. R. (1959) ‘Attacks on linking.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40, 308–315.
Bion, W. R. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock Publications.
Bion, W. R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Maresfield, 1984.
Bion, W. R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications.
Bléandonu, G. (1990) Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897–1979. London: Free Association
Books, 1996.
Heimann, P. and Isaacs, S. (1952) ‘Regression.’ In M. Klein et al. Developments in Psychoanalysis
(1989). London: Karnac Books.
Hinshelwood, R. D. (1999) ‘Countertransference.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80,
797–818.
Miller, E. (1998) ‘Are basic assumptions instinctive?’ In Talamo P. Bion, F. Borgogno and S. A.
Merciai, Bion’s Legacy to Groups. London: Karnac Books.
Pines, M. (1985) Introduction to Bion and Group Psychotherapy. London: Routledge, 1992.
Scheidlinger, S. (1960) ‘Group processes in group psychotherapy: Trends in the integration
of individual and group psychology.’ American Journal of Psychotherapy 14, 104–120,
346–363. Republished in S. Scheidlinger (1982) Focus on Group Psychotherapy. New York:
International Universities Press.
Schermer, V. L. (1985) ‘Beyond Bion: the basic assumption states revisited.’ M. Pines (ed) Bion
and Group Psychotherapy. London: Routledge, 1992.
Sutherland, J. D. (1985) ‘Bion revisited: Group dynamics and group psychotherapy.’ In M.
Pines (ed) Bion and Group Psychotherapy. London: Routledge, 1992.
Trist, E. (1985) ‘Working with Bion in the 1940s: The group decade.’ In M. Pines (ed) Bion
and Group Psychotherapy. London: Routledge, 1992.

Endnotes
1. He states this even though, for Bion, the gathering of a group in a particular place and
time has no significance for the development of group phenomena. The individual,
though isolated, ‘should [not] be considered as outside a group or lacking in active
manifestations of group psychology’ (Bion 1952, p.239; 1955a, p.461; 1961, p.169).
2. Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal were working with psychotic patients and pub-
lishing papers on the subject. The former published five papers about the treatment of
schizophrenics from 1947 to 1954. The latter published a paper on the same topic in
1950, an article on aesthetics in 1952, and two more in 1953 and 1954. The last of
them was related to schizoid mechanisms. Paula Heimann for her part published a cou-
ple of papers in 1952, one about the early stages of the Oedipus complex and the other
 GROUP DYNAMICS: A RE-VIEW 131

on defence mechanisms in paranoid states. Donald Winnicott published his funda-

mental paper ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena – a study of the first
not-me possession’ in 1953, and in 1955 an article about regression in psychoanalytic
treatments. In July of 1951, Bion’s influential and close colleague, John Rickman,
died. In 1953 Elliot Jaques published On the Dynamics of Social Structure. In 1952 S. H.
Foulkes created the Institute of Group Analysis. He also published two papers in 1954
and 1955 related to group psychotherapy.
 5

Anthropological Psychoanalysis
1
Bion’s Journeying in Italy

Claudio Neri

Bion held his last seminar in Rome on 17 July 1977. Francesco Corrao, on
behalf of all the participants, expressed his gratitude for the lessons which had
been given.
Bion thanked the participants for their gratitude and added that he hoped
he would not seem rude if he compared Corrao’s description of his contribu-
tion to something of which he was aware but did not much like – the nearest
image he could give was of a leaf falling from a tree without our being able to
tell on which side it would land.
At first I didn’t perceive the fact that he was expressing perplexity about
how his contribution would be received and worked through. I was more
struck by the image he was using than by the content. In 1977, Bion was
getting on in years and although in good health, he did not know what the
future held for him. The image of the falling leaf remained in my mind as a
farewell: his goodbye to the people with whom he had spent a week of fervent
work.
Continuing with his speech, Bion quoted a few lines from Yeats’
‘Solomon and the Witch’ and a short passage from Shakespeare: ‘Journeys end
in lovers meeting, /Every wise man’s son doth know.’
At the very moment in which we were to part, Bion was pointing out the
need to look ahead, thinking about the possible outcomes of the meeting
which had taken place.

132
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 133

In fact, he ended his speech by saying that he did not think that journeys
ended in lovers meeting, but that they began at that point, asking further on
what the group might give birth to, what thought or action.

2003
To my mind, three of Bion’s theories have been developed in an original way
in my country; they are:
1. the ‘container« contained relationship’ model
2. the notion of ‘PS« D oscillation’
3. the intuition of the existence of ‘thoughts without a thinker’.
Furthermore in Italy, Bion’s particular view of psychoanalysis has been
understood and his model for promoting the thinking activity has been
assimilated.
I will deal with this theme straight away, because of its more general
aspects. I will then develop his treatment of ‘container« contained,’ ‘PS« D’
and ‘thoughts without thinker.’

A way of conducting a discourse

The particular model of thinking and talking which Bion called ‘speculative
imagination’ was introduced into Italy, enhanced by the brilliant light of
Sicily and the Mediterranean, by Francesco Corrao. I am referring to the
colors and intensity of the light in Sicily, but above all to the intensity and
depth of Sicilian culture, a culture that is directly descendant from Greek,
Arab and Norman traditions. Francesco Corrao identified deeply with Bion
through a connection of a common object of love: psychoanalysis. If the
statement ‘one can love the mind of a man’ is true, it is true that Corrao loved
the thought and way of Bion’s thinking. Corrao (1998a, 1998b) placed
Bion’s thoughts into his mind and when he brought them to the Italian psy-
choanalysts’ attention, they were transformed for having lived in his mind.
The primary function of speculative imagination is to give the germ of
thought an opportunity to come to life. The second function is to allow it to
be communicated, to pass through the barriers of conformity, hypocrisy,
cynicism and apathy.
Speculative imagination – as far as I have understood – is made up of a
third of courage, a third of dramatization and the remaining part of observa-
134 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

tion and scientific method. Courage lies in saying exactly what one thinks
and feels at the moment of the session, making only slight adjustments which
may help the patient (or the members of a group) to a better use of communi-
cation. An illustration of courage is Bion’s saying to the participants at the
Rome seminars that he didn’t know how they would work through his con-
tribution.
Dramatization consists in privileging the use of images and in suggesting
that an intervention be a cue for a dialogue (of two or more voices), which is
open to unpredictable developments. The reference at the beginning of this
paper where Bion quotes from Yeats and Shakespeare is a fine example of dra-
matization. The scientific component is offered by the relationship the analyst
forms with the facts of the session and by the genuineness with which he
accepts that his hypothesis be open to discussion.
Speculative imagination can be used not only in meetings of analyst and
analysand (and between the analyst and members of a group with analytic
aims), but every time there is a meeting among psychoanalysts, too. Several
examples of this are shown in the interventions in which Bion tells his
colleagues of the discoveries which are progressively giving weight to his
‘psychoanalytic anthropology,’ and represent as many different expressions of
it.
First, I want to give a brief definition of ‘psychoanalytic anthropology.’
Anthropology is a compound term which is derived from two Greek words,
‘anthropos’ which means man and ‘logos’ which means reasoning, discourse
and word. Anthropology therefore, is a reasoning upon human nature, or
more precisely, a reasoning on man. The specific task of psychoanalysis,
according to Bion, is to develop a discourse on the most primitive and archaic
aspects of man, which goes together with the more evolved ones (language
and thought). These aspects of the nature of man persist in civilization as
living animal and ancestral remains: remains that may manifest themselves in
various ways and reawaken suddenly, without warning.
I would now like to present the illustrations taken from Bion’s seminars.
In Italian Seminars (1985), he says that the suffering and limitations of
capabilities that the patient suffers can actually be sited in aspects of his per-
sonality that are not removed or denied, but are living archaic residuals that
have never emerged. He also says that there is evidence of survival, ‘gill slits,’
and that if these residuals (remaining from when man was an aquatic animal)
exist as far as the body is concerned, why should there not be, somewhere,
something that concerns what we define as our mind. Still with the course of
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 135

Italian Seminars, Bion sketches a portrait of man, using a science-fiction form:

war between ‘man who is dominated by the basic assumption of fight/flight’
which is dramatized in the figures of ‘adrenal gland’ (‘adrenalists,’ ‘adrenalin
producers’), and ‘man dominated by the basic assumption of coupling.’ This is
shown in ‘gonadic’ figures. This war may lead to complete destruction, so it is
necessary for Homo Sapiens (‘Man who is able to think’) to intervene. As Bion
(1985) wrote:
…Adrenal glands…might emerge inside the human mind…and so…find
expression, aided by the film business, by film projectors and by mass adver-
tising, [in] a modern presentation of fleeing and fighting… Perhaps
someone would like to write the scene of a war film between the Adrenalists
and the Gonads. Maybe we would all end up by being impotent and sterile
or maybe we could make the world impossible to live in as we become over-
populated… Perhaps it will not be just a film, perhaps in this very same
moment we will have to prepare ourselves mentally and mobilize our
capacity to face up to future dangers. These future dangers will seem to be so
enormous, as compared both to our current and past dangers that our
present dangers will appear to be just a trailer. One must feed the capacity
to think in a way which becomes more able and more robust than it
currently is.

Courage
Freud (1920) knew about this type of problem, as we can see from his note on
the prehistory of analytical technique where, regarding free association, he
spoke about creative writing, making reference to Ludwig Borne, ‘The art of
becoming an original writer in three days.’ Borne spoke about the necessity of
jotting down notes on ‘everything that came into one’s head’ for three days in
a row, as the method for becoming a writer. He then said that in reality it was
moral courage that an individual lacked, not ideas.
The feeling of risk is an unavoidable experience for anyone using specula-
tive imagination. The analyst can perceive either a personal risk or a risk
concerning his patient, the risk that he may waken a sleeping tiger, triggering
forces beyond his control. Therefore, one must be rather courageous to face up
to such an unpredictable event.
In the adrenal glands example that I have shown above, courage (the
primary component of speculative imagination) lies in Bion’s way of
expressing his thoughts openly to colleagues who might misunderstand or
mock him.
136 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Dramatization
Dramatization is evident in the use of the ‘remains of the fish’ image on which
the sufferings and limitations of the patient might depend.
According to Bion, dramatizing doesn’t mean just describing but giving a
shape to that which is in dynamic evolution. Dramatizing doesn’t mean
recalling something that had already been lived, but letting that part of the
past which was made up of trauma and not recallable, live (Cavalletti 2000,
p.xxi).
I will relate a short account. Sometimes, when there is a new member in a
small therapeutic group, it may happen that the old members speak about an
episode which is unknown to the newcomer. He may ask: ‘What are you
speaking about?’ Very often the others answer: ‘Everything that happened a
long time before your arrival.’ We may interpret the refusal of giving explana-
tions as rivalry of the siblings toward the newborn baby. We may also follow a
different line of interpretation, which focuses on a real difficulty. Such a
difficulty can be better explained if the answer of the old members were
formulated in the following terms: ‘We could tell you about the facts, but that
would not give you very much idea as to what was happening in the group. To
do that we would have to let it happen again.’
Dramatization is a way of reenacting something that happened at a
different moment or in a different place, something that can be recalled, but
recalling is not sufficient to convey all the emotions, feelings and turmoil. To
do so, one would have to recreate the same situation and atmosphere. Bion
was conveying emotions, feelings and turmoil to the participants at the Rome
seminars, through his use of poems and images.

The scientific aspect of speculative imagination

In the example I have given, the scientific aspect lies in the suggestion of a
hypothesis, which differs substantially from Freud’s hypothesis of the uncon-
scious. This hypothesis takes on part of Ferenczi’s theory (1924) in a new
form. The form in which the hypothesis is given, however, is closer to
Galileo’s and Einstein’s method than to Ferenczi’s.
I’m referring to ‘mental experiments,’ which are crucial to some moments
of the history of science. An example of preliminary ‘mental experiment’ is
the question that the adolescent Einstein asked himself. He was rowing a
small boat on a lake surrounded by high hills. The sun rose over the edge of
the hills and Einstein asked himself how fast he should row in order to prevent
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 137

the sunlight from touching him. The most famous mental experiment was the
‘platform experiment.’ One can see how this mental experiment is closely
linked to the theory of relativity and to the idea that privileged observers do
not exist. Einstein imagined a railroad station with a very long platform. Two
people were positioned on the platform, observers A and B. A train passes
through the station at a certain speed. In the train there is another observer, C.
At a certain moment, Tx, a gun is fired on the train. The observers hear the
shot at different times: T1, T2, T3, because of the speeds of the train and of
the sound. Einstein assumed that there is not only one privileged referral time,
but all were at the same level. Now passing to the solar system, in accordance
with the theory of relativity, it is not correct to assume that the earth only goes
around the sun. It is not correct to assume the sun as the only one privileged
point of reference; we can also consider the Earth, or even Mars, as a point of
reference.
Getting back to Bion, it is important to underline that in his use of the
image of ‘something in the mind, which is the correspondent to the archaic
residuals of the gills,’ the metaphoric thickness is very thin. Bion’s aim is not
to evoke a scenario, but to conduct an ‘analytical mental experiment.’
The peculiarity of mental experimentation (or thought experimentation –
Gedankenexperiment) is such that while ‘freedom’ of imagination has to
lean towards the extreme (indeed, to see links which were not previously
seen, as in Poincaré’s descriptions), at the same time, thought must be
‘self-disciplining,’ limiting the spectrum of the imaginable to the planning
of future experiments…and/or to the compatibility with the ‘corpus’ of
theoretical hypotheses which are deemed to be relevant. [… It is this type]
of ‘mental experiment’ that Bion tries to set in motion through the use of
faculty or ‘non-logical’ acts even though they are self-regulated by thought
(as ‘imaginative conjecture,’ ‘rational conjecture,’ and speculative imagina-
tion…or even ‘idea generators,’ or as Joyce called them, ‘mother ideas.’ (Di
Paola 1995, p.104)

Speculative imagination in Italy

Speculative imagination, in its Italian form, has become richer in images
whilst the scientific part is of lesser degree. Furthermore, it has improved by
taking the needs and vulnerability of the patient into consideration. Great
store is held in these in the formulation and choice of moment of intervention,
which the analyst makes. The necessity of being authentic and courageous, for
the analyst, remains unchanged.
138 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Beyond the close circle of those who have been into Bion’s work in great
depth, there are many psychoanalysts in Italy today who lean towards the
interpretation as invention or trace of an image or hypothesis which is able to
activate both a response of the analysand’s and a transformation of that which
is taking place in the session. I believe that this way of viewing interpretation,
at least in part, is an effect of the impact of the idea of Bion’s ‘speculative
imagination.’

A particular view of psychoanalysis

The theory of speculative imagination acquires even more sense if seen from
Bion’s point of view of psychoanalysis.
I spoke previously of Bion’s ‘psychoanalytic anthropology’. I shall now
better explain what I meant by that with the aid of an analogy. Along with
many psychoanalysts, two artists continue to come to mind both when
studying Bion’s view of psychoanalysis and recalling his ties with Italy.
Alberto Burri and Pino Pascali were rather anomalous compared to other
postwar Italian artists as they were not ‘intellectuals’ or ‘left-wing,’ and while
being on friendly terms with other artists, they did not belong to any
particular artistic movement. Burri – who is also regarded as the major Italian
painter of the period – was a doctor and had started painting during the last
years of World War II while he was a prisoner of war in Texas. Some paintings,
such as the famous ‘Sacks,’ show cuts and stitches in the cloth – stitches put in
by an expert surgeon’s hand, but which leave the wound visible. Of his other
works, ‘The Clays’ create cracked earth on the surface of the painting – earth
or clay that has cracked when dried in the sun because of the drought. Other
works by Burri were created by ripping a part of the smooth layer of a sheet of
plywood to show two adjacent surfaces – one smooth and the other rough.
Looking at them, one gets the same effect as when contemplating the coun-
tryside where a large field is composed of brown ploughed clods on one side
and green, newly sprung, waving wheat on the other.
Pascali loved motorcycles and speed. He produced several works entitled
‘Anthropology.’ They are more like do-it-yourself, (DIY) than proper
sculptures – ‘nests’ made of straw, ‘tree-houses’ made of nets, wood and ropes.
These are nests, houses and passages in which a primitive man might have
moved about. Another piece of work, ‘32 sq. m. of Sea’ was made by
colouring a large quantity of water with blue aniline. In a short film, ‘Measures
of the Earth,’ shot on the beach at Fregene, one can see Pascali measuring
sandy areas with a tape and other tools (cf. Christov Bagargiev 1997).
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 139

Like Burri and Pascali, Bion uses the simplest and most precise tools. Like
them, he searches for a measure for man, man who is not alone or isolated, but
part of a flock; that means, man who is subjected to the forces which are active
in the flock. Moreover, Bion is interested in measuring man under extreme
conditions, when the flock is subjected to very strong pressure and in turn
exerts powerful constraints on man – man subject to the drive to be part of the
flock, to attack or to run with the crowd, man faced with terror and stupidity, a
thinking man.

2
Work-group mentality and primitive mentality
What I just said may remind us of Bion’s hypothesis of rational or work-group
mentality as opposed to primitive mentality.
The terms ‘rational group’ and ‘work-group’ correspond to two chrono-
logical moments and two stages of Bion’s development. To begin with he
speaks (1943) of a ‘group with a rational structure,’ referring to those aspects
of collective mental life which maintain a level of behaviour linked to reality
such as the awareness of the passing of time and the ability to follow methods
which may be roughly called scientific. Such methods may still be rudimen-
tary (like that of the monkey using a stick to reach a banana) but they are
different from simple motor activity (like that of a monkey flinging itself
against the bars) and from the automation of actions promoted by primitive
mentality.
Later Bion (1961) replaced the name ‘rational group’ with ‘work-group.’
As he himself says: ‘In some groups with which I was concerned, what I had
called ‘rational group’ was spontaneously called ‘work-group.’ The name is
concise, and since it expresses well an aspect of the phenomenon which I wish
to describe, from now on I shall use this term.’ The term ‘work-group’ used by
Bion makes it clear that a learning activity is necessary if a participant is to be
able to make a contribution to the achievement of the group’s aims. This term
also shows that participation in the work-group implies having developed
some skills which Freud had indicated as characteristic of the individual’s Ego,
i.e. attention, verbal representation and symbolic thought.
The second group mentality described by Bion is primitive mentality.
Primitive mentality corresponds to the tendency to give automatic replies. It is
a dimension in which it is hard not to become completely involved. To
illustrate this characteristic I shall tell the tale of a friend with a sense of
humour: ‘My first contact with politics was one day many years ago. Nation-
alism and Fascism were just beginning. I was at Middle School and I was very
140 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

proud to have had this first contact with politics, and anxious to tell my family
all about it. When I went home to lunch, I met my brothers and my father, an
old gentleman with a liberal education. Full of enthusiasm, I began to tell
them that the High School boys had arrived, and that we had gone to the
other schools in a procession to get the boys to come out. We had gone all
round the town. My father asked me: “What were the reasons for the demon-
stration? What did you want?” I replied: “I don’t know, but we were all
shouting ‘Fast-belt, Fast-belt.’
My brothers burst out laughing. It took me some time to understand that I
had joined the procession out of step. In fact they were shouting: “Bel-fast,
Bel-fast.”
The more the group functions according to primitive mentality, the more
limited the space for the individual. It is important for the therapist to be
aware of this, and in particular of the fact that the group can limit people’s
liberty by requiring them to adjust to a certain collective functioning. This
adjustment is demanded both regarding thought (through the elimination of
dissonant thoughts) and emotion. For instance, the group may exert coercion
in the sense that everyone must be happy and show themselves to be so. If
those forces which tend to limit freedom to express oneself and to think
prevail, then individuals lose their uniqueness and become interchangeable.
Therefore, the group therapist’s task is not to force individuals to form a group
(as in the case of a mass group) but to slow down processes that are too swift
and disruptive, and to underline the peculiarities, differences and rights of the
individuals.
According to Bion, primitive mentality is supported and pervaded by
three phantasies which alternate in the group. Bion defines them as ‘basic
assumptions’ to indicate how fundamental and indisputable they are. In a
recent paper (1991), his daughter Parthenope Bion Talamo speaks about
them as follows:
In a broad outline of Bion’s theory…he declares that the attempts made by
human beings united in a group to develop creative conduct (in whatever
field) may be disturbed and even completely broken off by the emergence of
thoughts and emotions as rooted in unconscious phantasies concerning the
‘true’ motives for the foundation of the group.
There are three main classes into which these phantasies fall: 1. ‘religious,’ the
phantasy of depending totally on an absolute and dominant figure; 2. that of
‘coupling’ according to which the group is said to be formed with the sole aim
of reproduction, a class which merges into the religious one when the product
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 141

of mating, whether it be a person or an idea, is seen as a messiah who is still to

come; 3) fight/flight, a basic phantasy according to which the group gets
together in order to deal exclusively with its own preservation, and this
depends exclusively on attacking the enemy in mass or in fleeing from it.
In Experiences in Groups, Bion describes the two mentalities (work-group
mentality and primitive mentality) as co-present and opposing. In other
words, primitive mentality and work-group mentality do not constitute a
sequence. This is a very precise point in Bion’s work. It is necessary to clarify
three points. First, in Bion’s thinking, both primitive mentality and work
group mentality are a genetic endowment of human beings and thus cannot
be annulled. Second, there is real growth only through conflict of that which
is primitive and that which is mature. Only growth occurring on the
developed side is apparent and is built upon a sandy foundation. Third, devel-
opment of technology doesn’t coincide with growth of man. Quite often, it is
just the opposite. Technological development may conceal the fact that man
(as someone who is responsible for his primitive drives) has not developed.
Evolved man (expression of the work-group) and regressed man (expression
of primitive mentality) are present in both the caveman and his modern
descendent, technological man. Actually, in technological man, the primitive
mentality – if it does not meet adequate opposition in the work-group – is all
the more dangerous in so far as it is masked by a sophisticated logic and
endowed with immeasurable power. Adequate opposition to the primitive
mentality could be the expansion of a worldwide movement which, for
example, opposes a nuclear war or destruction of the ecological environment.
The active presence of the work-group mentality and primitive mentality,
both in the group and in each of the participants, puts the individual in a
situation of conflict, which cannot be resolved. If he participates in the
work-group, he feels deprived of warmth and strength, if he adheres to the
group as a basic assumption, he knows he may find it impossible to pursue his
own ends as a thinking and reflecting individual. Participating in a group
dominated by primitive mentality is revitalising, even when it leads to catas-
trophe, while when we detach ourselves from our herding nature, we suffer a
sense of limitation and realise how deeply dependent on others we are and we
feel alone.
On the other hand, this conflict between work-group and primitive
mentality is also essential, and it is the origin of transformations. In Bion’s
opinion there is no true growth where the evolutionary aspect is detached
from the primitive aspect. It is only when what is evolved comes into
142 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

resonance with what is primitive and drags it out of its isolation, that there is
real development of the group and of the personality of the individual.

More about Bion’s particular view of psychoanalysis

Returning to Bion’s particular view of ‘psychoanalysis as anthropology,’ and
completing this quick sketch, I should like to mention two more characteris-
tics.
The first lies in the belief that the analyst’s (and the analysand’s)
acceptance of responsibility implies overstepping the boundary of the
horizon of knowledge that had previously been laid down. In other words,
the ethical duty of a psychoanalyst is not to adjust to certain norms of
behaviour, but to expand the fields of knowledge and accept responsibility for
the new point of view which has been reached. According to Bion, psycho-
analysis is a tool for research, a probe exploring the unknown, not a container
for what is already known.
Another important part of Bion’s view of psychoanalysis is in considering
it a ‘truth-verifying process,’ a process, through which a person becomes
him/herself, whoever that may be. Bion believes truth is ‘reality,’ ‘food for the
mind.’ For him, truth is also ‘what evolves,’ ‘the non-finished.’ Truth has a
general, or rather, a universal character there is one truth, which evolves in
multiple forms.
In the truth-verifying process, different forms of truth, even though con-
tradictory, do not exclude one another, but on the contrary, are linked to each
other. We might say, for example, that without the conception of truth A
(Freud’s theory of the unconscious), the expression of truth B (the theory of
living archaic residuals) would be insufficient or might even never have been
able to emerge. The relationship between two truths can perhaps best be
compared to the love of Tristan and Iseult: in the sense that they are the pro-
tagonists of a ‘truth-verifying novel or process’ in which they are linked to one
another in life and death in an indissoluble way (cf. Reale 1997).
Entering psychoanalysis is like entering a truth-verifying process which
does not only concern what becomes known, but also concerns the people
(the analyst and the analysand) engaged in the research. We become truth, we
do not possess it.
It follows that Bion’s ‘truth-verifying process’ hypothesis, spotlights the
transforming effect, the active character of truth (cf. Gargani 1996).
I would now like to examine the impact of these two characteristics of
Bion’s view on Italian psychoanalysts. The assumption that psychoanalysis is
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 143

a probe exploring the unknown promoted an original temporal conception.

One may say that a patient is anxious because he underwent a trauma when he
was an infant. Taking advantage of the image of the probe, one may also say
that he is anxious because of something that still hasn’t happened. That is, the
votes are in the ballot-box which is waiting to be opened.
A second consequence is the accent on a particular aspect of the interpre-
tation of dreams and other clinical material during the sessions. That is:
interpretation is seen not so much as clarifying underlying unconscious or
pre-conscious meaning, but as a contribution to a very special dialogue, a
dialogue in which the two parties become more and more involved, in the
sense that it becomes ever more important for each person and increasingly
related to what is essential.

Container«contained relationship
I will now move from a general to a more detailed view and briefly consider
some of Bion’s other ideas which have been developed in Italy in an original
way. The first one is the ‘container« contained relationship’ model.
Pierandrea Lussana (1998 and 1999) pointed out the difference between
the notion of Melanie Klein’s ‘projective identification’ and Bion’s
‘container–contained relationship’ model. The Kleinian theory assumes that
the position of the two parties who are engaged in the analytical relationship
is a fixed one. The patient ‘launches’ the ‘projective identification content’ and
the analyst receives it. The analyst takes it on board, works through its impli-
cations and responds through verbal interpretations. In the Kleinian view, the
analyst is the only agent who is capable of transforming the content of
projective identification. On the contrary, when considering the analytic rela-
tionship from the point of view of Bion’s ‘container–contained relationship’
model, the stress is on reciprocity and the mutual undertaking in which
analyst and analysand, from time to time, take the role of container or
contained. In Bion’s model, the mind of the analyst is not the sole performer
of the transformation. The transformation is carried out mainly through the
interchange of the analysand and analyst, both as container and contained.
Luciana Nissim Momigliano (1984) goes even further, developing an
original idea of psychoanalysis as ‘two people talking in the consulting room.’
The analysand is considered as having a completely active role in the course of
the analysis.
144 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

‘PS«D’ oscillation
The major contributions to the development of the ‘PS–D oscillation’ theory
in Italy have been provided by Giovanni Hautmann (1981 and 1999) and by
Bion’s daughter, Parthenope Bion Talamo (1981).
Before entering into this matter, I would like to give a short definition of
Bion’s ‘PS« D oscillation’ theory. PS is the initial for the paranoid–schizoid
position. D stands for the depressive position. Bion takes the two terms from
Kleinian theory, but he puts new wine into an old barrel.
Melanie Klein worked through the notions of both paranoid–schizoid
and depressive positions in quite considerable depth, in connection to the
evolving process that a child must pass through in order to reach a more stable
relationship with an object. That is, for Melanie Klein the only worthy
movement is from paranoid–schizoid towards the depressive position. Any
movement in the other direction is considered as being regressive and in fact,
pathological. In numerous sections of his work, Bion declared complete
acceptance of Melanie Klein’s formulations and further, considered them as a
milestone within the psychoanalytical world. However, to one side of Klein’s
theory, Bion developed his own model.
For Bion, that is: oscillation is not between paranoid–schizoid and
depression, but between dispersion and integration. For Melanie Klein, as I
said before, there is evolution from the paranoid–schizoid position to the
depressive position, whilst for Bion there is oscillation between PS and D. For
Bion, remaining only or too long in ‘D’ leads one to a stereotyped form of
mind and at the end, to stagnation of thought. To continue functioning, it is
necessary to oscillate once more from D to PS.
Of course, dispersion is accompanied by some feelings which are usual in
a fragmented state of mind, and integration is accompanied by a slight
depressive mood. ‘Bion…said that following an effective interpretation, both
patient and analyst felt sad… Feelings of sadness associated with separation
and loss were the inevitable consequence of an effective interpretation and
would always be mutual, however gratifying the analytic process may be’
(Mason 2000).
Bion’s theory also considers the existence of a principle, which is able to
bring order and shape: a ‘chosen fact,’ a ‘significant configuration.’ This
principle, when one is able to grasp it, activates the oscillation from dispersion
to integration.
Giovanni Hautmann and Parthenope Bion Talamo agree on the fact that
the PS« D oscillation should be considered a fundamental mechanism of
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 145

thought, just as the systolic and diastolic mechanisms are of the heart. They
also agree on the need for the analyst to ‘contemplate’ void and chaotic
confusion, which are typical of the paranoid–schizoid position – while main-
taining his ability to think and dream. Their opinions differ with regard to the
analyst’s bringing about a crisis of crystallized beliefs, and therefore
triggering D« PS oscillation. Bion Talamo takes a more ‘wait and see’ stance,
with Hautmann a more active one.
As for myself, I believe that – in certain circumstances – these interven-
tions are useful and desirable. Even in these cases, the analyst, however, must
limit himself to using the tools offered by the setting.
I find Giovanni Hautmann’s precise descriptions of how Bion was able to
activate ‘thinking,’ thus causing D« PS oscillation, particularly fascinating.
Hautmann also demonstrates how Bion repeatedly and actively questioned all
the situations in which he himself, the analysand or the group had reached a
finished formulation and a point of emotive equilibrium. The ‘thinking’
process is presented as a series of moments, where every safe moment is
followed by a fracture and a consequent need to face painful instability in a ‘to
and fro’ game which lends importance to the becoming rather than the being,
to thinking rather than to thought (understood as what has already been
thought).

3
An illustration of PS«D oscillation
I would like to present an illustration using the notes taken by one of the par-
ticipants in Bion’s seminars in Rome.
Bion sometimes began his seminars by making general considerations,
and more rarely, he just waited without saying anything. Then after a little
while, someone from the audience would ask a question.
On asking the question, the interlocutor put himself in front of a thought
which organized itself and, in turn, became the ‘question.’ A field of interest
was set up. Emotions and thoughts which were up to that point rather vague
would begin to take shape within a cognitive and affective condition that was
characterized both by the intense expectation of verifying one’s own convic-
tions and by the desire to receive confirmation and support from Bion (oscilla-
tion from PS to D).
The characteristic trait was that, apparently, there wasn’t any reply given.
Bion developed his discussion, which seemed not to have anything to do with
the question that had been asked. In this way he shifted the emotional and
146 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

theme context, which had been set up in such a way that the participants were
taken by surprise. The designated interlocutor and the group of participants
underwent the effects of the destruction of the emotional and theme field into
which they had set themselves (oscillation from D to PS).
Nevertheless, at the same time Bion’s discussions produced new seeds of
thought which brimmed with core significance that he had been able to seize
upon from the question that the interlocutor had asked, but was not aware of.
This core had been enriched by Bion’s thoughts and expressed through a
verbal form which was poetic and enriched with images.
Further, using a silence of either longer or shorter duration, the group
assimilated the deception. The participants managed to master the confusion
and the corresponding tormenting surprise blows. Once more, ‘seeds of
thought’ gathered in another ‘question’ (oscillation from PS to D.) Once
again, the audience were exposed to the frustration and emotional swirling of
contact with Bion’s spirit (oscillation from D to PS.)
An uneasiness spread through the participants, there was almost a cocktail
of both negative and positive elements. The dominating reaction was to grab
desperately onto the need to understand. ‘To understand’ meant struggling to
pick up on the way in which Bion, in his answer, had elaborated upon the
‘manifest contents’ of the question.
This was the exact opposite of what Bion was aiming at. In his Rome
seminars he wanted to show that one had to free oneself from codified
language and thought forms in order to be able to pick up on something that,
although inseparable from those forms, went beyond them. Thought then,
freed from ‘institutional language,’ would have looked for, and found, other
efficient forms of expression and communication.

Thoughts without thinker

Bion upheld that thoughts exist both prior to and independently of the
subject who thinks them; the thought function, then, comes only after the
thoughts. If one wanted to propose the first reference from a purely philo-
sophical point of view, it would be Plato, or whilst regarding contemporary
philosophy, ‘World 3’ which Popper (1963) spoke about, ‘a world of thoughts
without a subject who does the thinking.’ The difference between Popper’s
World 3 and Bion’s thoughts without thinker is that the latter are active and
evolve (cf. Dazzi 1987).
Once again, I think it opportune to make reference to Bion’s seminars.
Bion started the seminar, which was held in Rome on 15 July 1977, by saying
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 147

that he was thinking that when there are many individuals present, there are
also many thoughts without thinkers and that these thoughts without
thinkers were, therefore, in the air somewhere.
This proposed consideration, which was sparked off by the idea that in
the room, ‘in the air,’ there could be a lot of ‘thoughts without thinkers,’ led to
the formulation of an original model of ‘Field,’ which has been developed
mainly by Antonello Correale (1991), Eugenio Gaburri (1997) and the
members of the Group Research Centre ‘Il Pollaiolo,’ in Rome and Palermo.
According to this model, the ‘field’ is the place (both mental and theoret-
ical) where emotions and sensations are accumulated and shared by the
members of the group.
The people forming a group are immersed in the field, which is limited by
links (L, H, K). The field is the third element, which exists between the
‘thoughts without thinker’ and ‘the thinker.’
Another starting point of the Italian psychoanalyst is Kurt Lewin’s (1935)
fundamental work. However, it is important to point out that only the more
general methodological ideas of Lewin were incorporated by the Italians, not
his specific model. More precisely, I am referring to Lewin’s approach for
observation of psychological phenomena. Lewin doesn’t search for regulari-
ties, but for interaction of a set of elements within a field. Whether an event
‘occurs often or seldom has nothing to do with the [sought after] law’ (Desilet
1999). In following Lewin’s approach, the Italians are searching for the inter-
action within the ‘field’ which is represented by the group and the group
session. However, differently from Lewin, they have not tried to state these
interactions in terms of forces or dynamics.
Another important researcher who made an important contribution to the
‘field theory’ from a very original point of view, was Foulkes with his idea of
‘matrix.’ Foulkes’ ideas have been assimilated by Italian psychoanalysts, not
directly, but through inter-subjective psychoanalysis.4 Mitchell (1988)
‘considers relationships with others, not drives, as the basic stuff of mental
life.’ He goes on to say that from his perspective, people are portrayed as being
shaped by and are inevitably embedded within a matrix of relationships with
other people, struggling both to maintain their ties to others and to differen-
tiate themselves from them. In his vision, the basic unit of study is not the
individual as a separate entity whose desires clash with an external reality, but
an interactive field within which the individual arises and struggles to make
contact and articulate himself. Analytic enquiry entails participation in, and
148 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

observation of, and uncovering and transformation of these relationships and

their internal representations (Wright 2000).
Although these two streams of ideas made important contributions to the
construction of the Italian model of ‘field,’ the latter has kept its originality:
the fact that field is seen as something between the members of a group or the
analytical couple (the thinker) and emotions, feelings and non-thought
thoughts (the thoughts without thinker). A second original point is, that
working through implies the fact that thoughts stay for a long period in an
undefined reservoir (the field) before they can really be worked through. We
believe that good wine is not just pure fermented grape juice but one that has
to rest for a period in wooden barrels in well-controlled temperature and
humidity conditions in a cellar.

Bion between past and future

In conclusion, I will say a few words about the topicality of Bion’s teaching.
Bion is not a pre-modern but a post-modern thinker, ‘postmodern,’ not in the
chronological sense, nor in the sense of a removal and relocation of modernity.
That is, not in the sense of an impossible return from the modern point of
view, but inasmuch as it implies that many routes that had previously been
followed by modernity seemed to be blind alleys. At the same time however,
through modernity, possibilities of comprehension which are radically new
have appeared (Bauman 1993).
Bion is not a psychoanalyst belonging to the period of crisis in psycho-
analysis, he is a psychoanalyst of the new beginning of psychoanalysis. Bion
sees the limits of psychoanalytical practice and technique, but he also
announces its fundamental value: the things that make it unique.
He writes that an activity like psychoanalysis can in certain periods be
fashionable, and that fashion changes. He adds that he has lived long enough
to have had the experience of recognizing a situation in which psychoanalysis
was very fashionable among the intelligentsia – as he was sure that many of us
could recall moments in which particular points of view and beliefs were fash-
ionable. He remembers when it was very fashionable to read The Forsyte Saga,
then the book was forgotten until later on, when there was a revival, thanks to
the dominance of television and of seeing with our own eyes. Thus history is
renewed, or so it seems. However, Bion continues, admitting that this was a
difficult point to write, what was really important was the true saga of the
Forsytes, the fundamental history, the facts and the reality. The only name he
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: BION’S JOURNEYING IN ITALY 149

could give to these was ‘truth,’ which is not influenced by a fashion or by

anything at all we might happen to think about it.
Bion invites psychoanalysts to widen the cracks in the surfaces of customs
and beliefs, and starting from the concrete experience, to take care to leave
more room for the fundamental history, for the truth that exists in a particular
psychoanalytic setting or in a group analysis.
An analytical approach – such as Bion’s – sustains the analyst and gives
him the security he needs when required to stand his ground, which I believe
often occurs.
Moreover, an approach to analytical work such as Bion’s guarantees a
stimulus. It makes both the analyst and the patient aware of the fact that
despite endless doubts, even if sometimes everything may appear worthless,
and we may feel worthless ourselves, there is an answer. The answer is ‘that
you are here – that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and
you may contribute a verse’ (Whitman 1855).

References
Baumann Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell Publishers.
Bion, W. R. (1943) ‘Intra-group tensions in therapy:’ Lancet 2: 678–781 (27 Nov. 1943).
Also in Experiences in Groups (1961).
Bion W. R. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock Publications.
Bion W. R. (1985) Seminari Italiani. Roma: Borla.
Bion W. R. (1997) Taming Wild Thoughts. London: Karnac Books.
Bion Talamo P. (1981) ‘PS« D.’ Rivista di Psicoanalisi, XXVII, 3–4, 626–628.
Bion Talamo P. (1991) Aggressività, bellicosità, belligeranza. Unpublished.
Cavalletti, A. (2000) ‘Leggere “Spartakus”, prefazione.’ In Jesi, F. (2000) Spartakus – simbologia
della rivolta. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Christov Bagargiev, C. (1997) ‘Città natura.’ In Catalogo delta mostra internazionale di arte
Contemporanea ‘Città natura’. Roma: Fratelli Palombi Editori.
Corrao F. (1998a) Orme I. Milano: Cortina Editore.
Corrao F. (1998b) Orme II. Milano: Cortina Editore.
Correale A. (1991) Il campo istituzionale. Roma: Borla.
Dazzi N. (1987) ‘Note sulla lettura dell’opera di W. R. Bion.’ In C. Neri et al. (a cura di), Letture
Bioniane, Roma: Borla.
Desilet, G. (1999) ‘Physics and language-science and rhetoric: Reviewing the parallel
evolution of theory on motion and meaning in the aftermath of the Sokal hoax.’ The
Quarterly Journal of Speech LXXXV, 4, 339–354.
Di Paola, F. (1995) Il tempo della mente. Saggio sul pensiero di Wilfred Bion. Ripatransone (AP)
Edizione Sestante.
Ferenczi S. (1924) Thalass Versuch einer Genitaltheorie, Wien: International Psychoanalytischer
Verlag.
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Freud, S. (1920) Quoted in Bion Talamo, P. (1981) ‘An “ethica1 code” for authors?’ In
Piccioli, E. et al. (1996) Writing in Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books.
Gaburri E. (ed.) (1997) Emozione e interpretazione, Psicoanalisi del campo emotivo. Torino:
Bollati-Boringhieri.
Gargani A. (1996) Presentazione di Gruppo di Claudio Neri. Gruppo e Funzione Analitica XVII,
1, 16–25.
Hautmann G. (1981) ‘My debt toward Bion: From psycho-analysis as a theory to
psycho-analysis as a mental function.’ Rivista di Psicoanalisi XXVII, 3–4, 573–586.
Hautmann G. (1999) Il mio debito con Bion. Roma: Borla.
Lewin, K. (1935) A Dynamic Theory of Personality. Selected Papers. New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company Inc.
Lussana, P. (1998) Gli elementi della psicoanalisi (Bion) come teoria delle emozioni o delle esperienze
emozionali. In Bion Talamo, P. et al. (eds) Lavorare con Bion. Roma: Borla.
Lussana, P. (1999) ‘Introduzione alla teoria ed alla tecnica della supervisione.’ Rivista di
Psicoanalisi. XLV, 3, 465–473.
Mason, A. (2000) ‘Bion and Binocular Vision.’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 81,
983–989.
Mitchell, S. (1988) Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Neri C. (1995) Group. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998.
Neri C. (1998) Bion in Italia. In C. Bion Talamo, F. Borgogno, S. A. Merciai (eds) Lavorare con
Bion. Roma: Borla.
Neri C. (1999) ‘Une pièce, où des gens parlent et discutent. Le modèle implicite de groupe
chez W. R. Bion.’ Revue Française de Psychanalyse. Vol. LXIII 3, 859–865.
Nissim Momigliano, L. (1984) ‘"… Due persone che parlano in una stanza…" (Una ricerca sul
dialogo analitico).’ Rivista di Psicoanalisi XXX, 1.
Popper, K. (1963) Conjectures and Refutation: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London:
Routledge.
Reale G. (1997) ‘Storia di una vita retta.’ II Sole 24 Ore, 108, 21.
Shakespeare W. (1969) Twelfth Night or What You Will, in Complete Works of W. Shakespeare,
Vol. III. Philadelphia: Handy Stratford Edition.
Whitman W. (1855) Leaves of Grass. New York: Penguin Books 1944.
Wright F. (2000) ‘The use of the self in group leadership: A relational perspective.’
International Journal of Group Psychotherapy L, 2, 181–199.
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Macmillan.

Endnotes
1. This paper is an expansion upon a previous publication: Neri, 1998.
2. Those readers who are familiar with this concept or who have read my book Group
(Neri 1995) can go directly to the next section.
3. This illustration has already been published in Neri, 1999.
4. The idea of ‘matrix’ was regarded both as too vague and too ontological in Italy.
Foulkes’ ideas were assumed to be opposed to Bion’s, the reference for the Italians was
to Bion. Nowadays, however, these preconceptions don’t exist any more.
 Part II

Bion’s Context
Contemporaries
and Refinements
 6

Pairing Bion and Foulkes

Towards a Metapsychosociology?

Dennis Brown

Half-jokingly I once suggested (Brown 1985, p.216) that rather than hope
Bion and Foulkes would pair posthumously, we should work to integrate their
contributions. I had argued that Bion’s idea about Basic Assumption states
reflects the negative processes in groups, the dark side of a group’s capacity to
work together creatively, and that they are more likely to predominate in
certain conditions. These include the way they are conducted and the organi-
sational culture. Examples of the former include a remote and mystifying style
and talking only to the group-as-a-whole; of the latter, settings which
discourage free communication and shared responsibility, which Foulkes
believed were essential for healthy growth and development. Bion
emphasised the difficulties in the relationship between individual and group,
Foulkes the inextricability and creativity of the relationship. Thus Foulkes
talked to the group and to individuals, holding that group interpretations
inevitably address most members, and that individual interpretations are
saying something to all.
Bion described the problem of psychoanalysis as, ‘Growth and its
harmonious resolution in the relationship between the container and the
contained, repeated in individual, pair and finally group (intra- and extra-
psychically)’ (Bion 1970,15–16). Now, more than ever, I am convinced that
the work of Foulkes and his followers helps us to illuminate and resolve that
problem. If we work towards integrating the ideas of Bion and Foulkes, we

153
154 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

could arrive at a metapsychosociology. A lot of the spadework has already

been done. I wish to use some of it.
Freud developed his metapsychology to conceptualise the vicissitudes of
instinctual drives within the individual, culminating in the so-called structural
theory of a personality structured into ego, superego and id (Freud 1923);
each part a sub-system of the whole. Similarly, a metapsychosociology would
need to visualise a series of systems and subsystems. These could embrace
several elements (De Mare 1972): (a) structure, incorporating the group
beyond the individual isolate; (b) processes such as a development of a sense of
belonging, identification, and differentiation from others. These would have
to include both positive and negative processes, in the sense that they are or
are not compatible with both self-respect and respect for others; and (c)
contents such as values, good/bad, simplicity/complexity, uniformity/di-
versity. These would include the value accorded to ‘individualism’ and to
group-belonging and participation. Bion summed this up in his idea of
humans being group animals at war with their groupishness (Bion 1961);
Foulkes’s contrasting idea is that groups provide the matrix out of which indi-
viduality emerges (Foulkes 1973). In Freud’s metapsychology the superego is,
as it were, the Trojan horse in which the social breaches the individual. A
Foulkesian metapsychology will allow for the influence of the social at all
levels of individual and group interaction.
Beyond the vicissitudes of individual development, the stuff of our
everyday clinical work, such a theory, could help us to account for the impact
on groups of individuals of social trauma, conflict and oppression, as well as
the subtler blockages to co-operative work epitomised by the basic assump-
tions. To do this we need to be aware of the operation of the social uncon-
scious as well as the individual unconscious and the way the context
influences what goes on within it.
I have begun to think again about Bion and his unworked out non-rela-
tionship with Foulkes, helped by the thinking of a new generation of group
analysts, notably Morris Nitsun (1996) and Farhad Dalal (1998), both of
whom are to a degree critical of Foulkes. In addition I want to bring in the
systemic approach of Agazarian, and group relations thinkers influenced by
Bion (Lawrence 2000, Turquet 1974). These have been further illuminated
by Earl Hopper’s attempts to link psychoanalysis, group analysis and
sociology (Hopper 1997), and by the work of others who have applied group
analytic ideas to organisational consultancy. They have helped me to integrate
both my experience of working as a clinician, and participation in the work of
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 155

the European Association for Transcultural Group Analysis. This has

inevitably involved thinking about transcultural and intercultural
phenomena; respectively focusing on similarities and communication across
cultures, and differences and failures of communication. The crucial signifi-
cance of boundaries is illustrated by work on the body image, briefly reported
here as a metaphor for group identification, holding and containing. It is
explored using the concepts of bi-logic (Matte-Blanco 1975, 1988) and the
vicissitudes of intersubjectivity (Brown 1994).

1. Morris Nitsun
Morris Nitsun (1996) challenges Foulkes’s excessive optimism about thera-
peutic groups, and recognises that groups as well as individuals can be the
source of aggression and destructiveness. In developing his concept of the
Anti-Group, the ever-present potential for destructiveness shadowing creative
group processes (‘the Pro-Group’), he suggests that basic assumption groups
are manifestations of Anti-Group processes (page 66). ‘[The] basic assump-
tions undermine the capacity of the group to achieve its purpose. The group is
preserved – or there is an attempt to do so – but at the expense of personal and
group development.’
Nitsun cautiously but powerfully extends the concept of the anti-group to
‘natural groups’ – to families and to organisations, and to social cultures. What
he calls ‘the indivisible link between individual and group, person and
culture’ involves different levels of the organisational whole in a complex way.
He uses a mirroring analogy in which the anti-group is a prism in which the
psyche and the social world ‘act as containers for each other, mutually
reflecting each other in an ongoing cycle’ (Nitsun 1996, p.268). Unlike Dalal
(v.i.) he starts with an intra-psychic phenomenon – failure of the environ-
mental mother to provide a context in which to acquire a creative relationship
to self and other – to group relationships in family and social groups. He does
however go on to consider social failures to care for people suffering scarcity
and basic requirements for life and dignity.
In his conclusions (Nitsun 1996, p.286), Nitsun proposes three integrated
perspectives: the dialectics, ecology, and aesthetics of groups.
(a) Dialectics refers to a continuous cycle of mutual creation and negation,
in a sense of Foulkes and Bion, construction and destruction. The group is
never one thing, defined and static, ‘it becomes what it is in the interplay of
different modes of experience’. Nitsun is wrong though, I think, to counter-
point anti-group basic assumption states with being stuck in cohesive ideali-
156 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

sation of the group; that is not Foulkesian, it is better seen as basic assumption
one-ness (Turquet) or massification/aggregation (Hopper), which are
discussed later.
(b) Ecology refers to the ecological viewpoint brought to wide attention
by Bateson (1972). It draws on principles of how human systems such as
groups are formed and maintained by the communication of information,
including the interaction of ideas. Durkin (1981), Blackwell (1994) and
Agazarian and Gantt (2000) have developed these systemic ideas. Boundary
issues are vital to any systemic approach, e.g. whether boundaries are
permeable or impermeable. Interestingly Nitsun prefers the term ecological to
systemic ‘as it generates more directly a vision of the group in its multiple
contexts as it struggles towards its destiny as a living system’ (Nitsun 1996,
p.289).
A well-functioning therapeutic group can become increasingly flexible
and inclusive, so long as the pro-group predominates and comes to dialectical
terms with the anti-group.
(c) Aesthetics relates to the way in which the group is experienced as a
creation integrated from the fragments unfolding at the time into coherent
patterns within the (dialectical) flux in the (ecological) holding environment. I
think Nitsun is right when he suggests that both group members and
therapists achieve aesthetic satisfaction from the transformational potential of
the group which can lead to moments of insight, wisdom and beauty.
This creative view of group functioning, in which the group creates itself,
contrasts with that of Anzieu (1984) whose work on training groups
emphasises the illusory nature of groups but links naturally with Winnicott’s
idea about creative play within transitional space (Winnicott 1971). This is, as
it were, the Anlage of the cultural products of society. It will be noted that this
implies a centrifugal process, starting in the space between baby and mother,
progressing outward to the space between wider and wider networks of
people. It also implies that the individual comes first. This is directly
challenged by Farhad Dalal, who emphasises the priority of the group, and
the centripetal forces of influence. I turn now to Dalal’s contribution without
agreeing that either direction of influence can be seen as primary.

2. Farhad Dalal
Farhad Dalal’s criticism of Foulkes is in some ways more radical than that of
Nitsun. He makes a case for Foulkes having had a failure of nerve in the face of
his own radicalness, anxious not to endanger his professional identity as a
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 157

psychoanalyst. According to Dalal’s reading of Freud and Foulkes, the latter

drew back from the full recognition of his awareness of the social world pene-
trating and moulding not only the ego and superego, but also the id, the
supposed seat of innate instinct (Dalal 1998, p.46). It is the deepest levels of
communication that have the widest transpersonal influences which permeate
groups and societies to a degree that comprises what he calls the social
unconscious (Foulkes 1964, p.52). In contrast with psychoanalysts such as
Winnicott, who considered healthy individuals make healthy groups,
Foulkes said that whether or not individuals are healthy depends on the state
of the group to which they belong; health and disturbance are a function of a
‘balance in the total field of interaction…’ (Foulkes and Anthony 1957,
p.54). Anyone working with families or groups today would surely agree
with this. Dalal however criticises Foulkes, and most group analysts, for
sticking to Freud’s theory and prioritising the mother–infant paradigm in for-
mulating ‘deep’ interpretations.
What Dalal approvingly calls radical as opposed to orthodox Foulkes,
breaking free from individualism, draws more on the work of the sociologist
Norbert Elias (rather than Freud). But Foulkes was half-hearted about it,
accepting Elias’ idea that individual mind and personality are formed by the
social nexus in which they develop, but ignoring the facts of social power rela-
tionships which Elias emphasised.
Dalal highlights the differences in our understanding of the relationship
between the so-called internal world and the so-called external world, partic-
ularly in terms of which has priority. The philosophical and clinical arguments
are perhaps endless and irresolvable. For example, Cohn (1996) has argued
from a basis in existential phenomenology, that Foulkes recognised the
intersubjective basis of mind, quoting his statement, ‘I do not think that the
mind is basically inside the person as an individual… The mind that is usually
called intrapsychic is a property of the group’ (Foulkes 1990, p.277). In the
same issue of Group Analysis, Diamond (1996) attacks my interpretation of
intersubjectivity (Brown 1994) as too restricted to a psychoanalytic
viewpoint. Countering her criticisms of my interpretation of clinical material
enabled me to clarify, at least for myself, that it was the cut-off ‘autistic’
elements, caused by intolerable pain and anxiety during individuals’ develop-
ment, that led to psychopathology (Brown 1996). This withdrawal is aided by
the fact that people have their own bodies which become sanctuaries and
projection screens, just as ‘belonging groups’ do in social life. (I refer to the
158 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

body image further on). The situations of safety or suffering can become an
infinite series in the unconscious (see references to bi-logic later on).
Foulkes’s emphasis on communication, articulated increasingly in the
therapeutic process, involves translating unthought and unspoken processes
into symbols, including words, and extending them from the ‘internal’
awareness into dialogue with others – whether an individual therapist or a
group; that is, from ‘internal’ into ‘external’ space. According to Elias, symbols
(language, knowledge and thought) are directed towards control of the social
and natural world in which a person is located (Elias 1991a, p.77). In place of
narrowly sociological theories which view the individual as infinitely plastic,
more sophisticated ones such as those of Elias (1991b), Vigotsky (1978),
Mead (1934) and Burkitt (1991) present a picture of mutual engagement and
transformation of the internal and external worlds, much nearer to the
group-analytic view.
Dalal points out that even Winnicott, by placing the transitional space
between mother and infant in which ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ are originally
negotiated, cuts short a potentially wider perspective on self and other in the
wider society by seeing the influence as one-way; i.e. avoiding seeing culture
as penetrating the mother–infant relationship. One example of this is the
effect of the infant’s gender. Foulkes on the other hand, for example, saw the
Oedipus complex not solely as a stage in the child’s development, but as
preceding even the birth of the baby, and as influenced by social attitudes
towards gender and authority (Brown and Zinkin 1994: pp.3ff ).
Dalal points to the radicalism of Fairbairn as being greater than
Winnicott’s, by giving the interpersonal, the ‘external’, priority over the
intrapersonal, the ‘internal’. He saw the libido as object-seeking rather than
pleasure-seeking, with aims to relieve innate tensions, and the infant as con-
structing its internal object world – containing both libidinal and
anti-libidinal objects – as a result of failures and frustrations in relation to
external objects. Yet Fairbairn disappoints Dalal in his seeming disregard of
the social world. In contrast Foulkes recognised that the social world
permeates the individual, but Dalal criticises him for failing to extend his
theory about what takes place inside a group (important for group therapy) to
account for what takes place between groups (which would take us to a wider
theory of the sort I am trying to adumbrate).
One of Dalal’s master strokes is to recruit the thinking of the increasingly
influential psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco (Matte-Blanco 1975 and
1988: Rayner 1995). The theory of bi-logic describes two different systems
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 159

of logic operating in the mind: asymmetrical, in which things are categorised as

different from each other, either/or; and symmetrical, in which all objects are
identical. The former is the world of rationality and ‘secondary process
thinking’, the latter of poetry and dreams and ‘primary process thinking’, in
which there is no necessity to split and differentiate, no negation. Asymmet-
rical logic differentiates, while symmetrical logic homogenises to an infinity
in which all differentiation is lost. According to Matte-Blanco both forms of
logic co-exist. Thus the psychoanalytic view that individuals exist in groups,
and the view that groups exist inside individuals, are complementary. The
complexity of this co-existence is clarified, Dalal asserts (1998 p.217), by
comparing the flowering or unfolding model of development, with its roots
in psychoanalysis, to the ‘cybernetic’ idea of fields of influence, of mirroring
and coherence (Pines 1998), and corrective feedback loops to which Nitsun
was also referring.
Dalal (1998 p.226) points to the fact that at different times Foulkes
acknowledged that both the individual and the group are abstractions. But he
did not join up these realisations. To have done so, in Dalal’s opinion, would
have led to a radical post-structuralist theory that is both exciting and fright-
ening. To get a perspective we have progressively to stand outside the context
we are inside in order to scan it, to enter another context, ad infinitum. He
would rescue us by reminding us of the power structures in the world that
decide who has power and who not, who is included in favoured categories
and who excluded, in short, who is ‘us’ and who ‘them’.

3. Yvonne Agazarian
Yvonne Agazarian has been developing her theory for nearly 40 years
(Agazarian and Gantt 2000). One of her earliest published papers (Agazarian
1962) was on role as an isomorphic bridge in the relationship between the
individual and the group. This links with G. H. Mead’s earlier sociological
work, but was systematically presented 20 years later in her theory of the
‘visible and invisible group’ (Agazarian and Peters 1981) in which she differ-
entiated the several ways in which the individual and group systems interact
as seen from different perspectives: (1) the person perspective ‘explains
individual behaviour in terms of genetic inheritance, developmental history
and environmental influences’. (2) The member role perspective ‘explains
individual behaviour in terms of how the person unwittingly coaches the
group to respond to him in ways that replicate and bind past conflicts’. (3) The
group-as-a-whole perspective ‘explains gross group behaviour in terms of group
160 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

composition, developmental history and environmental influences’. (4) The

group role perspective explains group behaviour in terms of the group as a whole
delegating of one or more of its members to perform group roles that bind,
contain or express group conflicts. ‘Invisible group theory’ explains
individual dynamics in terms of a discrete individual system and separates it
from the equally discrete group system which explains group dynamics. As
Agazarian (1983) explicates, the individual system has two subsystems –
person and member; and the group system has two subsystems – group role
and group as a whole. ‘All three systems are in hierarchical relationship. Their
structure and function are, through their principle of isomorphy, related.’
This complex but careful description integrates systems theory and
Lewinian field theory. Its clarity is far from most therapists’ experience, unless
perhaps they have been through Agazarian’s vivid training seminars.
However, her thinking sheds light on some of the problems highlighted by
Dalal and links with some of Matte-Blanco’s ideas mentioned above. For
example, Agazarian distinguishes between stereotype and functional subgroups:
the former forming around similarities and striking differences, the latter also
forming around similarities but integrating differences. Unlike most group
analysts, who characteristically lead from behind, she sees the task of the
therapist to promote actively the ‘right’ sort of subgroup formation.
For Agazarian every system exists in the environment of the system above
it, and is the environment for the system below it. This hierarchy is
‘contexualised’ as the observing self-system discriminates and integrates informa-
tion, developing the ability to experience itself both as a person-as-a-whole
with membership in many internal subgroups, but also as a member of the
group as a whole and its subgroups (Agazarian and Gantt 2000, p.239).
Much of Agazarian’s work is rigorously intellectual, as in the method she
describes as SAVI (system for analysing verbal interaction), later her sys-
tems-centred practice. But concluding her recent book (Agazarian and Gantt
2000, p.254) she claims that her approach has contributed ‘an understanding
that it is not the human dynamics themselves that contribute to the success or
failure in therapy, but the development of a context in which they can be
addressed and explored rather than acted out. In this Agazarian is very
group-analytic in the Foulkesian sense.
The active role that Agazarian takes in therapy to promote the ‘right’ sort
of subgroup formation could be seen as similar to the promotion of enabling,
as opposed to restrictive, group solutions to group focal conflicts, described
by Whitaker and Lieberman (1964). Her awareness of the narcissistic trauma
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 161

that can be inflicted by group-as-a-whole interpretations in training (T)

groups conducted on the Tavistock model, led her to ‘rescuing’ individuals
through eye contact, as though to affirm their continued existence for her.
She proposed that Bion’s basic assumptions are ‘core emotional response
states that serve the group much as ego defence mechanisms serve the individ-
ual’ (Agazarian and Gantt 2000, p.83). She was influenced by the theory of
group development in T group events described by Bennis and Shepherd
(1956), involving two initial phases: (1) dominated by issues of power and
control in which the group attempts to seduce the leader to a ‘good protector
role’ to defend it against chaos (BaD); and (2) dominated by competitiveness,
which when frustrated leads to a fight–flight Ba culture manifested in
inter-member scapegoating, but finally coalesces into a ‘barometric event’ – a
ritualised attack on the leader. When successful this leads to the location of
‘evil’ in the ‘bad’ leader and ‘good’ in the group, thus freeing the group from
its struggle with the leader for power and control, and allowing it to turn to
issues of intimacy. You will note the similarity of thinking to that of
Winnicott when he described ‘the-use-of an-object’, mentioned below.

4. Fourth and fifth basic assumptions: Turquet, Lawrence and

Hopper
In discussing the contributions of Nitsun and Dalal I have focused on the
two-way relationship between the individual and group, extended to society,
then with the help of Agazarian have begun to allow for the effect of interme-
diate groupings and subgroupings. This brings us to a body of knowledge and
theory that have been mainly the preserve of specialists in group dynamics
consulting to organisations in industry, commerce and public institutions. It
has been promoted especially by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relation-
ships and the Grubb Institute in the UK, and the A. K. Rice Institute in the
USA. One method of working has been through group relations workshops,
the so-called Leicester Conferences, in which the work task is the examina-
tion of relationships within and between groups of participants within the
total situation of the conference. Another application is consultation to
organisations in trouble. The fact that the interests of the organisation and
those of the individuals in it can be in conflict, for example over methods and
hours of work and levels of pay, is obvious, and so is the powerful effect on the
functioning of the total organisation of whether or not workers at all levels are
satisfied and motivated.
162 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

It is significant, I think, that this way of studying group processes can be

very stressful for some individual company members. Agazarian’s method of
making eye contact described above differentiates her from the more
detached style of some conductors who model themselves on Bion and the
‘pure’ Tavistock method. Kleinian psychoanalysts have contributed massively
in this field (e.g. Jaques 1974, Menzies 1961) and the influence of Bion’s
work continues to predominate. This has resulted in a preoccupation with
primitive ‘psychotic’ anxieties – fear of annihilation and persecutory attack –
and defences against them. One could argue that, as with Bion’s method of
conducting small groups (Brown 1985, pp216–7) the way the staff of group
relations workshops carry out their roles can also promote the anxieties they
study. This is not to say that studying the worst possible outcome is not
valuable in reaching towards healthy models of organisational life.
As Lawrence (2000, p.126) has pointed out, the theme of ‘order’ has
always been present in the Tavistock conferences through emphasis on
leadership, responsibility, authority, organisation and the ‘politics of related-
ness’. This is studied in the ‘psychoanalytic’ exploration of possible transfer-
ence and countertransference feelings between the managerial and consultant
staff of the conference and its membership. For example, the staff will often
appear as a privileged subgroup in the conference, at the same time destruc-
tive, persecuting, protecting and benign. The assumption is that such ‘fanta-
sies’ are just that, but there is no doubt that such experiences occur in any
conference when power is arrogated by staff. They could however be
augmented by the style and method of leadership. Ideally, working through
such transference feelings enables the membership to take responsibility for
learning from such experiences.
These extensions to Bion’s theory of basic assumption states, I believe,
help to humanise it by recognising the complex ways by which individuals
keep afloat in groups and find nourishment in them, even put roots down in
them. Pierre Turquet introduced the basic assumption of oneness (Ba0) in
which ‘members seek to join in a powerful union with an omnipotent force,
unobtainably high, to surrender self for passive participation and thereby feel
existence, well-being and wholeness’ (Turquet 1974, p.357). In this state the
individual is lost in oceanic feelings of unity – as in crowds of football
supporters – or in oneness personified in a single person – as in ‘salvationist
inclusion’ achieved by following a cult religious leader. Writing of his experi-
ences in the large group in Leicester Conferences, Turquet (1975) traces the
individual’s ‘conversion’ from being a disconnected singleton to an individual
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 163

member (IM) by establishing relationships with other singletons. He or she

then has to struggle against being taken over as a membership individual (MI)
in the large group in which group membership may be felt to counter
self-definition and needs. This threat is greatest when membership of a large
group is equated with the singleton’s own destructive feelings. Turquet
points to transitional states, between singleton, IM and MI and back again.
Certainly this accords with my own experience in large groups held in the
Group Analytic Society and Institute of Group Analysis, which some people
find so threatening they drop out while others enjoy the exhilaration of the
transformations. The latter are probably more secure personalities or, at least
having survived such experiences before, feel less threatened.
Gordon Lawrence has introduced the complementary concept of a basic
assumptions ‘me-ness’ (Lawrence, Bain and Gould 1966), starting with
Turquet’s idea of the singleton, and which Lawrence sees as increasingly
dominant in a world of increasing individualism and consumerism. This
precedes Turquet’s analysis of the progression of the individual through the
life of the group ‘because the individual does not want to have relations’.
Instead of moving towards intersubjectivity, in which the sentience of others
is acknowledged in a mutual ‘we-ness’, the ‘I’ becomes an object to itself, a
‘me’. BaM represents an attack on the possibility of learning from relating to
others. The group is not allowed to exist and achieve its primary task.
BaO and BaM represent extreme states hindering the function of
self-reflecting work groups that parallel the double nature of the individual as
an ego and part of a ‘we-go’ (Klein 1976). They are integrated, seen as twin
opponents of both unbearable suffering and of creative relating, in Earl
Hopper’s idea of a basic assumption of massification/aggregation (Hopper
1997, 2003). He developed this in the course of exploring, over many years,
the interface between his first professional identity as a sociologist with his
later practice as a group analyst and psychoanalyst, particularly with severely
traumatised and/or personality disordered individuals.
Hopper’s concept of a BaM/A seems particularly relevant in under-
standing what he calls ‘the patterns of incohesion and traumatic experience in
the unconscious life of groups’. Cohesion, Hopper states, refers to the
appearance of unity of feeling and purpose enabling people to work together in
harmony, and is not based only on patterns of communication (as it would be
in a ‘coherent’ group). There is an optimal degree of cohesion for different
phases of group development; too little interferes with decision and action,
too much inhibits individual creativity and can lead to overidealisation of the
164 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

group, scapegoating and denigration of other groups. The degree of cohesion

is influenced by the therapist or leader. Pines (1981) has argued that a mature
group aims for coherence rather than cohesion, the difference being the
amount of diversity that can be creatively integrated within the group and its
component members. I think the important thing is how people can
co-operate and belong, along with others, to an identifiable group, while at
the same time being true to themselves and their own component parts.
Whereas Turquet saw BaO as a regressive group response to multiple
stimuli and response bombardment, Hopper sees Incohesion: Aggregation-
/Massification (I:A/M) as occurring in a group of traumatised people who
have encapsulated intrapsychic oscillations between fission and fragmenta-
tion, fusion and confusion. Those who developed contact-shunning ‘crusta-
cean’ defences will tend to personify states of aggregation; those whose
defences involve merger-hunger ‘amoeboid’ processes, will tend to personify
states of massification. The former Hopper equates (Hopper 1997, p.459) with
Turquet’s singletons, the latter with his membership individuals, leaving
Turquet’s individual members (IM) as those with an optimal degree of
cohesion for working in groups. (These two categories of Hopper are reflected
in work I did on body image many decades ago, and to which I shall refer
later.)
Hopper’s thinking recognises the deep levels of pain and fragmentation
that underlie such group phenomena, akin to Bion’s ideas about basic assump-
tions and the Kleinian tendency to present the underlying anxieties as
psychotic. Work in group relations workshops would indicate that they arise
in ‘average’ groups of ‘average professionals’ and therefore, they arise from all
levels of health and pathology. My own experience in therapy groups (Brown
1985) is that basic assumption phenomena are common transient features of
well-functioning group-analytic groups with very mixed levels of pathology.

5. Group-analytic organisational consultancy

Following Robin Skynner (1989), in the last few years several colleagues have
applied group analytic concepts to organisational consultancy. Rifkind
(1995), working with staff groups dealing with HIV infection, has high-
lighted boundary and ‘dynamic administration’ issues in promoting staff ’s
‘emotional literacy’ and hence their ability to contain the huge emotional dis-
turbance evoked by this work. She describes the staff group as a microcosm of
the wider community setting, able to attend Janus-faced to their own internal
processes and what is happening outside.
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 165

Nitsun (1998a and b) develops Foulkes’s concept of mirroring in consulta-

tion, aiming to strengthen boundary differentiation by clarifying dysfunc-
tional mirroring, in groups and individuals, to increase their capacity to adapt
to the organisational task. He traces isomorphic mirroring through the
concentric systems from the wider environment to what he calls ‘the organisa-
tional psyche’ with its shared fantasies and unconscious attributions [note, not
the individual psyche]. Nitsun uses Foulkes’s ideas of levels of group func-
tioning (current, transference, projective and primordial), the group matrix,
the inseparability of internal and external relationships, figure-and-ground,
and the crucial role of communication; but he also introduces his own concept
of the Anti-group in relation to organisational pathology (which we have
already seen Nitsun equates with Bion’s basic assumption states).
Wilke (1998) describes Oedipal and sibling dynamics in groups
occurring especially at times of rapid change, and defending against the
inability to mourn and feel remorse. Imposed organisational change, he holds,
reproduces early infantile anxieties to do with ‘separation of me and not-me’
and the need to move into the early phase of Oedipal conflict; but at the same
time puts it in terms of social psychology: ‘An organisation of this type is char-
acterised by high levels of anxiety about boundary issues, role strain and
normative expectations.’ (This double way of thinking implies isomorphism
between the theoretical systems of individual and social psychology which
may or may not be justifiable; we will need to think about this further).
Rance (1998) in keeping with Foulkes’s emphasis on networks (nexus,
‘plexus,’ etc. at different points in his writing) uses systems theory and psycho-
analytic theory, as well as Foulkes’s basic idea of the social origins of person-
ality. Rance develops the idea of staff consultation as a conversation, often
extending over several months.
Like Wilke and Nitsun, Blackwell (1998) recognises the potential chaos
in organisations undergoing change, but sees the creative potential of
managing the anxiety stirred up by instability in the system. As he puts it,
following Foulkes, a group analytic approach provides a model for counter-
acting regressive tendencies by promoting communication and dialogue. This
helps to avoid the twin dangers of rigidity and chaos, especially when reflex-
ivity in ‘the bounded instability’ of the matrix can include humour and play-
fulness.
However, Spero (1999), a group analyst who works with Harold Bridger
(a colleague of both Bion and Foulkes at Northfield), quotes Foulkes’s
warning to those working in the organisational context not to go too far into
166 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

underlying meaning or private personal motivation, i.e. to differentiate

clinical and non-clinical work, therapy and consultation. For Spero an
important function of the consultant is to keep the organisation in mind,
along with its task and members’ roles, reflecting at the same time on the
tensions created by the task in both individuals and groups.
This holding and containing of very difficult countertransference feelings –
also emphasised by Wilke in his way of working as a consultant – reflect Colin
James’ (1984, 1994) integration of Winnicott’s and Bion’s complementary
but distinct concepts. Both can be seen to operate within the group-analytic
matrix, and occur (or do not) in all group phenomena, from the mother–infant
dyad to society.
Social construction (Campbell 2000) offers a unifying view of organisa-
tional consultancy and of the individual self which is consistent with
Foulkesian group-analysis. The organisation is seen as socially constructed
continuously, daily, even momentarily, by individuals interacting; it is contin-
uously changing and re-inventing itself, like the dynamic matrix in
group-analytic therapy (Campbell 2000, p.28). The individual self, likewise,
is constructed in the interaction between the self and others (ibid., p.16). This
view is entirely consistent, for example, with Foulkes’s basic law of group
dynamics (Foulkes 1948, Brown 1998) that the group constitutes (i.e. creates)
the norm from which individuals deviate. But it has to maintain its boundaries
and contain its diversity despite difference and emergent tensions.

6. Transcultural work
I shall now draw on experiences studied by the European Association for
Transcultural Group Analysis (EATGA), which relate to the sort of massive
trauma and disruption to which Hopper refers. The history of Europe,
especially in the last century, is one of oscillation between forced attempts at
imperial massification and struggles to unpick larger masses into smaller
groupings, both of which have involved destructive wars, wholesale disloca-
tion and exile of populations, and mass exterminations, not to mention the
continuation of social divides in power and discrimination. It would not be
surprising then if rational co-operation between individuals and between
groups and nations tends to be hampered by oscillation between the fears of
massification and aggregation. Current disputes about European integration
could be seen as a demonstration of Hopper’s basic assumption.
The work of the intercultural workshops organised over the last two
decades by the EATGA have demonstrated how, with good will and profes-
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 167

sional interest – often stemming from a personal history touched by past

European trauma – much of the destructiveness can be contained and
reflected on in ways that diminish scapegoating and stereotyping. Through
alternating small and large groups, people from different cultures are
confronted by how much they have in common. Intermediate-sized groups,
between the size of a nuclear family and a large social group, have allowed
exploration of issues to do with differences of language, religion, and nation-
ality, and the effect of migration. Historical antagonists recognise the
mutuality of their suffering inhumanity; ‘You are the enemy I killed my friend’
as the First World War poet Wilfred Owen wrote before he himself was
killed.
The depth at which cultural and national identity and conflicts are incor-
porated in each individual’s personality is part of what Foulkes (1975) meant
by the foundation matrix, which included shared myths, values and standards.
In the EATGA this is often referred to as the non-individualised part of the
personality (Le Roy 1994). Kaës (1987) pointed to four major psychic
functions of culture: 1. maintaining the individually undifferentiated basis of
psychic structures needed to belong to a social whole, a ‘we-go’; 2. ensuring a
set of common defences; 3. providing points for identification and differenti-
ation which guarantee the continuity of distinctions between the sexes and
generations; 4. constituting an area of psychic transformation by providing
signifiers, representations, and the means for organising psychic reality.
My own observations, during the first workshop in Maastricht (Brown
1987) is that there is a parallel in small and large group settings which can be
related to movement between the (Kleinian) paranoid–schizoid and
depressive positions. One way the small and large groups differed was in the
relative linguistic homogeneity of the small groups, so that frustration,
confusion and fear of annihilation, or at least non-recognition, were
commonest in the large groups. (One manifestation was the non-provision of
a German–speaking small group, and the apparent embargo on German in the
large group.) Themes and developments reflected each other, though small
groups were explicitly more personal, large groups more cultural. Issues of
identity were prominent in both, but the former dealt more with the history of
individual struggles with ambivalently cathected parental objects, while
moving towards individuation and intimacy; the latter with cultural history,
language and identity. The fear of non-recognition and annihilation gave way
gradually in both settings as the paranoid–schizoid was succeeded by the
depressive position, and basic assumption phenomena were replaced by dif-
168 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

ferentiation, reconciliation and mutual concern. This was not without crisis
and struggle, especially powerful in the large group, evident for example in
the confrontation between Jews and Germans in the subsequent workshop in
Heidelberg (Brown 1992). Such powerful and explosive phenomena are
more likely in large groups, where it is much easier not to hear or see individ-
uals, and to resonate to cultural history, myths and stereotypes. This is
augmented by the ‘psychic envelopes’ (Anzieu 1984, 1990), illusory notions
of nation and race, with their attendant mythology. These make it much more
difficult to attain the empathic mutual identification that is necessary for rec-
onciliation and mutual concern. This requires genuine encounters, real con-
frontation and encounter – not the pseudo-confrontation that is based on
paranoid projection (Brown 1988).
Rouchy (1995) has contributed to our appreciation of ‘secondary
belonging groups’ such as educational, occupational and recreational groups,
beyond the primary family, as completing the cultural interiorisation begun in
the family, perhaps permitting individuation and object relating that were not
sufficiently attained there, and ‘concretising the grasp on space and time’.

7. Boundaries and barriers – the analogy with the body image

As Louis Zinkin (1994) argued, boundaries between systems mediate a
balance between centrifugal and centripetal processes. Exchange, vital in psy-
chotherapy, economics and all living systems, implies permeable boundaries.
One of our conclusions in The Psyche and the Social World (Brown and Zinkin
1994) was: ‘Boundaries between individuals are to varying degrees
permeable. The more rigid and seemingly impermeable the boundaries – that
is, the more they become barriers – the greater the use of projection and
projective identification to supplement them, and obtain an exclusive identifi-
cation based on ‘myths of purity and homogeneity, rather than plurality.’
The need for clear, even rigid and impermeable boundaries around
oneself and ‘one’s own kind’ is largely a measure of insecurity and fear of
inner fragility. The analogy of the body image may be instructive. We all have
an unconscious kinaesthetic and proprioceptive model of the body that
influences the sense of ourselves in the world (Schilder 1935; Scott 1948)
both in health and disease, and extend it beyond our physical boundaries, e.g.
to our cars (Brown 1959). Fisher and Cleveland (1958) developed a way of
studying the body image by means of the projective Rorschach ink blot test in
a wide range of psychosomatic and psychiatric conditions, deriving barrier (B)
and penetration (P) scores which can be rated as ranging from high to low. B
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 169

scores were high in people suffering from ‘body boundary disorders’ (e.g.
skin and musculo-skeletal) compared with those suffering from internal (e.g.
gastrointestinal) disorders. P scores were high in fragile schizophrenics.
Many years ago I used this test to study the susceptibility of chemical workers
to develop contact dermatitis (Brown and Young 1965). We discovered that
psychological orientation towards either introversion or extraversion (differ-
entiating between social and thinking I/E, especially when these were
discordant) interacted statistically with other traits such as ego-strength,
anxiety threshold, hunger for tactile contact, and degree of rigidity and intol-
erance of ambiguity. Summarising these findings (Brown 1997) it appeared
that if subjects were social introverts but thinking extraverts (i.e. impulsive
rather than reflective) they had lower ego strengths and anxiety threshold
and more hunger for tactile contact; if they were social extraverts (but
reflective and perhaps ruminative) they tended to be emotionally constricted,
rigid and intolerant of ambiguity.
In his book The Group and the Unconscious, Didier Anzieu (1984) describes
groups as suffering from not having a body, and having to imagine one by
developing an imaginary ‘envelope’ or ego-skin (as do individuals).
Metaphors of the group as a ‘body’ with individual ‘members’ capable of
‘esprit de corps’ bear this out. Based on work in short-term training groups,
Anzieu describes the image of the group body as a ‘pseudo-organised
principle’ corresponding to a ‘nostalgic dream of symbiosis between
members’ (Anzieu 1984, p.241), echoing Turquet’s BaO or Hopper’s Ba. A
more dynamic approach could be offered by the application of Attachment
Theory (Marrone 1994, 1998) to the human need to belong from infancy to
the multiplicity of identifications and real belonging groups that make up a
human’s life span. One can imagine a series of organising metaphors from
womb (Elliot 1994) to global universality.

8. Concluding questions and speculations

Is it meaningful to draw an analogy between the body image and models we
make concerning the inside and outside of the individual in relation to his or
her family, the family in relation to others, and the various secondary groups
with which we identify, and nations, etc.? I suspect it might help us to see the
complexity of developmental negotiations, for example, by enabling us to
allow for variations in basic security within each system, the degree to which
basic needs are met, and the predominant values and attitudes to others. These
would involve a capacity for centrifugal as well as centripetal empathy, for
170 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

flexibility and inclusiveness. There does seem to be a relationship between

the security and satisfaction experienced in a system and the values it develops
towards others.
Do the apparent differences between ‘optimistic’ Foulkes and ‘pessimistic’
Bion relate first to the values of the conductor/therapist/chairman/leader,
and second to ‘where the group is at’ in terms of the security, satisfaction of
needs and the flexibility of the group and the individuals comprising it? I
believe that a crucial differnce is Foulkes’ view of persons and groups as open
systems in dialectical relationship to one another.
A comprehensive ‘metapsychosociology’ would integrate the mutual
interaction and interpenetration of psyches and social worlds, at all levels,
conscious and unconscious. I suspect that a key role in this integration could
be played by the concepts of bi-logic and mathematical set theory developed
by the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco (1975, 1988), particularly in
relation to what Foulkes (1964) called the Social Unconscious. These
concepts involve the coexistence of two modes of thinking, asymmetrical and
symmetrical, which on the one hand discriminate and classify, and follow the
principles of ‘secondary process’ logic (things exist in specific time and space);
and on the other hand follow the ‘primary process’ logic described by Freud
(1915) as characteristic of the unconscious – without contradiction and
negation and manifested in displacement, condensation and symbolisation.
The unconscious is timeless and spatially infinite. Inside and outside coexist
and are interchangeable – as we see in dreams and psychosis. Boundaries and
barriers dissolve. A first step in applying Matte-Blanco’s thinking to
group-analysis has been taken by Wilson (1997), and Dalal, as mentioned
earlier, has extended its use into social psychology and a deeper under-
standing of the social unconscious. He has used bi-logic to throw light on
relationships between groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’. These can have devastating
consequences when feeling gets cut off from thinking, and stereotyping is
associated with putting groups and/or populations into the same degraded or
demonic category (Dalal 2002).
Matte-Blanco (1988) offers a new perspective on processes like
projection and identification. He relates them to what he calls
‘despatialisation’. Foulkes’s thinking of the social world as simultaneously
inside and outside us (here as well as there) would be described in bi-logic
terms as a Simmasi – simultaneously asymmetrical/symmetrical structure. In
relation to time, Volkan (2001) has described as ‘time collapse’ the process by
which ‘chosen traumas’ are re-activated at times of conflict in the form of
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 171

historical national myths, such as the 1389 AD Battle of Kosovo in the

Balkans, or the Sack of Jerusalem in 70AD, and the Crusades in the Middle
East. In bi-logic this could be an Alassi – alternately asymmetrical/symmet-
rical structure.
It is well known that Foulkes emphasised communication in his theory
and practice, and that he recognised it as occurring at several levels: 1. in every
day communication; 2. through transference; 3. through projection and
bodily processes, and 4. at the primordial level of the ‘collective unconscious’.
These levels, as they descend, are decreasingly individual and conscious. They
move from the personal, as narrowly defined, to the interpersonal, to the
transpersonal. But as Puget (1991) puts it, they interact in the dialectics of
inner, interpersonal and social worlds.
Bion’s concept of container–contained, the emergence of thought from
primitive bodily sensations as a response to frustration, of conceptions and
preconceptions, and the destructiveness of psychotic processes through
attacks on linking and knowing can all be brought to bear on these dialectics.

Figure 6.1 External and Internal Worlds. f = father, m = mother, s = siblings.

172 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Basic assumption states in themselves reflect a one-way process, from the

individually disavowed to the jointly enacted.
I shall return to the structures, processes and contexts required for a
metapsychosociology mentioned at the beginning. In teaching I have used
Figure 6.1 to illustrate the structural relationship of individuals and groups. It
indicates that an individual is born into a family in a society, and carries both
within him or herself, as well as being within them. The individual contains
groups and therefore is, in a sense, a group; and takes these into the group and
society in which it makes its home, or seeks therapy; these in turn, more or less
contain the individuals constituting them. Processes by which people and
groups develop involve ‘psychoanalytic processes’ such as introjection, identi-
fication and projection, but also interaction, intersubjectivity, dialogue,
mutual construction and transformation, which are more the realm of group
analysis, and of Winnicott (1971), Ogden (1994) and of self psychology
(Harwood and Pines 1998). It is here that Foulkes’s deeper level of communi-
cation and relationship are relevant, and Matte-Blanco’s bi-logic is needed to
understand the constant ready availability of pigeonholing, stereotyping and
prejudice, but also their dissolution in waves of similarity (Rayner 1995). The
contents of our cultures, values and ideologies flow from and feed into the
processes which sustain the structures we create and have created for us.
Structures, processes and contents interact. When we talk about mental
structures, we are referring to dynamic structures: individuals and groups in
complex dynamic interaction.
Stacey (2001), a group analyst who teaches management studies and
complexity theory, has drawn attention to the interactional basis of social
events in which unpredictable crises can develop seemingly spontaneously
through self-organising patterns. As he puts it, we form the social in patterns
of continuity which at the same time, paradoxically, give rise to transformations.
At a micro-level this is a good description of what happens during sponta-
neous interaction in group-analytic therapy. Stacey states that mind requires
that the maker of a gesture has the capacity to evoke, in the self, the response
generated in the other(s). Accepting the attitude of others towards ‘me’ leads
to a private dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘me’ (the subject and object). He claims
that the individual mind involves conversation with self; the social mind a
conversation with others. They coexist. You will see that complexity theory is
consonant with Foulkes’s idea of free-floating conversation, communication
at all levels, resonance, condenser phenomena and universality. Making and
apprehending similarities and connections – in bi-logic terms – involves
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 173

symmetrisation. Reaching a limit and erecting a boundary involves

asymmetrisation. Transformation in therapy entails redrawing boundaries.
The dynamic ebb and flow needs sufficient trust in the system for risks to be
taken, and the necessary element of play in ‘transitional space’ (in Winnicott’s
terms) to allow transformation to occur.
How difficult and complex these processes can be has been highlighted
by Nitsun and Dalal, and by Agazarian in her analysis of different ways in
which individuals use and are used by groups. The intersubjective ground
pointed out by existential phenomenologists such as Cohn and Diamond –
nearer to the symmetrical relationships of bi-logic – is challenged by the sort
of pseudo-individualism Foulkes described as ‘autistic’, and by groups (e.g.
totalitarian societies) that constrain and oppress rather than contain and allow
developmental transformation, and mistrust and hate others.
Behind this are the contents of the group, particularly the values of the
group and social system, unconsciously active in what Foulkes called the
‘foundation matrix’. Bion wrote about man being a group animal at war with
his groupishness, and the struggle of the individual to relate to the group
being as fraught as the infant’s with the breast. In contrast Foulkes viewed the
group as the matrix of individuality. These are two seemingly disparate views;
unless one sees each as valid in certain circumstances – e.g. when the breast is
experienced as predominantly bad or good, or we are talking about a ‘good’
or a ‘bad’ group. But the group-analytic view offers a set of values that I have
described as in constant conflict with their opposites.

The Values of Group Analysis

Table 6.1 The Values of Group Analysis

174 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

homo apertus v. homo clausus

inclusiveness v. exclusiveness
fairness v. entitlement
consensus norms v. imposed norms
1
ethics v. moralism
democracy v. authoritarianism
religious dialogue v. fundamentalism
universalism v. nationalism
pro-group v. anti-group
– –
etc. etc.

These I believe are supported by much recent neurological, biological and

sociological evidence (Brown 1998). They are part of a substantial philosoph-
ical stand represented by Axel Honnuth (1995), who emphasises the struggle
for the establishment of relations of mutual recognition as a precondition for
self-realisation. As he puts it, ‘It is individuals’ claim to the intersubjective rec-
ognition of their identity that is built into social life from the very beginning
as a moral tension, transcends the level of social progress institutionalised thus
far, and so gradually leads – via the negative part of recurring stages of conflict
– to a state of communicatively lived freedom’ (Honnuth 1995, p.5).
If we begin to discern meaningful patterns of dynamic structures,
processes and values that influence the balance of creative and destructive
processes within individuals and groups, and between individuals and groups
– and thus influence psychological and social pathology and health – we shall
have the makings of a useful metapsychosociology. Working with the contri-
butions of Bion and Foulkes, and their discrepancies, will have helped us
towards what will be a dynamic interactional model in which vicissitudes of
relatedness play a key part (in contrast to the vicissitudes of instinctual drives
in Freud’s metapsychology). As implied by Figure 6.1, it will allow for the
development from one-person to two-person psychology (as in the mother–
infant and psychoanalytic dyads) to three-person psychology (a triangulation
epitomised by the Oedipus complex), to four-body psychology (and thus
sibling rivalry, as suggested by Rickman (1957), to multi-person psychology
as in groups. It will at the same time allow for a contrary current, as social
influences impinge on individual ontogeny. I have already proposed a spiral
movement in good therapy groups from psychological confinement within
 PAIRING BION AND FOULKES: TOWARDS A METAPSYCHOSOCIOLOGY 175

individual and family (‘the inner world’) to a fuller intersubjectivity with

others (Brown 1994); in a ‘bad group’ this could be reversed.
The model will reflect the establishment of identities, individual and
social, and thus of differences and boundaries, which in some circumstances
can be transcended in an ongoing creation and recreation of meaningful
existence. The situation of power and authority, and the role of context in
forming meaning will be acknowledged. So will the influence of group size –
small, large or median (de Maré, Piper and Thompson 1991) – and whether
dialogue and discourse are possible (Brown 1982, Schlapobersky 1994).
Finally it will allow for the possibility of group function being based on
defensive illusions (as in basic assumption states) or on coherent co-operation
despite conflict, anxiety and pain. We might need a series of inter-related
models and view points. These could include (echoing the structure of this
chapter):
1. Nitsun’s model of a dialectic between destructive and constructive
forces in groups of individuals that can lead to transformation.
2. Dalal’s rebalancing of individual and group to allow for the
presence of the social ‘even’ in the mother–infant dyad, and his
attempt to use bi-logic to explain intergroup dynamics e.g.
stereotyping.
3. Agazarian’s model of different types of relationship between
individuals and groups, and how they use each other.
4. Extensions of basic assumption theory by Turquet, Lawrence and
Hopper that relate to the deep anxieties aroused in some
circumstances when people are combined in groups.
5. We need to account for the role of culture and personality, and for
transcultural and intercultural phenomena, including social trauma.
The social unconscious – Foulkes’s deepest layers of transpersonal
communication – could include the bi-logical symmetrisation of
basic assumption states.
6. We need to develop clearer and more dynamic models for the
formation and functions of boundaries – literal and metaphorical –
within interacting systems, such as those sketched in Figure 6.1.
Attachment theory might be useful in showing up the
security-seeking need to belong, aided by complexity theory with
176 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

its focus on emergent patterns that display both continuity and

potential for transformation.
By taking equal account of positive and negative processes in groups, of asso-
ciation and dissociation, we might be clearer in our understanding of the view
of Elias (1991b) – who influenced Foulkes – that the individual is a level of
the group (even Homo Clausus, the ‘we-less I’) and of the way harmful group
processes (e.g. Ba states) arise when the component individuals feel ignored or
disenfranchised, or collectively want to avoid facing up to something. We are
into the area of sociology. But what about the body, the area of biology? Can
we develop a truly comprehensive bio-psycho-sociology? If so, we could
begin to integrate social psychology – which Freud could only speculate
about in essays such as ‘Totem and Taboo’, ‘Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego’, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, and ‘Civilization and Its Dis-
contents’ – with deeper understanding of the struggle between social order
and chaos, between ‘ego’ and ‘wego’, and the individual physical conse-
quences of stress and social trauma.
Freud’s metapsychology (Freud 1915) was an attempt to provide a theory
of psychological processes in the absence – at that time – of an adequate
physical substrate. Now, the burgeoning of neuropsychology offers such a
substrate with its application to infant development within the mother–infant
dyad, attachment theory and affect-regulation via the right brain and limbic
system (e.g. Schore 1994, Taylor, Bagby and Parker 1997).
The neurobiological approach could complement a metapsychology, and
give it a bodily biological base. Indeed in a recent interview Schore (2001)
states his belief that groups and cultures offer affect-regulating self-object
functions – a self psychology concept – acting as external psychobiological
regulators of human internal states. Cultures, Schore holds, acting through
their prescribed child-rearing practices, imprint on the earliest members of
society those affects that can be socially expressed face-to-face. Almost
echoing Foulkes, he adds that this determines what affects are conscious and
what unconscious and/or expressed physically. Bion would say the latter
involves physical ‘beta’ rather than mental ‘alpha’ functions in individuals,
and predisposes to basic assumption states in groups. At this point, beyond
metapsychosociology, we could say that if Bion and Foulkes are not twinned
(thankfully), their thinking is intertwined.

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Endnote
1. By this I mean the golden rule of ‘Do to others what you would want done to you’
versus self-righteous condemnation of others.
 7

Group Mentality
and ‘Having A Mind’
Robert Hinshelwood

Bion was fascinated that the experience of being in the presence of another
person’s mind is a difficult one. Having a mind is not easy, and his contribu-
tions add considerably to the debate about what is it to have a mind. In a late
paper, he described the problem of having a mind that is aware of minds:
When two characters or personalities meet, an emotional storm is created. If
they make a sufficient contact to be aware of each other, or even to be
unaware of each other, an emotional state is produced by the conjunction of
these two individuals, these two personalities, and the resulting disturbance
is hardly likely to be something which could be regarded as necessarily an
improvement on the state of affairs had they never met at all. But since they
have met, and since this emotional storm has occurred, then the two parties
to this storm may decide to ‘make the best of a bad job’. What this means in
analysis is this.
The analysand comes into contact with the analyst by coming to the
consulting room and engaging in what he thinks is a conversation which he
hopes to benefit by in some way: likewise the analyst probably expects some
benefit to occur – to both parties. The analysand or the analyst says
something. The curious thing about this is that it has an effect, it disturbs two
people. This would also be true if nothing was said, if they remained silent…
The result of remaining silent, or the result of intervening with a remark, or
even saying: ‘Good morning’ or: ‘Good evening’, again sets up what appears
to me to be an emotional storm. What that emotional storm is one does not

181
182 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

immediately know, but the problem is, how to make the best of it; this means
a capacity to turn the circumstance – as I choose to call it for the moment – to
good account. (Bion 1979, pp.1–2).
This encounter is often termed ‘attachment’ or ‘bonding’, adapted from
Bowlby’s psychoanalytic ethology. But those are quiet terms, and it seems to
me Bion is describing something far from quiet – a storm, in fact. A mind not
only craves an attachment to another mind but, having found one, is then
1
disturbed by an emotional storm. I think Bion is neutral about whether that is
a storm of loving or of hating – or what the actual emotional tone is. But, his
point is that an encounter is both craved and it is also resisted as a disturbance.
It is ‘minded’. And he attempted to dissect out that process of minding.
However, to not mind something interested Bion, too – how somebody
manages not to do anything with their mind, both in the mindlessness of
groups, and in the rubble of a destroyed mind of the schizophrenic. Because of
the resistance to being ‘stormed’ by others, people take protective action.
Psychotic patients can abolish their minds altogether rather than suffer those
emotional storms. Those with personality disorders tend to exploit this kind
of meeting by deliberately engaging with other minds to create such storms
for specific purposes.2 And those of us somewhat less disturbed manage to
numb our minds in certain ways, and live in a psychic storm-shelter as it were,
constructed of the familiar defence mechanisms, and live in socially
prescribed rituals.
Psychoanalytic work with schizophrenic patients, in particular, goes to
the heart of the question, what is a mind, since somehow schizophrenics
seemed to lack a proper one. It is not that they have conflicts in their mind, as
do neurotic patients, they seem instead to have a mind that fails to operate as a
mind (Bion 1957). In this work, Bion, at his most creative during the 1950s,
decided that the deficits in mental functioning can point the way to defining
the essential function of ‘having a mind’.

Meaning
The variety of different responses to the emotional storm of encounter leave
us with the question of what constitute ordinary ways of dealing with such
disturbances. In other words, what is involved in living within that perpetual
storm, and how can one flourish there – rather than escape from it. Bion’s
answer was characteristically provocative. He described the ordinary process
as ‘alpha function’. He offered this as an empty term, one which further work
would fill with further meaning. It is a supposed mental process which creates
 GROUP MENTALITY AND ‘HAVING A MIND’ 183

an individual mind out of this experience of encounter. He asked of us, his

readers and successors, the task to fill in his empty term.
Bion’s own work has led to what is now loosely called ‘containment’.
Alpha-function is the transformation of the storm into material that can be
used for thinking, analogous to the metabolism of the body’s digestive
system. He referred to those products of alpha-function as the ‘furniture of
dreams’3 which, arising from the conversion of raw experience of encoun-
tering another mind, are used to create structures we know as dreams, and of
which we then have a further experience. The conversion of raw experience
into dream-like creations is complex, and I will only take up one element that
is central to how I understand Bion. As that conversion process takes the raw
experience and creates thoughts, it creates a new quality. It is a quality which
dream symbols have as their essence – that quality is ‘meaning’.
I suggest that meaning is the inherent quality of the thoughts which our
minds work upon; and without meaning such thoughts would be thoughts;
and in some cases (psychotic people) the mind does not have meaningful
objects with which to think. Thus, the human mind must deal in meanings,
that is to say a ‘substance’ or a category which is not just information, as we
might say of a computer. It is a specific experience we know as the quality of
meaningfulness. A mind may register an event, but so can a computer, which
creates a display on its screen. But a whole lot more happens in a mind than in
a computer. What is registered in that mind acquires a collateral quality – the
felt quality of something being meaningful.
This is the subjective ‘addition’ to the more mechanical recognition, and
subjective qualities are described as ‘qualia’. Whatever the ontological nature
of qualia, that experience in which we say to ourselves ‘that means something
to me’ is no doubt wired into the brain; it is something which then attaches to
various experiences, memories and phantasies. The world of qualia is akin to
the Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasy. An experience of a particular
other person can have all kinds of associations, which derive from the accumu-
lation of past experiences and memories of them; mother at the meal table may
arouse very different meanings from mother typing at the keyboard of her
computer, or mother in the bath. Various qualia accrue to registering the idea
of mother, depending on all sorts of conditions. But generically qualia are
what we call a meaningfulness.
To see something which looks blue, say the mug on my desk, I recognise
the colour (the shape and purpose of the mug, too), and this is normally called
the secondary characteristic, the subjective experience of blue. But I also have
184 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

a sense in that subjectivity that blueness signifies something to me – it has

meaning. For instance, when Heisenberg was asked to comment on the math-
ematical properties of space, he is said to have replied, ‘Space is blue and birds
fly through it’ and he thus indicated that even a physicist finds powerful
personal meanings in what he deals with.
In essence, ‘to mind something’ equates with ‘meaning something to me’.
In this view, it is the unique property of minds to give a meaning to experi-
ences, and it produces them in the processing of those storms which mental
interaction creates. Thus to have a mind implies dealing in meanings – not
information. Nor does it deal in more material substances, as does the body, on
which of course a mind must also depend. But despite depending on the body
functioning with material substance, the mind functions (or alpha-functions)
with meaning4.
Representations: This suggests a further aspect of the conversion of raw
experience to thinkable objects. The combination of registering an experience
with, and the special quality of, meaningfulness creates an object of thought,
and this is represented in a mind. To simple recognition is added meaning, and
this combination produces what I believe we would call a ‘representation’. In
the immaterial world of the mind, a ‘representation’ has a felt existence, a
thing that feels tangible and manipulable. Representation is not just a passive
process. It indicates that something has been ‘minded’, and that goes beyond
mechanical computing.
Having a mind: At the same time, there is another fall-out of alpha-
function. This third component, to add to registering and meaningfulness, is
the sense of having a ‘place’ where representations reside – and can be further
manipulated, processed or transformed – with subsequent further meaning-
fulness, in the creation of new meanings. I suggest that this additional aspect
of alpha-function is the sense of ‘having a mind’. Thus Bion’s transformation
process (alpha-function) in creating a representation also creates the sense of a
mind in which the products of the encounter exist. For Bion thoughts require a
thinker, that is to say, a mind, a place where thinking can happen to thoughts.
The experience of discovering a meaning, is linked to, or the other side of the
coin to, having a mind. Both arise together.5
The space and time co-ordinates where that thinking occurs are then
identified with a specific material place – the body on which the mind
depends. A lot seems to explode into existence with alpha-function – recogni-
tion, meaning representations, a thinking mind; and even, one might say, the
 GROUP MENTALITY AND ‘HAVING A MIND’ 185

basis of a personal identity, a self which is irrevocably linked to that space

(mental) and location (bodily).
Reversal of alpha-function: I suggest I have not distorted Bion too much in
elaborating his views in this way. His aim initially was to find the contrast with
what happened in a schizophrenic where mind, meaning and identity all seem
to be corrupted. He started his investigation of alpha-function in effect with
the results of some sort of ‘reversal of alpha-function’ (Meltzer 1978). The
schizophrenic dismantles his own mind by making attacks on the
meaningfulness of the representations in his mind. He destroys the links that
make up the matrix of meaning – the configuration of space which is blue
with birds flying, for instance. As a schizophrenic once told me, ‘the sky is
emptied, that’s why birds can’t fly’ – meaningless deconstruction of his
thoughts, which might have once been the bleakness of Keats’ La Belle Dame
Sans Merci, with its chilling refrain ‘And no birds sing’. In that sense the
reversal alpha-function disconnects meaning; and the result is the bleakness
and depression that Keats experienced in his own life.

Group mentality
I now wish to move to phenomena in groups. The nature of a group is to be
the place for the encounter between persons. And I shall claim a group is a par-
ticularly good arena to investigate minds that ‘mind’ encountering. I want
especially to shed light on the to-and-fro process, between constructing
meaning and mind, and the dissolution of it.
Bion started his small group work with the three concepts, ‘group
mentality, group culture and the individual’ (Bion 1961, p.61). ‘Group
mentality’ was the idea that the members of a group can pool a lot of contribu-
tions ‘anonymously’. Neither explicit nor conscious, these contributions exist
as a collective pool that is the group, rather than any individual.6 He gives, as
an example, an air of hostility in a group whilst each of the individual
members denied feeling hostile.
However, these three concepts proved inadequate. In his third paper in his
series on groups, Bion was forced to admit that his experience eventually
‘knocked holes in my theories’ (Bion 1961, p.61). He then had to rethink. He
did not give up his idea of group mentality but developed it, bringing in then
the idea of the basic assumptions – to which the individual contributes
implicitly and anonymously. Implicitly, the purpose of the basic assumptions
is to preserve the group – and to do so in one of the three forms (pairing,
fight/flight and dependency).
186 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Merely by relating to a group the individual regresses to this innate set of

assumptions about being in a group. Bion could then define group mentality
as ‘a machinery of intercommunication that is designed to ensure that group
life is in accordance with the basic assumptions’ (Bion 1961, p.65). These
assumptions seemed to him to be innate or instinctual, a set of three endowed
‘valences’ that embodied unthought assumptions about the nature and
purpose of the group and which all human individuals have available for
linking with each other. This kind of instinctual linking underlies, and can
often override, the conscious communication system.
Later, around 1952, after he finished working with groups, he began to
review his ideas again. At that time he was already working psychoanalyti-
cally with schizophrenic patients. As Eric Miller noticed, Bion moved away
from the innateness of basic assumptions:
…early on [Bion] made references to the instinctiveness of the phenomena,
but later he shifted to treating them as postnatal formations and linking
them to Kleinian theory of the infant’s very early development of defences
to cope with distressing unconscious phantasies. (Miller 1988, p.40)
In that paper, in 1952, he made a hypothetical suggestion, that basic assump-
tions might be derived from something else – derived from psychological
developments, rather than innate (Bion 1952). And he speculated that the
basic assumptions were derived from the very thing he happened to be
pre-occupied with in 1952, the analysis of psychosis. That speculative move
was to suggest that the basic assumptions are based on the mechanisms central
to schizophrenia. Matias Sanfuentes (2000, personal communication) has
pointed out that the 1952 paper, published in the International Journal of Psy-
cho-Analysis collection to celebrate Melanie Klein’s 70th birthday, was revised
for publication in Klein, Heimann and Money-Kyrle (1955). That 1955
7
version filled out this speculation. Bion had by then begun to clarify his
theories of schizophrenic thinking (Bion 1954, 1955) – the self-destructive
dismantling of thought processes, the obliteration of time and of sophisti-
cated cognitive function. These were ‘attacks’ made by schizophrenics upon
linking, and remarkably they resemble his earlier descriptions of the state of
mind of a group dominated by basic assumptions. So, Bion moved, first specu-
latively (1952), and then on the basis of his clinical work with schizophrenic
patients (1955), from an innatist explanation of basic assumptions to an
explanation in terms of psychotic mechanisms. Group mentality is thus a
psychotic mentality. It is a mentality become mindless.
 GROUP MENTALITY AND ‘HAVING A MIND’ 187

In these basic assumption states the group appears to have lost the
non-psychotic, alpha-function of the individuals – there is no moral sense, a
loss of mature judgement (all is exclusively good or bad), an absence of recog-
nising consequences to actions, a lack of development in group thought and
achievement, a failing of the sense of time, etc. What we witness is the
reversion to a psychotic mental functioning – the reversal of alpha-function.
Bion’s view of psychosis was that the individual mind dismantles itself
with the loss of the ‘furniture of dreams’, and instead creates meaninglessness
(nameless dread) and ‘bizarre objects’. In a group, a similar process goes on in
which mentalisation reverses. This is a reversal of alpha-function as a group. I
shall give extracts from two groups to contrast states in which mentalisation –
the awareness of other minds in the group – occurs, and states where it seems
absent.
These are two rather ordinary pieces of clinical material from out-patient
groups of non-psychotic patients. In the first, we can see how the individuals
link together, not just in the surface content of what each one says, but also at
an emotional level. The emotional storm of the encounters impels the course
of the dialogue:
Two men in a group were discussing a trivial detail about some maintenance
work on a car that belonged to one of them. ‘A’ described his difficulty with
a rusty bolt. ‘B’ talked about how he had once had the same problem and
had solved it by hitting the bolt with a hammer; he seemed pleased with
himself. Another man, ‘C’, gave a slight laugh and remarked on ‘B’s’ hint of
pride. ‘A’ looked startled and then a little angry, as he realised that he had
given ‘B’ the opportunity to be pleased with himself. He told ‘B’ that it was
no solution to hit the bolt with the hammer and explained why. Clearly he
now wanted to put ‘B’ down. Two women in the group were looking on
with some fascination at this male sparring. One said ‘Men!’ with mock
exasperation. The other said her husband had returned from a football
match recently with a bruise on his cheek which he had refused to talk
about.
In this interchange five people were involved who seemed willing to tune in,
in their own characteristic ways, to the male rivalry and psychological
bruising which was going on. They tuned in to each other at an emotional
level as well as a cognitive one. One person’s comment seemed to stimulate the
next through having an emotional colouring that linked to the previous
person. And this was repeated through a number of links between all five. The
emotional colour that one person was expressing was intuited and responded
188 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

to, at that implicit level. This was not just exchanging information, meaning
was passing from one to another. They were ‘working’ together on some
feeling. Of course, in this case it was not particularly harmonious, respectful
or friendly. But they were reading each other accurately and it is this quality
8
of being ‘in tune’ which I emphasise here. I contrast it with the second piece
of clinical material:
In another group a woman, ‘X’, described an event in which her husband
had had a row with her mother. Another woman, ‘Y’, waited just until this
story had finished, and immediately asked for the dates of a forthcoming
break in the group sessions. They had been announced recently. The
therapist pointed out how ‘Y’ had cut across the first woman’s story. She had
also cut out her own memory of the dates. ‘Y’ immediately turned to enquire
of someone else. A man started to talk about his mother-in-law, seemingly
following the first woman, though clearly absorbed only in his own tale –
more to do with seeking out a mother for himself because in childhood he
had spent long periods separated from his own mother.
In this group, the connections between the separate contributions are quite
different. People cut across each other’s contributions. They did not really
encounter each other. There may be some connection in terms purely of
content – for instance the man at the end returned to a discourse about his
mother – but the connection was only superficially linked with the first
woman, ‘X’. Each seemed to remain cut off in an emotional sense from the one
before. There was plenty of talk but no encounter; no-one worked on the
emotional storm – rather the storm was obstructed. In the second group, that
obstruction destroyed meaning, at the group level. Any coherent experience of
being together was annulled.
Thus they did not register each other in the sense of another mind filled
with emotional meanings, and the dialogue is constructed of fragments of
unintegrated meanings. One could say that the group mentality is a mindless
one.
These clinical examples of ordinary dialogue show a crucial difference. At
first glance perhaps one could say it was a difference in the dominant basic
assumption: in the first group, there is a tendency for a hostile fight/flight
atmosphere; in the second, a dependency atmosphere (about mothers, the
need to be told the dates again, etc.).
However, I have stressed another difference, one highlighted in Bion’s
latter work. In the first group, the individuals remain in contact with each
other as individuals.9 They appear to relate to each other’s feelings with their
 GROUP MENTALITY AND ‘HAVING A MIND’ 189

own storms of feelings. There are repeated encounters that can be followed in
sequence as one person is mobilised to respond in key with the emotional
impact of the speaker before. But in the second group, a dismantling of links
seems to dominate, so that the members are not individuals but members of a
group in which linking has collapsed.10 From a group point of view, the
second group has come apart and fragmented. Coherent meaningfulness has
disappeared, and internal representations cannot be communicated.
Despite the incoherence, a peculiar state of homogeneity pervades the
second group. The homogeneity is a joint agreement, but it is the agreement to
be in this incoherent, disconnected condition! Thus, a kind of unthinking,
mindless co-operation occurs. Bion expressed his surprise at this paradox
when he saw it in a group of patients:
I have always been quite familiar with the idea of a patient as a person whose
capacity for co-operation is very slight… I reflect that from the way in
which the group is going on its motto might be: ‘Vendors of quack nostrums
unite.’ No sooner have I said this to myself than I realise that I am expressing
my feeling, not of the group’s disharmony, but of its unity (Bion 1961,
p.52).
The individual is co-operating in a kind of way – co-operating in forming a
stable group in which co-operation is impossible! This implies a complex phe-
nomenology of the person as both individual and group member, which Bion
tried to articulate: ‘Thus we have a situation in which the individuals behave as
if they were conscious, as individuals, of the basic assumption, but uncon-
scious of it as members of the group’ (Bion 1961, p.94).
In other words, they are committed to the ‘machinery of intercommunica-
tion that is designed to ensure that group life is in accordance with the basic
assumptions’.11
Here Bion is struggling to conceptualise some radical inconsistency in the
members of the group. The individual functions in two separate ways at the
same time – he can function mentally in a coherent manner with meanings
that he can fashion and express. But as a group member, he dismantles
meanings in the creation of the mindless group mentality. Reverting for a
moment to an individual context, Freud described the Ratman’s thought
insertion, in which words were put into the Ratman’s mind which disrupted
his ability to think and study. Jonathan Lear commented on this, ‘the vehicles
of meaning themselves [words] are used to disrupt meaning’ (Lear 1996,
personal communication). So it is with this group situation in which the
individual, as an individual, handles meaning but operates quite differently
190 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

from the individual as a group member who dismantles meaning. This

paradox that Bion puzzled over in groups, is once again premonitory of an
idea he rediscovered and formulated later in his work with psychosis:
The non-psychotic personality was concerned with a neurotic problem, that
is to say a problem that centred on the resolution of a conflict of ideas and
emotions to which the operation of the ego had given rise. But the psychotic
personality was concerned with the problem of repair of the ego. (Bion
1957, p.272)
The paper from which this quote is taken described a personality as having
this contradictory form – being both psychotic and non-psychotic in different
parts. His work with psychotic people enabled him to see these two kinds of
functioning in which an individual can be in two different states of mind. It
might of course mean that a psychotic is split up in such a way that in different
relations he operates differently, or at different times, or under different
internal conditions. But the example of the group shows the individual
operating on the one hand as a creator of meaningful communications, and
simultaneously destroying meaningful links. In fact the very act of expressing
a meaningful symbolic contribution to the group disrupts the possibility of
meaning in the group. When the woman, ‘Y’, turned to the group therapist to
ask the dates of the break, she was making a meaningful communication, but
she was at the same time destroying the meaning of the woman, ‘X’, who had
just spoken.
The group shows these ‘parts’ of the person, if parts they be, in interaction
with each other. ‘Function’ would seem to be a better term than a ‘part’ of the
mind in this case – one function, the creation of meaning, being set to
interfere with itself ! The psychotic process of reversal of alpha-function is
implicated in the specific linking via the basic assumptions.

Groups and psychosis

Clearly there is something amiss with Bion’s idea that attacks on linking, and
thus reversal of alpha-function, render the individual psychotic, in the
straightforward way he described. And Jaques too thought that ‘the relation-
ship between the operation of basic assumptions and of depressive and
persecutory phenomena remains to be worked out’ (Jaques 1955, p.487).
People in the group in which meaningful contact is being actively abolished
are not necessarily psychotic. They abolish their encounters, but not their
minds.
 GROUP MENTALITY AND ‘HAVING A MIND’ 191

Bion tended to see the nature of psychosis as a structural problem, the

intrusion into a sane personality of an increasingly large psychotic part. Thus
one or other part – the sane or the psychotic – can take over, and be in charge
of the overt personality, at different times. He did not pursue this anomaly of
structure in the personality. However Rosenfeld (1971), O’Shaughnessy
(1981) and many other contemporary Kleinians have put this kind of struc-
turing of the personality under close examination.
But structural phenomena of this kind are only one possibility. In groups
we can see an intricate phenomenology that weaves between the creation of
meaning, and its dissolution. In the example of the second group, the individ-
uals were not in a clinical sense psychotic. They remained quite able to
formulate articulate, coherent statements about themselves and others’ minds.
Therefore their attack on linking was not a sufficient condition for a psychotic
state of mind. It may be a necessary one – without which a mind cannot
become psychotic and mindless. But other factors must come into play. When
does the attack on links produce a psychotic person and when does it not?
A group highlights, and magnifies up to visible proportions, the
divergence between the attacks on linking and the full psychotic state. The
group mentality, which embodies a reversal of alpha-function, is not in fact a
psychosis. At the level at which the problem starts – the level of encounter
with other minds – the dismantling of mind is not complete. To understand
this further needs a wider discussion about the group as the locus for symboli-
sation. But in passing we can note Kaës’ view that a group supports ‘an accred-
itation for an intra-psychic representation and a “re-run” in speech-form
which gives it meaning within the context of interpersonal, group and
societal relationships’ (Kaës 1984, p.363).
Thus, meaning itself is enhanced and codified within a group which
renders it into a transmittable form – using a symbolic system, language.
Language seems to hold together with a kind of extra-personal system of
meanings. Links cannot be broken between words and within the system of
semantics. That survives even when personal meanings are under attack. In
this sense, a group gives a second dimension to meaningfulness – the codified
language. It exists as a separate dimension from the personal meanings
conveyed in the emotional side of a communication. Those I described as the
product of the individual alpha-function. Meaning is the product of
individual mentalising based on encounter, but it has in the context of a group
where those encounters happen, an external component, as well as the
internal one. This sense of meaningfulness sustained by language seems to
192 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

operate at a group level, and thus to sustain the meaningfulness which the
individuals require to continue having a mind. It suggests that new develop-
ments might be made in the psychoanalytic theory of symbolism, and they
might be informed, partly, by observations on groups.
Bion made a rather unwieldy synthesis of his views on groups and
psychosis. This entailed trying to elaborate group basic assumptions with
psychotic mechanisms of defence. But this first effort can be made more
fluent, and has true relevance to the phenomena in groups if we consider the
phenomenology of emotional linking between people. It gives us opportuni-
ties for thinking about therapeutic opportunities which I tried to show in my
brief examples. This greater fluency comes from teasing out the implications
of alpha-function as the core of what is now known as mentalising.

Conclusions
Psychoanalysis has a good record in contributing to the philosophy of mind
and can potentially make an important contribution to the current interest in
the philosophy of consciousness. And Bion’s work on thinking and on groups
is central to any such contribution.12

The new reality principle

When Freud talked of the reality principle, he talked as if it (reality) had the
quality of a physical reality, stable, consistent and reliable and contrasted it
with the psychic reality of the subject’s inner world of impulses, dreams and
feelings. Increasingly, psychoanalysis has come to recognise that reality, the
really important reality for the human being, is the reality of other people. A
person’s external reality is the inner reality of someone else. The implications
of this for the psychoanalytic theory of mind has been the development of
object-relations – they are relations with other minds.
Recently the word ‘mentalise’ has been used to describe the ability to
conceive a mind. Mitrani (1996) describes the autistic defect in those terms,
and the relations and whole way of life of the autistic person appear to
function mindlessly. Fonagy and Target (2000) have used the term to pinpoint
the deficit which, in their view, characterises borderline personality disorders.
There is clearly an inter-‘mental’ or interpersonal aspect to mentalisation,
which Kaës (1984) has pointed out in groups. He described mentalisation as:
‘first and foremost, a psychic work, that is work concerned with the formation
 GROUP MENTALITY AND ‘HAVING A MIND’ 193

and transformation of psychic qualities’ (Kaës 1984, p.362). And he

explicitly connected this with Bion’s ‘alpha-function’.
It would seem that the core feature of a mind is that it encounters other
minds. A mind is, as it were, a mind-recognising apparatus, and this could
supplement the Turing test.13 The mind could in this way be distinguished
from a machine that simulates mental functions. If one of the pre-occupations
of philosophy is to construct a theory of mind, then it would seem that such a
sophisticated philosophical field of endeavour is common to everyone who
has a mind. We must all have a theory of mind in order to qualify as having a
mind.

Mindblindness
The psychoanalysis of which Bion was an exponent takes it as central that the
human mind recognises other minds. Failure to do so is a major
psychopathological event. We might take either a psychopathological point
of view of such a failure, or a developmental one. Frith (1994) makes it the
central feature of the psychopathology of schizophrenia, following Bleuler’s
(1986) early recognition of this deficit in schizophrenic patients.
From the developmental point of view, failure to develop a mind in this
way is now commonly regarded as a core of autism, a ‘mindblindness’ as
Baron-Cohen (1999) calls it. The notion of ‘mindblindness’ starts from the
premise that the core feature of a mind is that it can recognise the existence of
another mind – that is to say, a mind, in order recognisably to be a mind, must
have a theory of mind. Autistic children appear to miss that developmental
step, and schizophrenics to have retreated from it. Hobson (1993) reviewed
this core problem of autism from a psychoanalytic point of view. Originally,
Klein (1930) described an autistic boy, in fact before Kanner (1943) first
labelled the syndrome. Thereafter, the interest in autism has been pursued by
Meltzer et al. (1975), Tustin (1981, 1986; see also Spensley 1994), and
Alvarez (1992) who with others have extended this work considerably.

The new neuroscience

Such an object-relations theory of the mind can inform recent neuroscience
and the philosophy of consciousness. To relate adequately to the external
world means recognising the existence of a personal mind in others, an
experience which presumably involves the sense of ‘having a mind’ oneself.
This has led to a ‘philosophy of consciousness’. Originally, the attempt to
194 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

solve the question: What is it to have a mind? was addressed in an evolu-

tionary way by asking: Who (or what) has a mind? In other words, what dis-
tinguishes the human mind from the ‘minds’ of other animals. For instance
Lloyd-Morgan (1930) attempted a comparative appraisal of the ‘minds’ of
animals, and Premack (1988, see also Premack and Woodruff 1978) was
interested to compare the chimpanzee with man. These were somewhat spec-
ulative appraisals, but more recently there has been investigation of con-
sciousness in terms of human psychology (Nagel 1986, Dennett 1991,
Humphreys 1993, Damasio 2000, Papineau 2000). Little of this work takes
account of psychoanalytic discoveries, although as Solms and Kaplan–Solms
(2000) point out, psychoanalysis originally derived from neuroscience, and
Freud’s work in neurology and on aphasia.
Bion’s views can fit with those emerging from the new neuroscience, and
enhance them by contributing details of specific subjective experiences.
Though they can specifically describe the causal ‘subjective’ matrix – recogni-
tion, meaning, representation, mental space and identity – within which mind
occurs, they do not clarify the objective conditions under which these
subjective phenomena erupt into being. For much of neuroscience, a theory of
mind is an infantile achievement. However, work in psychoanalysis and in
groups suggests that such an achievement is a wobbly one, and adult life,
within our interpersonal context with others, is fluctuating experience of
encountering others and ‘having a mind’.
What is it to have a mind? How do the first flickering moments of a mind
come into existence? How and under what conditions does it snuff out again?
It is a research trail like that physicists are following back to the first moments
of the universe itself. Following that trail is one of the current topics in psy-
choanalytic research. But we are not alone; psychiatrists, experimental psy-
chologists, neuroscientists are on the trail with us. There is a potential in
Bion’s work and writings which is highly stimulating, despite running into
contradictions, and which remains a source of ideas and evidence to be mined
in the future long after him.

References
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235–247.
Bion, W. R. (1954) ‘Notes on the theory of schizophrenic.’ International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 35, 113–118. Expanded as ‘Language and the Schizophrenic’ in M. Klein,
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P. Heimann, and R. Money-Kyrle (1955) (eds) New Directions in Psychoanalysis. London:

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Nagel, T. (1986) The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Premack, D. And Woodruff, G. (1978) ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’
Behaviour and Brain Sciences 4, 515–526.
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Segal, H. (1957) ‘Notes on symbol formation.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 38,
391–97. Reprinted in H. Segal (1981) The Work of Hanna Segal. New York: Jason
Aronson.
Solms, M. and Kaplan-Solms, K. (2000) Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis. London:
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Spensley, S. (1994) Frances Tustin. London: Routledge.
Stern, D. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Young Infant. New York: Basic Books.
Turing, A. (1950) ‘Computing machinery and Intelligence.’ Mind 59, 433–460.
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Tustin, F. (1986) Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients. London: Karnac.

Endnotes
1. By making these storms of feelings central to the working, and even existence of the
mind, I am resorting to what I believe to be a fundamental psychoanalytic premise.
However, in the field of experimental psychology too there is a similar position which
makes ‘feelings be the primitives of consciousness… [T]he idea that human conscious-
ness depends on feelings helps us confront the problem of creating conscious artefacts’
(Damasio 2000, p. 314).
 GROUP MENTALITY AND ‘HAVING A MIND’ 197

2. People with severe personality disorders, pre-occupied as they are with abuse, can em-
ploy their sensitivity to such storms of encounter in order to express something of their
terror of intrusions, violation and abuse, into others.
3. Formally, he referred to the raw material, upon which alpha-function works, i.e. the
storm, as ‘beta-particles’, and the products of alpha-function as ‘alpha-particles’,
which are the elements with which the mind can begin to work, as in dreams.
4. I am here adapting Bion who described the food of the mind as ‘truth’ – in my account
it is meaning.
5. It seems important to distinguish ‘representations’, which can be restricted to these
‘things’ in the mind, from symbols. Symbols are clearly related to representations.
They are, perhaps, external ‘representations’. But they are more than representations –
symbols are the conversion of representations into something that is communicable to
other minds. There is a difference. Symbols are created as a result of some activity, that
is, worked up representations – symbols are representations put in the form that can be
externally recognised. The term symbol-formation is used, and it has something to do
with Freud’s notion of dream-work – that work that has to be done on the dream itself
to communicate it to the analyst. It is put into words, it is converted into a formal narra-
tive as far as possible – secondary process gets going on it. Thus symbols have three
components: the real thing, the internal representation and the symbol that gives ex-
pression to the internal. This is roughly in line with Segal’s formulation which she
takes from Morris (1938):
I find it helpful following C. Morris (1938), to consider symbolising as a three-term re-
lation, i.e. a relation between the thing symbolized, the thing functioning as a symbol
and a person for whom the one represents the other. In psychological terms, symbolism
would be a relation between ego, the object, and the symbol (Segal 1957, p.161).
6. This has significant similarities to Bleger’s idea of the pooling of primary undifferenti-
ated aspects of the individual, in the group, which Bleger was developing at the same
time (Bleger 1972, 1980).
7. The 1955 version was republished without further changes as the last chapter in his
Experiences in Groups.
8. This connects with the notion of ‘attunement’ stressed by Stern (1985) and others in
the mother–baby interaction.
9. This is an example of a group in a work mode which is coloured by (rather than
dominated by) the basic assumption.
10. Elsewhere I have examined these kinds of group states in greater detail, and speculated
on their therapeutic benefits or otherwise (Hinshelwood 1997).
11. In that case, it is the dependency assumption. I do not want to add complexity by
going further into the conditions when a basic assumption dominates in this psychotic
way; and the conditions when encounters do happen, but flavoured with a basic
assumption.
12. See also Guy da Silva (1997).
13. That test in effect determines the possession of a mind, as opposed to information pro-
cessing (Turing 1950).
 8

Incohesion: Aggregation/
Massification
The Fourth Basic Assumption in the Unconscious
Life of Groups and Group-like Social Systems

Earl Hopper

The cohesion of groups has been studied in a number of related fields: general
systems theory, social biology, classical psychoanalysis, sociology, and social
psychology, as well as in group dynamics or group relations, group psycho-
therapy and group analysis. In 1981, these perspectives and literature were
reviewed in depth in Group Cohesion edited by Kellerman. In 1997, Marziali,
Munroe-Blum and McCleary referred to cohesion as ‘…the most frequently
studied group-process dimension’. (Marziali et al. 1997, p.476) However,
they wrote that ‘despite these developments, Bednar and Kaul (1994) believe
that the construct of cohesion continues to defy definition…’ It seems that
‘…there is little consensus about the dimensions that best describe the
complex phenomena that comprise group cohesiveness’ (ibid p.476).
It is, therefore, entirely appropriate to think more about the nature of
cohesion in groups and group-like social systems. I will present here a highly
condensed version of my theory of the effects of traumatic experience on the
cohesion of groups and group-like social systems in terms of the fourth basic
assumption, which I call ‘Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification’ or ‘ba I:
A/M’. I have outlined previous versions of my theory in a number of publica-
tions, which include detailed clinical illustrations and extensive bibliography

198
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 199

(e.g. Hopper 1997, 2001c), but have developed and illustrated it further in
Traumatic Experience in the Unconscious Life of Groups (2003).

A theory of cohesion proposed by Bion and Turquet and

modified by Kernberg and Lawrence
1. Acknowledging the influence of Freud, Klein and Rickman, Bion provided
the first coherent psychoanalytical theory of many group processes. Experi-
ences in Groups (1961) and his earlier papers and articles (Bion 1948–1951)
constitute a time marker in the psychoanalytical study of groups that should
be known as zero, all previous studies to be dated ‘BB’, and all subsequent
ones ‘AB’ Although he did not regard his theory of ‘basic assumptions’ in the
unconscious life of groups as a theory of incohesion, it can be understood in
this way.
Especially useful summaries of his theory are provided by Kernberg
(1978) and Lawrence, Bain and Gould (1996). However, Bion’s work is
indeed complex, and his style is often cryptic. It may be helpful to emphasise a
few of the points made by these authors, and add some of my own, which
offer a slightly different way of understanding the original theory of basic
assumptions:
(i) The three basic assumptions have been understood from many points of
view, for example, in terms of phallic/Oedipal, anal and oral levels of
psychosexual development; instincts concerned with the perpetuation of
the species, the control of territory and the food and sexual partners within
it; and of seeking dependable ‘attachments’. However, Bion’s work
developed from the perspectives expressed in his earlier papers into those
expressed in Experiences in Groups. His psychoanalytical views became more
and more Kleinian, although subsequently they evolved into what is now
called ‘post-Kleinian’. Bion argues that when people are in group situations,
they regress to levels of psychic life of an infant at the mother’s body and
breast, to be understood in terms of very early Oedipal phenomena, or to
what some would call pre-Oedipal or triangularisation phenomena,
involving relationships of the mouth, breast and nipple or the mouth, eye
and hand or the mouth, ear and anus, etc., rather than in terms of relation-
ships between the person, mother and father. In groups these relationships
are experienced in terms of the vicissitudes of the primal scene, depending
on the prevailing anxieties and defences against them. As Bion puts it, more
in terms of the sphinx than of Oedipus.
200 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

(ii) Bion emphasised that the three basic assumptions are best understood in
terms of the ‘interplay’ between the paranoid/schizoid and depressive
positions. Although he was not clear about this, he implied that, based on
the death instinct, innate pathological envy is the source of irrational and
destructive rage, and that primal processes of splitting, denial and projection
facilitate processes of idealisation and denigration in order to help the ego
rid itself of painful rage and protect its most important objects. Dependency
develops from idealisation associated with the schizoid component of the
paranoid/schizoid position, and fight/flight develops from denigration
associated with the paranoid component. The basic assumption of
dependency protects people from the experience of helplessness and fear
that they will be unable to fulfil the requirements of those tasks the
completion of which is essential to life, such as, in infancy, obtaining food.
Feelings of unsafety, uncertainty, being lost, of not knowing what to expect
and what is expected, etc., are also involved. Pairing is based on
sexualisation or erotization as a manic defence against anxieties associated
with the depressive position, involving the conviction that goodness and
perfection exist nowhere, not within and not without. In other words,
pairing is not a matter of genital sexuality.
(iii) All basic assumptions are containers for psychotic anxieties. Basic
assumption processes can be used in the service of the activities of the work
group, but they can become grotesque and distorted, and interfere with the
activities of the work group. This is analogous to the way that neuroses and
possibly psychoses in adults are grotesque versions of the mental life of
normal children and infants. However, the existence of basic assumption
processes in parallel with work group processes is also analogous to the
existence of unconscious mental and emotional life characterised by
primary process in parallel with the unconscious, rational, secondary
processes of the ego.
(iv) Basic assumption processes can be delineated in terms of patterns of
interaction, normation and communication as properties of social systems
(Hopper 1994a, first published 1975). The following examples stress how
each pattern is seen in any basic assumption: with respect to pairing, a
typical interaction would be a flirtation between a male and a female,
encouraged by the rest of the group; a typical pattern of norms would be the
expression of values that favour personal sacrifice for collective goals; and a
typical pattern of communication would be an enthusiastic, hopeful and
perhaps unrealistic discussion of future projects and plans. With respect to
fight/flight: an apparently unsolvable argument between two members on
behalf of factions that have arisen virtually from ‘out of the blue’; the
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 201

expression of values that favour debate and the importance of being true to
principles; and discussion of the possibilities of forming two groups and of
the various major differences among the people within the group. And with
respect to dependency: very little interaction and hesitant participation; the
expression of values that favour humility, risk aversion, conservatism on
behalf of all rather than on behalf of individuality, and respect for authority;
and discussion about ‘being stuck’ yet confident that the leader will soon
help ‘get us going’, punctuated by long periods of silence.
(v) In any group, all three basic assumptions and combinations of them
emerge kaleidoscopically, as do the correlates of the paranoid/schizoid and
depressive positions on which they are based. For example, when the basic
assumption of pairing fails as a defence against depressive anxieties, certain
kinds of paranoid/schizoid anxieties are likely to emerge, associated with
denigration, which, in turn, generates the basic assumption of fight/flight.
However, when other kinds of paranoid/schizoid anxieties emerge,
associated with idealisation, the basic assumption of dependency is likely to
follow. The converse of these processes may also occur. For example, when
dependency fails as a defence against feelings of helplessness, envy is likely
to occur, and, in turn, either denigration develops and leads to fight/flight,
or further idealisation develops and leads to an amplification of
dependency.
(vi) Bion also discussed the leadership of a group. Ambiguously, he referred
to the leadership of the work group as well as of the basic assumption group.
However, Bion implied that a ‘real’ leader is the leader of the work group,
who is able to use basic assumption processes in the service of work,
depending on the nature of the task at the time. In other words, the work
group is like a cork floating on the Sea of Basic Assumptions, and the leader
of the work group is in chronic danger of being capsized, and likely to be
replaced by a leader of a basic assumption group. A leader of a work group
and leaders of basic assumption groups may exist and function simulta-
neously, and usually the situation is transitory and in flux.
Bion argued that as a consequence of ubiquitous processes of projective
identification, patterns of ‘valence’ arise, based on the attraction that
particular basic assumption processes and their roles hold for people with
certain kinds of personality. The so-called ‘leader’ of a basic assumption
group is someone with a valence for the roles and processes associated with
a particular basic assumption. The leadership of a basic assumption group is
not necessarily an indication of pathology as much as it is of a type of per-
sonality and character.
202 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

2. Only twice did Bion (1970, 1978) mention the possibility of a fourth basic
assumption concerning illusions of fusion and oneness in connection with an
infant’s need to protect against the anxieties associated with birth, or more
precisely, with the transformation from being a unique object of
mother-and-foetus combined with the body of the mother, to being a separate
object outside the mother. This fourth basic assumption concerns incohesion
specifically.
Pierre Turquet, focusing entirely on large groups within group relations
conferences, developed Bion’s cryptic comments about a fourth basic
assumption in two papers: in 1967, to the Paris Society of Psychosomatic
Medicine, which gave rise to the publication in 1974 of ‘Leadership: the
individual and the group’; and in 1969, as one of the Winter Lectures
sponsored by the British Psychoanalytical Society, which was the basis of the
original publication in 1975 of ‘Threats to identity in the large group’
(Turquet 1994). According to Turquet:
(i) The fourth basic assumption should be called ‘Oneness’ (BaO). Under the
sway of this basic assumption members of a group ‘…seek to join in a
powerful union with an omnipotent force unobtainably high, to surrender
self for passive participation, and thereby (to) feel existence, well-being, and
wholeness’ (Turquet 1974, p.357) ‘…The group member is there to be lost
in oceanic feelings of unity…(i)f the oneness is personified…(the group
member is there)…to be a part of a salvationist inclusion’ (Turquet 1974,
p.360).
This basic assumption of oneness results from a transformation or ‘conver-
sion’ that people experience as a result of threats to their identity through
their attempts to participate in the large group. It is argued that a person
begins in what is called an ‘I’ or ‘singleton’ state, but in order to protect
against the unbridled envy, fear of annihilation and loss of identity that
follow from uncontrolled regression, provoked by the ‘multiple stimuli’ and
‘response bombardment’ that typify a large group, a singleton ‘(S)’ either
becomes a ‘membership individual (MI)’ or an ‘isolate’, rather than an ‘indi-
vidual member (IM)’. Membership individuals unconsciously create a state
of social and cultural ‘homogeneity’, characterised by absolute equality,
absolute sameness of belief, no role differentiation, no use of personal
authority as the basis of the interpretation of the role, the use of language in
order to convey identity as a membership individual rather than the content
of ideas, and the use of ‘speaking-in-tongues’ in order magically to be at one
with the unified group as a whole. Homogenisation is said to be the source
of the basic assumption of oneness.
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 203

(ii) An alternative defensive process, through which alienated isolates and

bizarre objects create unconsciously a state of chaos and multiple splittings
characterised by ‘errancy’ and ‘polarities’, should be called ‘dissaroy’, which
connotes that the king-father has been dispossessed of his power and
authority. In itself, dissaroy is not a basic assumption, and not explicitly
connected to oneness. The ‘dissaroy’ of the group is based on the states of
mind of the individuals who comprise it.
(iii) A good work group is characterised by ‘heterogeneity’. However, as for
Bion, the concept of the work group is used primarily as a foil for the
analysis of the destructive processes of unconscious basic assumption
groups, and, thus, Turquet did not describe heterogeneity. In any case, it is
implied that under conditions of oneness the work group would only be
momentary and transitory, and under conditions of dissaroy, the work
group would cease to exist, as, shortly thereafter, would the group itself.
(iv) Having suggested that homogenisation is typical of charismatic
movements in which people wish to be at one with God, Turquet suggested
that a leader of the basic assumption of oneness is likely to be ‘charismatic’.
The charismatic leadership of oneness groups is different from Bion’s
depiction of a God of dependency groups or a Christ of pairing groups, and
certainly from a General of fight/flight groups.
3. An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this entire approach has
been provided elsewhere, for example, by group analysts such as Brown
(1985), group psychotherapists such as Yalom (1985) and many students of
group dynamics such as Stock-Whitaker and Lieberman (1964). However, to
the positive side of existing critiques I would add that rarely have we been able
to identify and to explain so many diverse phenomena on the basis of so few
concepts and propositions. Nonetheless, as to the negative side of existing
critiques, I would emphasise several points:
(i) Bion and Turquet nominalised groups and group processes, and denied
the reality of social facts. It is not generally remembered that although Bion
studied groups as ‘wholes’, and stressed that people were social animals, he
also expressed the view that groups do not really exist except in the minds of
people who are regressed. He wrote that a ‘group’ is a fantasy that is shared
by people who are in similar states of regression.
(ii) With respect to the fourth basic assumption specifically, it is impossible
to integrate the hypothesis that oneness or fusion is connected with the
experience of birth, with the underlying Kleinian hypothesis that fusion is
only a defence against envy, which is at the foundation of the theory of three
204 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

basic assumptions. Within the context of the Klein/Bion model, it is

impossible to conceptualise anxieties more primitive than schizoid
anxieties, and, therefore, to imagine basic assumptions more primitive than
dependency. Whereas primal envy is said to lead, on the one hand, to deni-
gration, and therefore, to fight/flight, and on the other to idealisation, and
therefore to dependency, primal envy is also said to lead to the fear of anni-
hilation, and therefore to the basic assumption of oneness. Clearly, this is a
contradiction and an inconsistency.
In my judgement, Bion became aware of this problem, but in order to solve
it, he would have had to adopt some of the views of Fairbairn, Guntrip,
Winnicott and others, such as Kohut, not to mention Foulkes, and, thus, to
alter the Kleinian model of development. He would have had to ask the
question that many years later Khaleelee and Miller (1985) and I (Hopper
1985) working independently, have put: what happens when dependency
fails? And a related question: what anxieties underpin feelings of envy
associated with the putative ‘death instinct’? Or, is it possible that envy
arises as a defence against more basic anxieties? The answers to these
questions require a truly interpersonal, intersubjective model of the mind,
and a theory of trauma that is more complex than ‘failed containment’,
which was Bion’s only contribution to understanding the nature of trauma.
Instead, Bion stopped theorising group processes, and began to focus on the
relationship between the body and the mind. Although he began to
consider the nature of ‘normal’ projective identification, he also began to
grant less and less importance to the external world of other people.
(iii) It is understandable that Turquet assumed that the basic assumption of
oneness is both ubiquitous and inevitable, because he also assumed that
oneness is based on envy, which, in turn, is assumed to be ubiquitous and
inevitable. Although he mentioned that the members of large groups
introject both projected anxieties and defences, he took projective processes
to be primary. He concentrated almost entirely on the ways in which persons
who are extremely regressed and frightened about their loss of identity
project these emotions into others, who are similarly frightened, and who
become ever more frightened, and who, in turn, project their fears into those
around them. Thus, for Turquet, as for Klein and Bion, the fear of annihila-
tion is based on the fear of retaliation from objects into whom envious
impulses to annihilate have been projected. In other words, the state of
dissaroy is created from projections. Although Turquet mentioned that the
participants in large groups are likely to feel overlooked and unheard, in
effect to feel narcissistically injured, this was peripheral to his central
argument. It was implied that such experience is important only in so far as it
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 205

promotes regression, and not that it is traumatic, and precipitates a

traumatogenic process.
In contradistinction, I would argue that although dissaroy and homogeneity
are ubiquitous, they are not inevitable. Large groups do not always evince
either dissaroy or homogenisation. In other words, oneness may be
associated with the emergence of envy, but the emergence of envy is not
inevitable. Envy is variable, and governed by variable conditions. In fact,
dissaroy and homogenisation in large groups in training conferences, which
were the source of Turquet’s observations, are often based on failed
dependency, perhaps because inappropriate and plunging interpretations
(Foulkes 1968) or confusion in the management and administration of such
events have insulted the integrity of the group. In training conferences large
groups tend to be experienced by people who are used to small groups as an
attack upon them by the staff, rather than as a developmental challenge that
might be related, for example, to a shift from the family to the school, or to
the integration of multiple facets of the internal world. Moreover, the devel-
opment and persistence of basic assumptions depend in large part on the
style of the conductor. It is easy to conduct a group of inexperienced
students of the dynamics of groups in such a way that they are provoked into
a state of fear and bewilderment. It is more difficult to facilitate the develop-
ment of a work group who share a sense of community, characterised by
optimal cohesion. In any case, what may often be true for large groups in
training conferences is not true for large groups in other settings (Brown
2001). Perhaps envy is not the primal emotion, and projection not the
primal action.
Most importantly, Bion confined his discussion of aggression within the
context of basic assumption groups to the basic assumption of fight/flight,
as though aggression did not occur and have particular patterns within the
basic assumptions of pairing and dependency. Moreover, Turquet implied
that aggression was non-existent within the context of the basic assumption
of oneness, because oneness was a defence against the dissaroy that followed
rampant envy. However, oneness is never perfect, and any threat to it precip-
itates aggression towards the people and sub-groups who are seen to be
associated with the threat. This is not so much a matter of envy as one of
attacks on perceived obstacles to merger.
(iv) Bion and Turquet neglected the phenomenon of leadership, especially
with respect to the work group. Although Turquet suggested that ‘leaders’ of
oneness groups are likely to be charismatic, he did not examine the nature of
charismatic leadership.
206 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

4. Like Bion and Turquet before him, Otto Kernberg is a renowned psychoan-
alyst who has taken a serious and deep interest in group dynamics, primarily
in complex organisations, particularly hospitals and training institutes of psy-
choanalysis. In a series of papers he introduced the theory of basic assump-
tions to psychoanalysts whose understanding of group dynamics was based
almost entirely on Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1950, first published 1913) and
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1955, first published 1921), and
suggested several modifications to it. Drawing on the ideas of Bion (1961)
and Turquet (1994, first published 1975), as well as those of Anzieu (1981),
Menzies-Lyth (1981), Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985) and others, Kernberg
argues that:
(i) Small and large groups promote regression because they ‘… lack an oper-
ational leadership and lack or lose clearly defined tasks to relate them to
their environment.’ (Kernberg 1998, p.45) Also, it is implied that dissaroy is
primary, and that homogenisation is secondary, and based on the
sexualisation of aggression associated with dissaroy.
(ii) On the basis of ‘role suction’ (Redl 1942), people with certain kinds of
anxiety and patterns of defence will be attracted to the roles provided by
particular basic assumptions, and become leaders of them. More specifi-
cally:
…(A) spectrum of different types of symbolic leadership [my italics:
that is, of basic assumption processes, E.H.] reflect(s) the degree of
regression in the group. [For example, the] dependency group tends
to promote infantile narcissistic (and even psychopathic) leaders, in
contrast to the fight/flight group that seeks a leader with paranoid
characteristics. (Kernberg 1998, p.46)
Kernberg also implies that the pairing group seeks a leader who has a surfeit
of hysterical features.
(iii) With certain exceptions psychoanalysts and students of group dynamics
in general have neglected to study leaders and leadership of the work group
as a pro-active process. Nonetheless, it can be said that:
[T]he mature superego [is] derived from the post-Oedipal parental
couple – [involving] the rational, protective, moral functions of the
parents, [which is the basis for] the symbolic meaning of the rational
leadership of functional organisations… (Kernberg 1998, p.46)
…[Rational leadership] is characterised by (1) high intelligence; (2)
personal honesty and noncorruptibility by the political process; (3)
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 207

capacity for establishing and maintaining object relations in depth;

(4) a healthy narcissism; and (5) a healthy, justifiable anticipatory
paranoid attitude in contrast to naivety… (Kernberg 1998, p.47)
5. Like Bion and Turquet, Kernberg assumes that the unconscious dynamics
of large groups can also be seen in more complex social systems, such as
organisations and societies. Nor is he clear about the aetiology of aggression,
even in his delineation of borderline conditions and pathological narcissism:
although he does not assume the existence of a death instinct, and does not
explain all aggression in terms of envy, he continues to focus on projective
processes. Kernberg also neglects the traumatogenic process: although he is
aware of the constraints of social facts on unconscious life, his brief reference
to the absence of the good father in the context of post-war German society is
the exception that proves the rule. In other words, like Bion and Turquet,
Kernberg neglects the problem of failed dependency.
It also seems judicious to cite Scheidlinger’s (1980) comments that
Kernberg’s discussion of the leadership of extremely regressed groups should
have taken account of additional work, for example, Scheidlinger’s (1952)
own analysis of mature and immature leaders, Freud’s (1931) delineation of
libidinal types and their tendency to assume leadership roles, Bychowski’s
(1948) study of dictators, Alexander’s (1942) and Erikson’s (1948) analysis of
mature and immature leaders, and Kohut and Wolf ’s (1978) discussion of the
‘narcissistic group self ’. Most importantly Redl (1942) implied that whereas
the work group has leaders, basic assumption groups have ‘central persons’,
and, thus, a so-called ‘leader’ of a basic assumption group is likely to be a
follower who is vulnerable to role-suction, especially the charismatic ‘leader’
of a oneness group.
6. Lawrence (1993) and Lawrence et al. (1996) propose a fifth basic
assumption of ‘me-ness’, the opposite of what Turquet called ‘oneness’. They
argue that in the same way that isolates are defined as ‘me’s, not-you’s’,
me-ness is defined as ‘not-oneness’. This putative basic assumption of me-ness
is said to function as a defence against the anxieties associated with being a
membership individual in a oneness group, such as the fear of contamination.
The basis for me-ness is a developmental moment in the early life of persons.
The authors cite Winnicott’s statement: ‘The idea of a limiting membrane
appears, and from this follows the idea of an inside and an outside. Then there
develops the theme of a ME and a not-ME. There are now contents that
develop partly on instinctual experience’ (Winnicott 1988, p.68). Curiously, it
is also suggested that schizoid anxieties and defences (I suspect in the sense
208 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

that Guntrip would describe them) are the basis of me-ness, which, in turn, is
manifest in various forms of alienation, withdrawal and pathological
narcissism. In other words, it is argued that me-ness is not only a defence
against the ‘we-ness’ of homogenisation, but also an expression of aggression
against the whole, and involves attacks on linking, based on unbridled envy.
Yet, such phenomena are said to be ‘socially induced’, through the experience
of ‘failed dependency’, and are typical of life in modern societies. It is
suggested that as do other basic assumption states, me-ness has positive uses
for a work group. It is also said that particular kinds of people are likely to
lead me-ness groups.
7. The argument advanced by Lawrence et al. (1996) has certain inconsis-
tencies. For example, these authors ignore the fact that Bion’s theory of basic
assumptions in general and Turquet’s theory of oneness in particular are
predicated on the assumption that the primary anxiety associated with innate
malign envy is an expression of the putative death instinct. This is a contradic-
tion to a theory of human development that emphasizes traumatic experience.
Although the authors have nodded in the direction of Winnicott, they think
within the tradition of Klein, Bion and Turquet. This is seen in their having
adopted the fundamental Kleinian tenet that fusion is a defence against envy,
and that ‘me, not-you’ is a retreat from fusion. However, they also argue that
this retreat is motivated by the envy of oneness. Moreover, ‘me-ness’ is not
conceptualised as a characteristic of the singleton, who is associated with
dissaroy, of which me-ness is the central feature.
In the context of their argument, ‘me-ness’ actually refers to what Bion
(1958) called ‘secondary splitting’, which I (Hopper 1991) have called
‘secondary fission and fragmentation’, the fourth step in the encapsulation
process. I have written:
…as a consequence of processes of secondary envy and internal projections,
the fusional and confusional introjected object is likely to be perceived as
dangerous. As a defence against the anxieties associated with fusion and
confusion with an object that is perceived to be dangerous, there is likely to
occur a regressive shift back towards processes of fission and fragmentation.
(Hopper 1991, p.610)
In other words these authors have described defensive shifts from homogeni-
sation to what Turquet might have termed ‘secondary dissaroy’.
It follows that in the same way that Turquet was unable quite to concep-
tualise a fourth basic assumption, Lawrence, Bain and Gould have not quite
conceptualised a fifth, because basic assumptions must be related to basic
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 209

psychotic anxieties within a context of a model of development. Although

they refer to a process of ‘social induction’, they do not give this process much
importance in the aetiology of psychic life. Unless the Klein/Bion/Turquet
model is modified, it is impossible to integrate an emphasis on projective
processes with an emphasis on social induction.
8. In sum, although the psychoanalytical point of view does not provide a
complete explanation of the phenomenon of incohesion in groups, the
psychoanalytical theory proposed by Bion and Turquet and developed by
Kernberg and by Lawrence et al., is especially illuminating. Nonetheless, the
main problem with this particular theory is that aggression is explained in
terms of envy and, by implication, the putative death instinct, and therefore,
that threats to identity are explained in terms of the fear of retaliation from
objects that have been invested with projected envy and aggressive impulses.
From this perspective it is impossible to postulate more than three basic
assumptions. Furthermore, the ‘leadership’ of basic assumption processes is
not distinguished from the leadership of the work group, which limits the
application of this theory to clinical work and to consultations with organisa-
tions. Although these contradictions are insurmountable, certain modifica-
tions to the underlying metapsychology leads to an alternative theory of a
fourth basic assumption, which negates the need to conceptualise a fifth.

Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or Ba I:A/M as the

fourth basic assumption in the unconscious life of groups
In my theory I focus on incohesion rather than cohesion. My theory of
incohesion is based on the work of the Group of Independent Psychoanalysts
of the British Psychoanalytical Society, including Rickman, Fairbairn,
Winnicott, Balint, King and Bowlby. It draws explicitly from the work of
group analysts such as Anthony, Brown, de Maré, Hume, Kreeger, Main,
Pines, Skynner and others. Group analysis is based on psychoanalysis, but also
on sociology and general systems theory. The concepts and theories of the
group matrix (Roberts and Pines 1991), the sociality of human nature
(Hopper 1981a), the social unconscious (Hopper 1996, 2000 and 2001a)
and open systems (Hopper 1994a, first published 1975) are essential to the
study of incohesion.
In my theory of incohesion of groups and group-like social systems it is
argued that incohesion is a manifestation within the external world of the fear
of annihilation, which is explained in terms of traumatic experience. Processes
of incohesion are personified by central persons whose identities can be
210 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

described in terms of characterological protections against the fear of annihi-

lation (Hopper 1991, 1994b and 1995). Thus, it is also argued that
incohesion is recursive, based on the continuing interaction of inter-personal
and intra-personal processes within a wider social context.

The fear of annihilation and traumatic experience

1. The primary fear of annihilation is a response to the experience of profound
helplessness arising from loss, abandonment and damage within the context
of the traumatogenic process, which spans generations and involves the rela-
tionships between victims and perpetrators, and the responses to the trauma-
tised. The traumatic experience of profound helplessness in response to loss,
abandonment and damage may be understood in terms of: the Chinese
water-torture strains of daily life, the cumulative build-up of small incidents
into an overpowering wave of oppression, and/or the catastrophic violation
of expectations. This is always a matter of failed dependency in both personal
and social domains. Traumatic experience is ubiquitous, as is the fear of anni-
hilation. Were this not so, it would be wrong to argue that the fear of annihila-
tion is the source of the fourth basic assumption. However, traumatic
experience is determined by both the magnitude of the strain and/or catas-
trophe, and the maturity of the ego (which is only partly a function of chrono-
logical age). A comprehensive classification of events that might be traumatic
is impossible. However, events that have been traumatic can be seen in terms
of whether they were primarily personal, random and idiosyncratic, or more
patterned for large numbers of people. They may have been primarily social
and political in nature or primarily natural or a mixture of both.
2. ‘In the beginning’, the primal emotion in psychic life is not envy, based
on the putative death instinct, but ‘grenvy’, which is a neologism that is
intended to convey a mixture of greed and possessive desire (Coltart 1989).
On the basis of traumatic experience, grenvy is split into greedy desire and
malign envy of objects who are perceived as able but unwilling to help, and
who are perceived as responsible for failed dependency, that is, failed contain-
ment and holding. In other words, according to this perspective malign envy
is not innate, but develops as a defence against feelings of profound helpless-
ness. On the basis of the emergence of defensive, malign envy, paranoid/
schizoid splitting leads to idealisation and denigration. Objects of failed
dependency are then subjected to annihilating attacks, usually but not always
in fantasy. In turn, the objects are perceived to be retaliatory. Sometimes, on
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 211

the basis of projective identification, they actually do retaliate, and, thus, a

secondary fear of annihilation is likely to develop.
I would hypothesise that virtually by definition helplessness is a conse-
quence of traumatic experience, and that envy arises as a defence against help-
lessness, which means that helplessness precedes envy, which is regarded as a
defensive response to narcissistic injury (Rutan and Stone 2000). Of course,
fusion can be a defence against envy and helplessness, and helplessness can be
a consequence of fusion, but these are secondary processes; furthermore, envy
can itself be traumatic, because it leads to the destruction in fantasy of the good
object, but this too is a secondary process.
The fear of annihilation is closely connected with the fear of separation,
because separation from an object with whom one has fused is likely to be felt
as losing a part of one’s self. Also, one is likely to have fused with an object
who has been lost prematurely and/or precipitately, especially at the phase of
unintegration, when it is difficult, if not impossible, to hold in mind represen-
tations of the object. In effect, the loss of the breast is experienced as the loss
of the mouth.
3. Primary and secondary fears of annihilation combined are expressed as
intrapsychic fission and fragmentation, which are associated with typical
psychotic anxieties, for example: fear of disintegration and of dissolution. The
first response to the anxieties associated with fission and fragmentation is
introjective fusion and confusion with the lost, abandoning and damaging
object. However, fusion and confusion are also associated with typical
psychotic anxieties, for example: fear of suffocation, swallowing and being
swallowed, being crushed, being entrapped, becoming a puppet, and
becoming petrified. In order to protect against the anxieties associated with
fusion and confusion, a retreat occurs to the state of fission and fragmentation.
The relationship between fission and fragmentation, and fusion and
confusion, and, then, in a secondary way, between fusion and confusion and
fission and fragmentation, and back again to fusion and confusion, is,
therefore, one of pendulum-like, non-dialectical oscillation, involving
incessant psychic activity but no change and no development.
4. In order for life to continue and psychic paralysis to be avoided, the
entire intrapsychic experience is encysted or encapsulated, producing autistic
islands of experience, characterised by all-encompassing silence and
grotesque internal developments of aggregated objects. Encapsulation is
associated with two autistic forms of self-protection: ‘crustacean’ and
‘amoeboid’ (Tustin 1981). A crustacean type may actually refer to himself in
212 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

terms of crustacean imagery, for example, as a lobster or a tortoise or covered

by a shell; and an amoeboid type, as a jelly fish, feeling utterly vulnerable, and
as someone whose skin functions merely to distinguish what is felt to be a
‘self’ from a ‘not-self’, or a ‘me’ from a ‘not-me’ (Winnicott 1988). Amoeboid
people find protection in merger and accommodation based on fantasies of
vacuole incorporation. This distinction is virtually identical to that of ‘con-
tact-shunning’ and ‘merger-hungry’ disorders of the self (Kohut and Wolf
1978). Several psychoanalysts have made similar comparisons, although with
slightly different nuances. For example, Balint’s (1968) distinction between
the philobat who loves empty spaces and avoids people, and the ocnophile
who clings to people, is especially apposite. These character types are
supported by disassociation (Klein and Schermer 2000), as is encapsulation
itself.
Both crustacean and amoeboid characters tend to use projective and
introjective identification of malignant kinds, involving the repetition
compulsion and traumatophilia, in the service of expulsion, attack, control
and communication of that which would otherwise be enacted. After all,
people who have had a history of traumatic experience are likely to have no
other way in which to communicate. They are, therefore, exceedingly
vulnerable to role suction. However, they also tend to create those roles which,
if enacted, offer a sense of containment and holding, in that they bestow an
identity within a field of turmoil and chaos.

The interaction, normation and communication patterns of traumatised

groups
On the basis of various kinds of externalisation and internalisation, especially
projective and introjective identification, groups of traumatised people are
likely to evince processes of ‘incohesion’. These processes are likely to be
characterised by what I call ‘aggregation’, in response to fission and fragmen-
tation, and then by what I call ‘massification’, in response to fusion and
confusion; and, in turn, by oscillations between massification and aggrega-
tion. These states and processes of aggregation and massification comprise the
bipolar forms of incohesion. Therefore, I call the fourth basic assumption in
the unconscious life of groups and all group-like social systems ‘Incohesion:
Aggregation/Massification’ or ‘I: A/M’. I will now develop these hypotheses,
and delineate the main features of aggregation and massification as the bipolar
states of incohesion.
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 213

1. Aggregates and masses are the two most simple, primitive social
formations. They are not merely collections of people, but nor are they
groups. These two social formations have been described by social scientists
and social philosophers from many points of view, using a variety of terms and
concepts, but ‘aggregate’ and ‘mass’ are technically correct.
An aggregate is characterised by a minimal degree of mutual attraction
and involvement among three or more people who are neither interdependent
nor in sympathy with one another, on the basis of shared beliefs, norms and
values. In contrast, a mass is characterised by a maximal degree of mutual
attraction and involvement among three or more people who are neither inter-
dependent nor in sympathy with one another but who share the illusion of
solidarity with respect to beliefs, norms and values, usually for a brief period
of time.
Although the members of a mass may feel otherwise, a mass is no more a
group than an aggregate is. An aggregate and a mass are each social formations
with dynamics of their own. Whereas an aggregate has too much individuality
to be a group, a mass has too little. An aggregate is highly incohesive. A mass
seems to be very cohesive, but in reality it is as incohesive as an aggregate. In
fact, a mass is like an aggregate masquerading as a group, like an aggregate in
drag.
Metaphors for an aggregate are a handful of gravel, a piece of granite, a set
of billiard balls, or even a plate of deep-fried whitebait; in contrast, metaphors
for a mass are a slab of basalt, a handful of warm wet sponges, a chunk of
faeces, or a nice piece of gefilte fish (chopped and stuffed fish). Another
metaphor for a mass is a highly condensed bundle of burning candles, such
that they melt into one, becoming a mass of hot wax, which is an image that is
conveyed by the very etymology of the word ‘fascist’.
A mass usually consists of a large number of people. However, as a
criterion for the formation of a mass, density of population may be more
important than size. A ‘few’ people in a small room may be sufficient for a
massification process.
2. Aggregates and masses, like all social formations, are manifest in typical
patterns of interaction, normation, and communication, and styles of thinking
and feeling, and of leadership and followership. In effect, aggregates and
masses can be described as bipolar syndromes of features of each of these
dimensions of social formation. For example, with respect to interaction, the
aggregate of disintegration contrasts with the mass of bureaucratisation or
mechanisation; and with respect to normation, the aggregate of insolidarity
214 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

contrasts with the mass of fundamentalism. In other words, both disintegra-

tion and bureaucratisation or mechanisation contrast with the integration of
the well-functioning work group; similarly, both insolidarity and fundamen-
talism contrast with solidarity.
With respect to communication, it is important to consider two forms of
incoherence (Pines 1986). In social systems characterised by aggregation,
people wish to avoid the recognition of agency and responsibility, and
therefore they tend to communicate in euphemism and bureaucratise. In ther-
apeutic groups aggregation is associated with profound silences, and with the
language of ‘either/and’ (Britton 1994). In contrast, in social systems charac-
terised by massification, ‘membership individuals’ attempt to define their
identities by using cult-speak and by speaking in tongues; words and
catch-phrases have nuanced meaning only to the core-members of the group;
and communication is laden with references to their history, which must have
been shared in order for statements to be fully understood. In therapeutic
groups massification may also be associated with silence, but the members feel
that they are merged in such a way that mutual understanding does not require
words, and the ambiguity of non-verbal communication is preferred.
However, such silences are not so much non-verbal as anti-verbal, that is, the
non-verbal communication is used to attack and undermine verbal communi-
cation, which requires thought and shared rules of discourse.
3. A group of traumatised people and/or a traumatised group are likely to
oscillate between states of aggregation and of massification for several
reasons:
(i) The state of aggregation is associated with a distinctive set of difficulties
and aspects of annihilation anxiety. For example, aggregation generates
ignorance and misunderstanding of norms, as well as inurement to them;
and under extreme conditions, aggregation generates normlessness. When a
group is characterised by ignorance and misunderstanding of the norms,
inurement to the norms, and processes of normlessness, levels of normative
expectations tend to rise higher than the levels of achievement with respect
to objects that are valued as goals both compulsively and fetishistically. In
other words, aggregation causes anomie, in which rankings and differences
become a source of invidious comparison, power is not supported by
authority, and administration becomes manipulative (Hopper 1981b).
(ii) In an effort to escape from the problems associated with aggregation,
people attempt to merge with a perfect group. They create an illusionary – if
not hallucinatory – state of perfection, and they attempt to obliterate all
flaws, impurities and differences. Unconsciously, the fundamental goal is
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 215

safety within the body of the group mother, and the group is experienced in
terms of her. All aggression is sexualised, and the objects of aggression are
projected into ‘other’ groups, who are then perceived as a source of
pollution, and, therefore, repudiated. Massification is based on such
processes as ‘twinning’ (Kohut and Wolf 1978), imitative identifications
(Gaddini 1992), and pseudo-speciation (Erikson 1968). Group perfection
requires either total submission to impersonal law and order or absolute
equality and sameness. For people who cannot abide even one tall poppy,
massification is very desirable.
(iii) The state of massification, however, is associated with its own distinctive
set of difficulties and aspects of annihilation anxieties. For example,
massification is always transitory and fragile. It is highly dependent on the
maintenance of enchantment, and on the perfect fulfilment of its promise;
yet, the larger the population of a massified social system, the more likely is
it that a core group will become differentiated from peripheral groups, and
that horizontal social distance will be transformed into hierarchy, which is
inimical to the perpetuation of homogeneity. It is very difficult to
accomplish complex tasks, which require flexible social organisation and
the maintenance of enchantment, which, in turn, requires energy and the
expenditure of scarce resources which do not violate the prevailing norms of
distributive justice. It becomes virtually impossible to utilise the variety of
skills and idiosyncrasies within the population in order to provide for the
greater good of the whole. Helplessness within peripheral groups is likely to
generate envy of core groups from whom the former feel excluded. Of
course, people may also feel helpless with respect to the pseudo-cohesion of
massification, and wish to prevent such ‘coming together’, but this is likely
to be a secondary process. In any case, it cannot be understood only in terms
of the unconscious impulse to spoil parental intercourse.
(iv) In order to protect against the difficulties and anxieties associated with
massification, a social system shifts back towards the state of aggregation,
and the original anxieties and difficulties re-emerge. And the entire process
repeats itself. In the same way that traumatised people who are over-
whelmed by their fear of annihilation are caught in incessant motion,
without possibilities of resolution, incohesive social systems oscillate inces-
santly between states of aggregation and states of massification. These oscil-
lations manifest motion and process, but no dynamic, dialectical movement.
An incohesive social system is in a state of social paralysis or social stasis.
4. It is useful to think in terms of processes of social formation or develop-
ment, and of social regression. For example, although a social mass can be
transformed into an aggregate very quickly, and vice versa, it is a more difficult
216 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

and lengthy process for either an aggregate or a mass to become a group;

nonetheless, a group can become like an aggregate or like a mass very easily
and very quickly. Similarly, groups can become organisations, and organisa-
tions can become bureaucracies, and vice versa. However, a group that
becomes an organisation is very different from a group that becomes like an
organisation while remaining a group, in which case the group is likely to
have regressed towards a state of aggregation, and not developed into a more
complex social system.
It is important to understand the determinants and the consequences of
social development and social regression. It is also important to remember
that properties of persons should never be inferred to social systems, and vice
versa. However, there is one exception to this golden rule of social science:
when social systems are traumatised through the experience of failed
dependency, which is associated with widespread and intense feelings of
helplessness, and, to be precise, the fear of annihilation, social systems are
likely to regress from the complex to the simple, that is, societies become like
villages, villages become like families, organisations become like groups, and
groups become like their members, and vice versa (Hopper 1994a, first
published 1975). Thus, when traumatised, the properties of people may be
inferred to their social systems, and vice versa.
5. As is the case with all basic assumptions, virtually by definition,
incohesion prevents the development and the maintenance of the work group.
Aggregation and massification are grotesque versions of processes of
authentic diversity and unity that are necessary for the optimal cohesion of
the work group. ‘Heterogeneity’ is sometimes used to refer to the optimal
cohesion of the work group, but this concept is ambiguous, and stems from
Turquet’s brief discussion of the homogeneity of oneness in contrast to the
heterogeneity of the optimal cohesion of the work group. For this reason, I
refer to the ‘cohesion’ of the work group, and think in terms of high, low and
optimal degrees of cohesion. Under conditions of optimal cohesion, the work
group manifests a ‘good’ sense of humour, tolerance and respect for differ-
ences, including differences of opinion, a degree of disinterest that facilitates a
scientific attitude towards data and techniques, etc. High morale and
passionate commitment to the achievement of collective goals are possible,
and not to be confused with the pseudo-morale of fundamentalism.
In small groups, especially in those who meet for the purpose of psycho-
therapy, it is possible to use interpretations of underlying anxieties and
defences in order to facilitate the development of the work group. Obviously,
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 217

in larger, more complex social systems, this is very difficult, if not impossible,
although working with large groups within organisational settings can be
very effective. It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to address the problem of
work group development in complex social systems.

The personification of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification

People who have been traumatised, have experienced the fear of annihilation,
and who have developed protective encapsulations are likely not only to
create processes of aggregation and massification, but also to be vulnerable to
the constraints of roles associated with them. People who have experienced
the fear of annihilation are desperate for the holding and containing provided
by roles that offer an identity which can be substituted for the one that has
been threatened, fragmented or even lost. Such roles are like new skin or new
clothes; perhaps a costume and mask are an apposite metaphor. Neither per-
sonification nor personality is easily dichotomised, especially in connection
with the variety of complex processes that comprise aggregation and
massification.
1. It may be helpful to discuss the concept of personification of basic
assumption processes, as opposed to the ‘leadership’ of work groups. ‘Person-
ification’ is usually defined as a literary device in which an author uses in the
course of his narrative the action and personality of a particular person in
order to represent abstract qualities, principles and more general processes
and problems in the sub-text of the work. However, the concept is apposite for
the discussion of valence and role suction. After all, the ‘narrative’ mode is
very important in group analysis and in some schools of psychoanalysis, in
which maturation involves an increasingly accurate and truthful rendition of a
life history, as well as an opening up of new and transcendent possibilities for
the authorship of future chapters (Hopper 1998, 2001b). Personification
emphasises the possibilities for the active interpretation of a role to which a
person has a valence, or a heightened sensitivity to its suction. Personification
implies that a role can be enacted with many individual idiosyncrasies, and
that it permits a range of interpretations.
Personification is always a social and cultural process that involves the
group as a whole, as well as the individual member of it. In fact, this is what we
mean when we say that the individual and the group are two sides of the same
coin, and that the individual is permeated through and through by social and
cultural factors and forces, and vice versa.
218 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Personification is largely unconscious. Although it is active, it is based on

a complex mixture of projective and introjective identification, as well as
other forms of externalisation and internalisation. Whether conscious or
unconscious, active or passive, people with a particular pattern of anxiety and
defence are most likely to personify those roles that are unconsciously con-
structed in association with particular basic assumption groups.
Related to personification are the concepts of ‘figuration’ and ‘fractal’.
Norbert Elias (1995) introduced the notion of figuration in order to describe
the interlocking social, cultural and personal aspects of a particular pattern of
action. A figuration can be analysed from various points of view and on many
levels, ranging from the constraints of social facts, on the one hand, to the
constraints of intra-psychic unconscious fantasy, on the other. This is
especially important in the elucidation of the social unconscious (Gfaller
1996).
The concept of fractal is borrowed from the new information and
computer sciences in which the discovery has been made that in many realms
of the universe parts seem to manifest the same fundamental structures as their
wholes, thus illustrating the old idea that the universe can be found in a grain
of sand. When applied to the social and psychological domain, it is possible to
think of a person and his intra-psychic life as being a fractal of his immediate
group, which in turn can be seen as a fractal of the group’s wider social context
(Lawrence 1993; Scharff and Scharff 1998).
The focus on an individual person as a fractal or as a figuration is exactly
that, a matter of focus. This is consistent with Bion’s idea that binocular vision
is necessary in attempts to understand group process, and with the emphasis
given by Foulkes to maintaining the tension between figure and ground of the
gestalt. Thus, in group analysis patients can be seen in terms of a figuration or
a fractal of the group, on the basis of which it is not only entirely justifiable but
also clinically appropriate to engage an individual patient within a group
when the patient is regarded as personifying a particular process, which, in
turn, may be a function of the matrix of the group or of the foundation matrix
of the wider society in which the group exists (Foulkes 1968).
2. I will call attention to only a few aspects of the personification of aggre-
gation and massification:
(i) In general, aggregation is personified by central persons who have
developed crustacean, contact-shunning characters, and massification by
those who have developed amoeboid, merger-hungry characters.
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 219

(ii) There are different kinds of charismatic leaders and of leadership, or, to
be more precise, of personifiers and personification. Some types may be
more stable than others, and some may even be able to take leadership roles.
Other types may be especially vulnerable to the role suction of basic
assumption processes. Some types may be split between a competent,
rational self and an incompetent, irrational self, who may be depicted in
terms of a particular combination of amoeboid, merger-hungry defences
against autistic anxieties. I would also suggest that in complex situations
both charismatic leaders and charismatic personifers may be prominent, and
susceptible to particular patterns of collusion. In fact, it may be appropriate
to identify ‘charismatic followers’ who are either primarily crustacean or
primarily amoeboid in the ways that they protect themselves.
(iii) Aggregation and massification processes are also personified by people
with particular kinds of perversions or perverse characters, based on the
‘core complex’, the distinguishing characteristic of which is the fear of anni-
hilation (Glasser 1979). Although some kinds of perversions would seem to
lend themselves to the personification of the cold and distant patterns of the
alienated detachment of aggregation, other kinds of perversion are
associated with the hot, clinging and virtually parasitical mergers of
massification. These perversions are marked by the desire to subvert all
‘natural’ differences between the sexes and the generations, and the
compulsion to confuse all that would ‘ordinarily’ be regarded as ‘appropri-
ately’ separate (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1985), although ‘natural’ and ‘appro-
priate’ are matters for negotiation.
(iv) Some kinds of addicts can be seen to personify aggregation processes,
and other types, massification processes. Partly this is related to the nature of
the drug of choice and how it is used. For example, marijuana addicts tend
to personify massification processes, but cocaine addicts, aggregation
processes. It can be argued that heroin addicts also personify massification
processes.
(v) The personification of aggregation and massification reflects a multi-
generational cycle in which victims become perpetrators, and vice versa, and
in which all of us collude as bystanders. Under such circumstances all ‘inno-
cence’ is inauthentic. Those who have been treated as vermin become the
persecutors of those whom they regard as vermin. The collusive creation of
these roles, and the propensity to fill them, involves the recapitulation of
early life experiences within the matrix of the family and its surrounding
social groups, but it also reflects ‘later’ sources of the fear of annihilation,
220 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

such as war, terrorist activities and high rates of unemployment, as does the
entire traumatogenic process (Hopper 1995; de Zulueta 1993).
3. An exhaustive inventory of the roles and character types associated with the
personification of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification is yet to be made.
Jungian analytical psychology offers many examples of the personification of
basic assumption processes in terms of archetypes. More colloquially, the ‘sci-
entist’ of aggregation might be compared with the ‘magician’ of
massification. The characters of many great books and other works of art are
especially illustrative. For example, in Julius Caesar, Cassius might be
compared to Brutus, and both to Casca, who is the most easily overlooked of
all of Shakespeare’s characters; and in The Tempest Prospero, to his younger
brother Alfredo. In the film Viva Zapata, Zapata was played by Marlon Brando
as an amoeboid character who personified the massification process, and the
Trotsky-like fellow traveller was played by Joseph Wiseman as a cold
crustacean character who personified the aggregation process. In clinical
group analysis, the alienated schizoid ‘space cadets’ and ‘lone wolves’ who
personify states of aggregation can be contrasted with the ‘cheerleaders’ and
‘morale boosters’ of states of massification.
4. With regard to the leadership of the work group, I would argue,
following the work of de Maré (1972), that the leaders of work groups are
also able to take the role of ‘citizen’, and to give meaning to this role. (Hopper
1996, 2000). Of course, good followers, who are essential to the optimal
cohesion of a work group, must also be good citizens. The group analyst must
struggle to lead the work group, thereby giving patients the freedom to
personify basic assumption groups and all their processes.

A summary of the theory of Incohesion: Aggregation/

Massification or Ba I:A/M as the fourth basic assumption in
the unconscious life of groups and group-like social systems
I will now summarise my theory of the fourth basic assumption:
1. The fear of annihilation is rooted in traumatic experience, and envy
arises as a defence against the shame and helplessness associated with it. The
phenomenology of the fear of annihilation involves non-developmental oscil-
lation between fission and fragmentation in the first instance, and fusion and
confusion in the second. Each pole of the fear of annihilation is associated
with its own distinctive anxieties, and the phenomenology of each pole
functions as a defence against the anxieties associated with its opposite. The
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 221

main, overall defence against the fear of annihilation and its vicissitudes is
encapsulation. The two main types of encapsulated character structure
associated with the fear of annihilation and its phenomenology are crustacean
and contact-shunning, on the one hand, and amoeboid and merger-hungry,
on the other. Various kinds of addiction and perversion are also associated
with these two kinds of encapsulated character structures.
2. As a defence against pain, the phenomenology of the fear of annihila-
tion is projected into the external world, and manifest in patterns of interac-
tion, normation and communication, as well as in styles of thinking and
feeling and styles of leadership and followership. The manifestations within
the external world of these projected processes comprise the fourth basic
assumption in the unconscious life of groups and group-like social systems. I
call the fourth basic assumption ‘Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification’ or
‘I:A/M’. States of aggregation, on the one hand, and of massification, on the
other, can be denoted in these terms. Incohesive social systems tend to
oscillate between these bipolar states. Incohesion: aggregation/ massification
(I:A/M) occurs in all groups of traumatised people, and in all traumatised
groups and group-like social systems. Of course, ba I:A/M can be a transitory
phenomenon, but its appearance always indicates that the group has been
traumatised.
3. The roles associated with processes of Incohesion: Aggregation/
Massification are likely to be personified by traumatised, contact-shunning
crustacean characters, and traumatised, merger-hungry amoeboid characters,
the former being sucked into the roles that are typical of aggregation, and the
latter, of massification. These patterns of personification are, therefore, typical
of traumatised groups and group-like social systems. The personifiers of
processes of incohesion should be distinguished from the leaders of work
groups. However, some leaders are split in such a way that they may be both
leaders and personifiers. Moreover, when groups are under the sway of basic
assumption processes, both leaders and personifiers are likely to exist. With
respect to processes of incohesion, a charismatic leader may evince amoeboid
characteristics, but it is also possible that the charismatic leader will be
associated with a number of crustacean and amoeboid personifiers. This is
absolutely central to our clinical work with difficult patients, because they are
likely to personify the roles that are generated by the processes of incohesion.
This is also relevant to our understanding the problems of leadership and
corruption in traumatised organisations and societies.
222 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

4. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the fate of aggression

within the context of I:A/M. However, it must be emphasised that aggression
remains rampant, and is essential to both the instigation and the maintenance
of massification processes. It is essential to purge all parts of the massification
‘mother’ that may prevent a merger with her, such as distracting smells,
colours, textures and words, for example, the nipple rather the breast itself;
especially important is the elimination of the father and any of his parts that
are perceived to block access and merger, for example, his phallus, his rules
and his manifestations in male siblings. Within the context of massification
processes, the work group leader is especially vulnerable, as is anyone who is
perceived to have maintained the idiosyncrasies of personal identity.
Crustacean and amoeboid characters are likely to be both the perpetrators of
aggression and the victims of aggression from others, partly because they
remain unable to mourn their losses thoroughly and authentically. Thus,
although traumatic experience is the source of the fourth basic assumption of
incohesion: aggregation/massification, the fourth basic assumption is also a
source of further traumatic experience, which is why the relationship is
recursive.

Postscript
As a psychoanalyst and group analyst who was formerly a sociologist, I am
pleased to acknowledge that my theory of Incohesion: Aggregation/
Massification as the fourth basic assumption in the unconscious life of groups
and group-like social systems is based not only on the work of Bion, Turquet
and Kernberg, but also on the work of S. H. Foulkes and his colleagues,
including various members of the Group of Independent Psychoanalysts of
the British Psychoanalytical Society and several European and American soci-
ologists. I have tried to stand on the shoulders of giants, which is not merely a
matter of intellectual acrobatics. However, it has not been easy to study and to
appreciate the ideas associated with competing and rivalrous schools of
thought, at least not within the context of the intellectual cultures of psycho-
analysis within the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in London and of group
analysis associated with the Institute of Group Analysis in London. Others
must assess the strengths and weaknesses of my thesis, as can be seen in the
discussions of the application of it to the treatment of difficult patients in
group analysis (Hopper 2001c).
 INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION 223

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 9

Building on ‘O’
1
Bion and Epistemology

Victor L. Schermer

Psychoanalysis tells you nothing: it is an instrument, like the blind man’s

stick, that extends the power to gather information. (Bion, Cogitations,
p.361)
We need to invent some form of articulate speech that could approximate to
describing these realities, the phenomena that I cannot possibly describe.
(Bion, Cogitations, p.369)

Introduction
I remember now that I reacted with puzzlement to my initial reading, (around
1980, at the suggestion of a revered teacher, Dr Gunther Abraham) of Bion’s
(1977) Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. Frankly, I felt as if I had read an
archaeological text written in another language. Now, when I look back, I see
that Bion’s seminal essays on the psychoanalytic process were difficult to
decipher partly on account of the richness of his ideas and partly because Bion
often wrote in myths and metaphors mixed with seemingly abstruse or
esoteric remarks, and with a minimum of explanatory discourse. Nevertheless,
it gradually became impressed on me – as on many others – that his was a
brilliant mind striving to grasp the very foundations of psychoanalysis.
Bion frequently wrote and lectured in a form of discourse derived from
2
free association, the modern theater, and the literary and poetic use of
metaphor and myth. The term ‘primary process Socratic dialogue’ is perhaps

226
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 227

an apt description of some of Bion’s writing and lecturing – he means for us to

question our cherished beliefs without quite stating it that way, for example
when, in one of his Brazilian Lectures (1990b, p.35), he has a cup in his hand,
and says, ‘What would be the interpretation of this cup?’ (Of course, the
audience response is silence!) In a previous paper (Schermer 1999), I
suggested that unconscious processes cannot be described per se, but rather we
‘point to them’ with metaphors and myths, as Freud did with Oedipus. Such
was often Bion’s way.
If he had merely been an astute clinician and synthesizer, Bion’s clinical
conceptualizations alone (see Symington and Symington 1996, for a
thorough discussion of the application of, for example, Bion’s concepts of
attacks on linking, bizarre objects, the use of the Grid, container/contained,
and catastrophic transformation) would have earned him a place as a signifi-
cant follower of Freud and Klein. However, many now consider Bion to be
one of the great innovators in the history of psychoanalysis (cf. Meltzer 1978;
Grotstein 1981; Bléandonu 1994). Since Bion was not a prolific writer and
sired no ‘Bionic’ school of thought, and since his writing is sometimes
suggestive and generative rather than lucid and clarifying, it is legitimate to
ask what earned him his stature as a great psychoanalytic pioneer.
The answer, for me at least, is that Bion had an uncanny ability to return to
the basics and thereby to open up the field to new possibilities. Bion’s
questions are more important than his answers. For him, this volume ought
better be called, not Building on Bion (he might even ask us, who is this Bion?
thus separating the thinker from the thoughts), but, borrowing from one of
his favorite phrases of Milton, Building on ‘the void and formless infinite’. Bion’s
quest for the roots of psychoanalytic knowing made him first and foremost an
epistemologist, one who asks persistently, deeply, with an admixture of
skepticism and faith, ‘What is the nature of knowledge? What is its subject
matter? How do we know what we know? What are the limits of our
knowing?’ Bion correctly perceived the central epistemological problem
posed by psychoanalysis: ‘How can we know the un-conscious, that is how
can we know that which – paradoxically – we do not or cannot know?’ Freud
(1954; 1895) struggled profoundly with this problem early in his career.
Melanie Klein took it for granted that Freud had solved it via the instinct
theory, and her penetrating analyses of pre-verbal and psychotic experience
implied – at least for the initiated – a ready accessibility to the deepest layers.
Bion, both utilizing and reacting to Ms Klein, revived the centrality of the
228 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

problem of unconscious knowing, and tackled it from a different angle than

before.
As for his intellectual credentials for such a task, we know that Bion was
Oxford educated and exceptionally well read, especially in mathematics and
philosophy, which were among his lifelong interests. Cogitations (Bion 1992),
a compilation of Bion’s notes, is laced with references to philosophers,
including, among others, from the ancient Greco-Roman period: Theocritus;
from the Enlightenment: Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Kant; from the late
nineteenth century: Bradley (who also had a great impact on the poet T. S.
Eliot), Pierce (who influenced the psychologist William James), Pritchard;
among the positivists and neo-positivists: Quine, Whitehead, Russell; and an
assorted array of others: Buber, Heisenberg, Niebuhr, Teilhard de Chardin,
Toynbee. In his seminal essay Attention and Interpretation (1970, p.130), Bion
provides a reference to the mathematician, Gottlob Frege, a founder of
modern mathematical logic, and in other places to the mystics Meister
Eckhart (pp.88, 115) and Isaac Luria (p.115). Thus, this remarkable work
moves with fluidity between realms of thought usually considered alien to
one another. His daughter, Nicola Bion, tells us (personal communication,
Bion97 listserv, June 2000) that he frequently read the Hindu spiritual text,
the Mahabarata. Thus, he was interested in both logical rigor and the
mysterious ‘Other’ that is beyond logic. Bion had a thirst for knowing about
knowing, whether from philosophical, scientific, literary, artistic, or esoteric
spiritual sources.
In particular, Bion possessed a great interest in the work of the philoso-
pher Immanuel Kant. Bion’s wife and editor, Francesca Bion (personal com-
munication, June 21 2000) states that Bion had contact while at Oxford with
the Kantian scholar, H. J. Paton, owned several of Paton’s books, and had con-
versations with him. The interaction with Paton and his work may have
served as a stimulus for his interest in Kant.
The Kantian epistemological vertex which Bion chose for his conceptual
underpinning was unique for a tumultuous twentieth century which
questioned everything enduring and requiring faith. It was that of the
‘thing-in-itself,’ an extension and variant of Plato’s ‘ideal forms,’ the objects in
the famous cave analogy, illuminated by a candle, and whose shadows we see
on the wall. For Bion to choose the Kantian premise of an unseen,
non-sensory reality (which according to Sandler 2000 is implicit in Freud
despite his allegiance to the anti-Kantian ‘empiricist’ stance of Helmholtz)
was to go against the prevailing temper of his time. In most of the twentieth
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 229

century, empiricism, in the form of behaviorism, was the prevailing approach

in the social sciences. Beyond that, phenomenology (which emphasizes
experience as such, not an underlying ‘reality’), as incorporated in the study of
perception and interpersonal meanings (Merleau-Ponty 1945) and later in
intersubjective theory (Stolorow, Atwood and Brandchaft 1994), and
structuralism (De George and De George1972) (which does imply pre-given
schema, while not fully committing to a philosophical stance such as idealism)
were significant outlooks. Bion, radical aristocrat that he was, went against
the Zeitgeist and adopted a traditional, even noble, vantage point which in his
own time was iconoclastic. This served to stir up the psychoanalytic establish-
ment and raise a host of questions about the nature of the human mind and the
way in which it is approached in both the psychoanalytic and group contexts.
However, no single epistemological stance, even that of Kant, could fully
satisfy Bion’s requirements. As I will try to show, certain limitations of a
Kantian point of view led Bion to go beyond its confines. As previously
mentioned, he was well read in and utilized the ideas of the ‘logical positivists’
such as Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein and Popper, even though they were
sharply critical of Kant. Bion used their ideas more as a way of clarifying the
psychoanalytic method and, so to speak, emptying the analytic container to
make it accessible to new awareness, than as a philosophical position as such.
The positivists also mirrored Bion’s interest in mathematics, logic and
language, which is manifest in the Grid and the concept of ‘transformations’,
for example. At the other end of the spectrum, Bion used the great mystics –
Eastern and Western – to link the notions of ‘thing-in-itself ’ and inner trans-
formation in a striking way whereby, for example, to know oneself and the
patient is also to change, so much so that the two are virtually inseparable.
In what follows, I hope to suggest some of the roots of Bion’s perspective
in the three vertices of the ‘thing in itself,’ logical positivism, and mysticism.
Next, I will discuss how such understanding applies to a) psychoanalytic
listening; and b) groups. With respect to the latter, many do not realize that
Bion had two related but distinct group theories: that of the basic assump-
tions, put forth in Experiences in Groups, and that of the relationship between
the ‘messiah’ (mystic, genius) and the establishment, developed in Attention and
Interpretation (1970, pp.112–13). I will suggest that Bion’s basic assumption
theory comes into sharper focus when one considers his own epistemological
assumptions. Finally, I will discuss how Bion incorporated, but also went well
beyond, Freud and Klein conceptually, based on an epistemological under-
standing.
230 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

The three epistemic vertices

The Kantian ‘thing in itself ’ or ‘noumenon’
What distinguishes Bion’s theorizing from that of his predecessors is his
explicit use of the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself ’ or ‘noumenon’ as a way of
speaking about unconscious processes. Freud was well-versed in Kantian
thought, as were most students of his day, but, in keeping with the medical
establishment of his time, as put forth by his mentor and laboratory instructor,
Brucke (Amacher 1965), he adopted the stance of the great physicist and
physiologist, Helmholtz, which was in turn based in the empiricist
philosophy of Hume and others. To put it simply, the empiricist position states
that science is interested in observable phenomena, particularly of repeated or
replicable events, such as are seen in a scientific experiment, where, under
certain conditions, certain results follow. Kant held, on the other hand, that
our perception of events is profoundly conditioned by our cognitions, by
certain of our intuited axioms, which he called synthetic a priori propositions,
which could also be roughly translated to mean our convictions about
ultimate reality. Thus, for example, Hume’s repeated observable events or
‘constant conjunctions’ occur within, indeed require, a matrix of time and
3
space, ‘categories’ which Kant held were inherent in our thought processes.
Thus Bion was not merely interested in observable regularities, but in the
‘invariants’ (Bléandonu 1994, p.196) that underlie transformation and change
and which bring us closer to the underlying Platonic forms or Kant’s
noumena.
The ‘thing-in-itself ’ is synonymous in Kant with the ‘noumenon,’ which
Allison (1983, p.350, note 20) defines as ‘the object of a nonsensible4
cognition. Such an object, however, could be either one that cannot be repre-
sented sensibly at all, such as God, or an object that is identical with a sensible
object (phenomenon) but is known in a nonsensible manner (as it is in itself ).’
Bion incorporated both of these types: (a) that which is essentially
unknowable, in his notion of ‘O’, and (b) ‘that which is known as it is in itself ’
he called ‘beta elements’ which are, in a certain respect, derivatives of the
specific non-sensory ‘things-in-themselves’ that affect our subjectivity and
our consciousness. Since the latter conceptualization evolved earlier in Bion’s
thinking than the former, I will discuss the notion of specific, non-sensory
‘things-in-themselves’ first, especially as there is a common confusion about it
which I wish to clear up. It also will be appropriate in that context to discuss
how Bion made use of logical positivist formulations, just as a discussion of
‘O’ necessitates referring to the mystical or religious ‘vertex’.
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 231

BETA ELEMENTS: THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER

Bion’s application of a Kantian formulation of the ‘thing-in-itself ’ began with
his attempt to understand the most primitive mental processes. He noticed
that while some experiences of patients in analysis had the qualities of dreams
and dream-like states, which could be thought about and explored, others
seemed to exist in unmetabolized form that could not be ‘thought about.’ Hal-
lucinations, thought fragments, and ‘bizarre objects’ which result from the
coming together of random elements following a mental catastrophe, are
inaccessible to the ‘thinker.’ They are sensory elements without a cognitive,
subjective, emotional net to contain and utilize them. Bion called them ‘beta
elements’ and differentiated them from ‘alpha elements,’ already-contained
images and representations which could be the subject of thought, elabora-
tion, and discourse. Bion in this way subdivided Freud’s ‘primary process
thinking’ into subcategories, including alpha and beta elements, as well as, in
addition, dreams, myths, and other combinations of alpha elements. In and of
itself, this subclassification of primary process was a major addition to theory
and has had great clinical utility in helping analysts to differentiate between
psychotic and non-psychotic presentations. Hanna Segal (1981) is one who
has had a special interest in this area.
Despite their import in understanding psychotic and borderline process,
there is some confusion about beta elements stemming from Bion’s own dis-
cussions, and partly from Bion’s interpreters (cf. Bléandonu 1994 p.152;
Symington and Symington 1996, pp.59–72). The problem is whether beta
elements are perceptible phenomena or non-sensible ‘noumena’, things-
in-themselves. In places (Bion 1992 p.181), Bion describes them as
‘unassimilated sense impressions,’ such as a twinge of stomach pain or an
hallucinatory figure. Elsewhere, he refers to them as unknowable ‘things-in-
themselves’ (Bion 1970, p.11). This latter depiction suggests that he believed
they were non-sensory noumena.
Since beta elements are experienced in the sensory realm – and who can
deny the sensory power of an hallucination, or of a burst of pain, for example?
– they are not, as Bion implied, things-in-themselves, but rather sensory
phenomena. They are not noumena, as Kant would define this term. Beta
elements do, however, have a ‘thing-like’ quality, that is, they seem to be
outside the influence of our subjectivity and mentation – they merely present
themselves, just as chairs and tables do. In this respect, they are believable
stand-ins for things-in-themselves, and we are easily, perhaps delusionally,
convinced of their ‘reality.’
232 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

As Sandler puts it:

‘I think that it is very clear in Bion’s texts that beta elements are sensory
stimuli – inner and outer, including feelings. The dilemma according to
Bion is that the person feels that he or she has “caught” the beta-elements as
if they were things in themselves and now understands them wholly. The
person feels as if he or she has attained absolute truth, and now “owns”
noumena, knows them.’ (Sandler, personal communication, 23 January
2001)
This convincing quality of beta leads us easily to assume that they are
things-in-themselves, or noumena. Such a belief also arises from a semantic
confusion which is well understood by Allison (1983) with respect to Kant’s
philosophy, namely, that, for Kant, things-in-themselves are not the objects of
our perception, like a chair or a table, but represent that transcendent
otherness which conditions and affects perceptions, but is never known to us.
Thus, while it could be said that beta elements are ‘thoughts without a
thinker,’ (in contradistinction to dreams, which, as Grotstein (2000, pp.1–36)
emphasizes, are the products of very deep cognitions), they are not
‘things-in-themselves’ in the Kantian sense of ‘noumena.’ Indeed,
‘things-in-themselves’ are not ‘things’ or objects at all, but that which we
assert to be the non-sensory ‘actuality’ which is inferred through intuition or
analysis. As I will try to suggest, it is not the sensory beta elements, but the
non-sensory noumena which the psychoanalyst is trying to access, and this
requires, as Bion (Bion 1970, pp.31–33, 41–54) has said, the suspension of
memory and desire. Parenthetically it is precisely the difficulty distinguishing
sense impressions from noumena which haunts the psychotic patient.
Bion did, however, recognize that beta elements are in some way ‘very
close to’ the noumena which condition our sensory experience. Thus, for
example, a twinge of stomach discomfort in the analyst might signal an
important aspect of the transference–countertransference which is not yet
accessible in any other way. A patient’s hallucination of a dead parent, while in
itself delusional, could represent an emotionally powerful, unresolved linkage
or bond between them. The present author likes to think of beta elements as
‘messengers’ from things-in-themselves, albeit in a raw, unmetabolized form.
What Bion called ‘alpha function’ or ‘alphabetization’ provides a mental
container for these messages.
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 233

‘O’: THE ARCHETYPAL UNCONSCIOUS OR UNKNOWABLE OTHERNESS

Partly to address this problem, and partly because of basic changes in his
thinking, Bion introduced an additional symbol to represent noumena. ‘O’ is
the thing-in-itself in the second meaning of Kant: as that which is totally
unknowable as it is in itself, but only ‘known about.’ When Bion discusses ‘O’
(Bion 1970, pp.26, 30), he is referring to a totally ‘other’ which differs in this
way from ‘K’, cognitive knowledge. For example, the analyst might have a ‘K
link’ with the patient as he develops a ‘definitory hypothesis’ about the
patient’s real and fantasied relationship to his parents. However, ‘O’ would be
manifest in the shifting and evolving emotional state of the patient in the
immediacy of the session. ‘O’ could impact upon the analyst, but is never fully
assimilated in cognition. Bion came to believe that these ‘transformations in
O’ were the real substance of psychoanalysis, the ‘tiger’ we might eventually
encounter, so that, while today psychoanalysis is just one of the tiger’s stripes,
‘Ultimately it may meet the Tiger – The Thing Itself – O.’ (Bion 1990a; Eigen
1998, opening quotes.)
Eventually, ‘O’ led Bion to a religious/mystical vertex which, however,
must be carefully distinguished from any particular system and from
mysticism and/or concepts of a higher Self which have supernatural connota-
tions. Grotstein (2000, pp.219–304) has made this vertex as Bion saw it
somewhat more explicit and elaborated it differently from Bion in terms of ‘O’
as a higher seat of awareness that he (Grotstein) calls the ‘ineffable subject.’ O
is consistent with Kant’s understanding of noumena and does not require a
mystical vertex, but mysticism played such a significant role in Bion’s later
thinking, that we will discuss it further after exploring the role of logical
positivism for him.

Modern philosophy of science: Logical positivism

Logical positivism is a modern movement in philosophy whose avowed goal
has been to demonstrate that all meaningful propositions consist of nothing
more than combinations of logic and sense data. It emerged as a coherent
vantage point in early twentieth-century Vienna under the aegis of Moritz
Schlick and others, and led to the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Karl Popper, and Rudolph Carnap,
W.V.O. Quine, and many others.
It is of interest that Bion extensively studied the logical positivists and
their successors and in fact had some personal contact with Bertrand Russell
(Sandler, personal communication, 10 February 2001). He used their
234 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

principles and ideas, and yet never, as far as the present writer can tell,
addressed two of the major agendas of the positivists.
The first of these was their ‘rallying cry’ critique of Kant. The positivists
held that metaphysical concepts, such as ‘the thing-in-itself,’ were neither
logical nor empirical/sensory, hence could be assigned neither a meaning nor
a ‘truth value.’ In particular, they made a devastating criticism of Kant’s notion
of ‘synthetic a priori propositions.’ These are statements which we know to be
true not because they are logically provable or the result of experience, but
because they reflect the nature of our cognitive nets; they must be true because
we can’t conceive of reality otherwise. The problem, of course, is that many
such propositions, like the axioms of Euclidian geometry, have been shown to
be arbitrary statements which could be easily replaced. The positivists
correctly questioned Kant’s implicit absolutism, but in doing so they rejected
the entire notion of noumena, a notion which does not per se require an
assumption of absolute metaphysical knowledge.
The second agenda which Bion seldom if ever discussed is the positivists’
discovery of and attempts to resolve the problem of contradiction and
paradox inherent in what might appear to be ‘airtight’ systems of thought.
The famous paradox of Russell, ‘Is the class of all possible classes which are
not members of themselves a member of itself ?’ (if it is a member of itself,
then it isn’t, and vice-versa!), raised questions about Frege’s attempt to show
that mathematics was derivable from logic. Russell’s resolution of the paradox
by assigning different levels of classes, enabled him to extend Frege’s thinking
to help a symbolic logic that is today a part of the Western mathematico-
scientific heritage. Godel’s incompleteness theorem similarly proved that any
logical system will have demonstrable contradictions. It is curious that Bion
never came to grips with this problem, even though it raises serious questions
about the validity of algebraic systems, which he sought with fervor to
institute in psychoanalysis.
Bion chose to borrow from the positivists that which was useful without
committing to their stance. Like them, he sought a clarity and universality of
concepts. He was fascinated with the idea of logical and mathematical
notation, and in his discussion of ‘transformations’ utilized Frege’s concept of
‘functions’ which includes a constant and a variable (Bion 1990b, p.12).
According to Bion, when the analyst identifies that which is constant in a
session and that which has changed, he can begin to describe the type of
transformation which has occurred in the patient, the analyst, and their inter-
action (Bléandonu 1994, pp.196–202).
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 235

Bion, like the pioneering positivist, Ludwig Wittgenstein, had a preoccu-

pation with the fallacies of language. He believed (Bion 1990b, p.13) that psy-
choanalysis had discovered a new language that would take centuries (!) to
elucidate, and that everyday language merely masked this other level of com-
munication. Like Wittgenstein (1953, 1961), he was acutely aware that
language might take us down false paths and cul-de-sacs. Therefore, like some
of the positivists, he sought to utilize an ‘algebraic notation’ (Bléandonu
1994, pp.160–162) to reduce the impact of language fallacies and illusions
on psychoanalytic work. Thus, for example, human beings have many pre-
conceived notions of what love is, but if we use the unsaturated letter ‘L’
instead of the word ‘love’, then we can use ‘L’ to refer to a generic bond or link,
without pre-judging what that link might be. In this way, we can stay open to
what we might learn, rather than project the preconceptions inherent in our
language into the freshly arising emanations in the consulting room.
The culmination of Bion’s search for a logico-mathematical base for
psychoanalysis was the Grid.

Figure 9.1 Bion’s Grid

Note: ©1970 by Wilfred R. Bion, reproduced by permission of Paterson Marsh Ltd on be-
half of Francesca Bion.
236 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

He put forth the Grid as a way to classify and notate the events of a psychoana-
lytic session. However, the Grid also seems to have a deeper meaning, almost
as if it is a symbol of an essence that Bion is seeking. The clues to this essence
are (a) the organization of the Grid in the manner of the Cartesian system of
coordinates; (b) the ‘psi’ function, denoted by Column II of the Grid, as the
non-truth, which bears a resemblance to ‘resistance/ counter-resistance;’ and
(c) the rows, each in a container/contained relation to the one above and
below it, and representing the most primitive mental processes to the most
abstract. Here is the ‘mind’s eye’ as it were, in a contemporary grid-like and
mathematical format.
The matrix of the Grid represents Bion’s faith in the hypothetico-
deductive system and the logical and mathematical nature of theory
formation. A matrix also suggests infinite extensibility and divisibility of its
categories, and Bion felt he was giving a bird’s-eye view that could be further
elaborated and detailed. For example, he says that each row is infinitely
divisible (Bion 1990b, pp.41–42). This suggests that he eventually conceived
of the Grid not just as a method for recording psychoanalytic sessions, but also
as a way of operationalizing psychoanalytic process in a way consistent with
modern science while retaining the Kantian emphasis on the noumenon and
its cognitive ‘net’ in movement from beta elements on up to algebraic
notation.
With Attention and Interpretation, Bion started out with a discussion of the
scientific model, sensuous and non-sensory aspects of thinking, and the Grid,
but quickly introduced a decidedly mystical element, explicitly referring to
mystics with respect to self-transformation, and to ‘messiah thoughts’ in
connection with the relationship between the genius and the establishment
(Bion 1970, pp.112–114). One question that can be asked is whether the
mysticism which pervaded his thinking thereafter is consistent with Bion’s
previous thinking, or whether it offers an entirely new perspective.

Mysticism
There came a point (perhaps, in real time, more like a ‘line’ of evolution, to use
Bion’s own geometrical terminology) where Bion’s thinking underwent a
shift away from logical and mathematical analysis, towards the opposite end
of the spectrum: mysticism. On various occasions, he acknowledged that his
project of operationalizing psychoanalysis in a scientific notation was
premature and, at best, incomplete (Bléandonu 1994, pp.141–142). Then, in
Attention and Interpretation, he explicitly used a mystical and religious vertex to
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 237

develop his understanding of the listening process and of the group. While
retaining the Kantian noumenon and algebraic notation as starting points, he
redefined the noumenon from a different vertex, namely, the mystical
tradition. He defines O, the ‘thing-in-itself,’ now not so much as reified
entities or beta elements but as ‘the ultimate reality represented by such terms
as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the
thing-in-itself’ (Bion 1970, p.26). He emphasizes the unknowability of O,
giving it a quality of mystery and indescribability, experienced, when
encountered, with terror and awe. K links (knowledge, so central to both
Kant and the postivists) are no longer the issue; one must be and become O, a
process which creates an evolution in both analyst and patient. This is no
longer the Enlightenment philosopher Kant speaking through Bion. It is now
the mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Isaac Luria, to whom Bion refers. It is
even possible to argue, as Grotstein (1997) has hinted, that Bion here echoes
the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1927) in now placing
existence before essence, being before ideas.
Mysticism and philosophical idealism have been historically connected,
beginning with Plato or before. Plato was influenced by the Eleusinian
mystery rites (Kuhn 2001), in particular as regards the duality of mind and
body, and Platonic philosophy much later influenced Christian mystics
(Turner 1911). Idealists and mystics are both interested in ‘essence’, idealism
in the essence of thoughts divested of misleading sensory distortions and con-
notations; and mysticism, with the essence of a soul and of a Higher Being.
The Freud/Klein/British Independent legacy self-consciously avoided
reference to the mystical dimension, partly on account of the agenda to
explain the more complex in terms of the simple; later development as a con-
sequence of the earlier; higher sublimations in terms of the primitive drives.
Suddenly, Bion overturned all this by presenting himself as a mystic. Why?
It would seem that Bion had become aware of the aspect of the infinite,
the spontaneous, the chaotic and the creative aspects of the unconscious. We
can speculate that there were various influences that may have impacted upon
him: Marion Milner’s (1957, 1987) suggestion of a mystical aspect of
creativity; Bion’s own reading of mystical texts; his contacts with psychoana-
lysts in Los Angeles, Brazil, and elsewhere, where the cultural matrix was
shifting towards spirituality; Matte Blanco’s (1975) ideas about the uncon-
scious as infinite sets.
Thus, while never relinquishing the logico-mathematical structure of the
Grid, Bion came to address the dimension of the ‘void and formless infinite’ as
238 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

an energy and a source of change. Unlike Matte-Blanco (1975), who tried to

grasp the infinitude of the unconscious in terms of a multi-valued symmetrical
logic, borrowing heavily from Bertrand Russell, Bion embraced a larger view
in which O is not reducible to logic (K), and is experienced in transformation
rather than cognition.
In so doing, Bion opened the door to psychoanalytic and group dynamic
discussions and explorations that go well beyond Kant, Bion’s own prior for-
mulations, and the province of psychodynamic thinking up to that point. It
wasn’t that he moved into the realm of supernatural phenomena – nowhere in
his writing does he advocate such a position. Rather, he expanded the
capability of the ‘container’ to allow for rich creativity and spontaneity,
infinitude, and deep complexity. In this respect, he was perceiving mystical
and spiritual texts as depictions of infinite containment experiences, and
encouraging the psychoanalytic and group communities to consider spiritu-
ality as a vertex from which to achieve a deeper awareness of the psyche and
the community. Bion thus paved the way for clinicians such as Nina Coltart
(1992), William Meissner (1995), Mark Epstein (1996, 1998), Michael Eigen
(1998) and James Grotstein (2000), all with traditional backgrounds, to write
daringly and in depth about the spiritual dimension of psychoanalysis. In that
respect, he moved from being a philosopher/scientist to a ‘messiah’ who revi-
talized the sacredness of the ‘I–Thou’ relationship of analyst and patient
(Schermer 2001).

The listening process

Bion had a unique view of the psychoanalytic (and by extension, group
leader) listening process. He held that the analyst should listen ‘in the absence
of memory and desire.’5 Many have found this to be a cryptic statement,
and/or one suggesting that the analyst is a latter-day swami. While it does
have a mystical significance, the notion of emptying the mind of interference
is not new to psychoanalysis. In the psychoanalytic literature, there are three
distinct concepts of how to listen to a patient’s associations: hovering
attention (Freud 1913, pp.109–120), empathy (Kohut 1977, pp.249–266),
and Bion’s. A comparison of these notions is both interesting and useful, and
has not been thoroughly discussed, so far as I know.
‘Hovering attention’ was defined by Freud (1913, pp.109–120) as evenly
suspended listening without particular focus and which gives equal notice to
each and every verbal association and non-verbal communication from the
patient, in order to pick up the intrusion of the unconscious into the linear
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 239

surface flow of the ego. Slips of the tongue, pauses, imagery, and so on, which
are ordinarily tuned out in an attempt to understand the surface flow of linear
communication, can then be detected by the analyst. Reik (1948) extended
the scope of hovering attention to the analyst’s own fleeting thoughts,
fantasies, and emotions. These, too, may provide useful data about what is
going on in the patient in terms of how it impacts on the analyst. Reik was
thus one of the first to see that countertransference could be clinically useful,
not merely an interference. Bion’s ‘absence of memory, desire’ appears to
contradict both Freud and Reik. He seems to be saying ‘have no mind,’ which
both Freud and Reik would have considered an impossibility. We will return
to this difference later.
Kohut (1977) and Wolf (1988, pp.20–21) introduced a different
emphasis to the listening process. While he did not contradict Freud, Kohut
implied a particular kind of focus and processing of data geared to the
treatment of narcissistic personality disorder. Like Bion, he was acutely aware
of how analysts could introduce cognitive bias into sessions, thus making
their interpretations ‘experience distant,’ out of reach of the patient. Kohut
advocated ‘empathy’ as the therapeutic mode of listening, and defined it as a
steadfast process of immersing oneself in the patient’s state of mind. Stolorow
(Stolorow, Atwood and Brandchaft 1994) agreed with Kohut ’s
phenomenological orientation as implied by empathic introspection. By
focusing on the patient’s experience, Kohut strove not only to describe the
patient’s inner world more accurately , but also to convey healing factors of
emotional availability and attunedness to the patient, which could help mend
his or her narcissistic wounds (Wolf 1988, pp.94-123).
Hovering attention and empathy seem sufficiently useful ways of hearing
and being present for the patient, so why would Bion suggest a more
demanding and, at first glance, esoteric way of listening? And, indeed, is the
absence of memory and desire really listening, in any sense of the term?
Again, the epistemological underpinnings of these analysts is useful in
grasping their purpose. Freud, at least consciously, was a laboratory-trained
empiricist. He saw the analyst as a neutral, detached observer. Hovering
attention is akin to the process a microbiologist might apply to looking at a
slide. Without prejudging, he waits to see what patterns form in his mind’s
eye. Thus, he may see a spot or a line that is not obvious from the surface
features of the slide preparation. This is a process which is both creative – may
lead to new data and understanding – and sharp – attuning the observer to
subtleties not ordinarily noticed.
240 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

For Bion, such a process was, I think, necessary but not sufficient. For him
the analyst must not only see sharply with the senses, but must seek to grasp
the noumenon, that which is not perceptible by the sense organs. Since the
noumenon is beyond the sensory realm, any sensory or empirical input blinds
the analyst’s intuition of the deep unconscious events unfolding in the
session. To ‘see’ these transformations (‘see’ = recognition of the truth), it is
necessary to use a higher intuitive faculty.
In the work of Kant, one finds references to the intuitive type of knowing.
It would take several books and years of studies fully to elucidate what Kant
was saying in these writings (which is one reason why the positivists so easily
dismiss him as a ‘metaphysician’!). In simple terms, one could think of it as
that which one comes to when one has eliminated one’s preconceptions and a
new formulation emerges. Kant and Bion were in agreement that genuine
knowledge is arrived at through intuition, not through the senses.
It should be remembered that Bion was especially interested in psychotic
processes. Those who work with psychotics know that the real significance of
psychotic communications is only remotely related to what is verbalized. The
present author conducted an initial interview with a patient who presented as
reasonably intact and communicated in a quasi-normal way. Halfway into the
session, he realized that the patient was putting him in a trance, and some
further inquiry revealed that the patient was hallucinating and delusional.
Psychotic mechanisms often present themselves as ‘presences’ rather than
ideas and words as such. The listening attitudes that might be sufficient for
more integrated individuals, such as hovering attention and empathy,
probably do little to access the meanings of events in the psychotic realm.
Bion’s dictum of listening ‘in the absence of memory, desire, and under-
standing’ does, however, present problems. For instance, nowhere does he say
how one accomplishes it. The mind is ordinarily bombarded by sensory and
cognitive input. Should the student study meditation before becoming an
analyst? Does the student utter an incantation to whisk away sensory interfer-
ence? Whereas Kant sought very deliberately to elucidate how the noumenon
could be known, and the limits of how it could be known, Bion did not go
very far to explain how such radical listening could be done. Furthermore, Dr.
Howard Kibel (personal communication, 19 February 2000) raised the inter-
esting question of how one could effectively ‘listen’ to a patient while blotting
out sense messages. Who or what is listening, and to what? We can only
surmise that Bion meant that the analyst does receive sensory input from the
patient, but his mental function temporarily blinds itself while intuiting the
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 241

patient’s O. And certainly, he meant that extraneous sensory and mnemonic

input such as the ringing of a telephone, or the recollection of a business
appointment would be significantly diminished as the analyst applied his full
concentration on the patient’s communication.
That he was aware that accessing O is problematical is evident from his
contending that the analyst does not actually know the noumenon, but becomes
it (Bion 1970, pp.26–27). So we have the idea that what he is talking about is
a state of heightened receptivity as a container, resembling the mother’s reverie
which gives her increased access to what is going on in her infant. This
perhaps brings him somewhat closer to Kohut’s phenomenologically based
empathy. When the analyst is listening to O, he is highly attuned to the
patient’s inner state, but for Bion such attunement serves not so much to reflect
it back to the patient as to intuit something that up until that moment has been
inaccessible to both of them. Bion’s emphasis on becoming O also bears a
resemblance to Heidegger’s philosophy in which existence (being) precedes
essence (noumena), a point which has been made by Grotstein with respect to
Heidegger’s ‘transcendent function’ of ‘becoming one with our aliveness…or
with our very being-ness (our Dasein…)’ Grotstein 2000, p.300). In other
words, it is not so much ‘what we know’ (knowledge) as ‘how we are alive’
(being) which is decisive. In actual practice, hovering attention, empathy, and
the absence of memory, desire, and understanding are three aspects of
maternal reverie, which of course also occurs in the creative process.
It is difficult to reconcile Bion’s notion of listening in the absence of
memory, desire and understanding, whereby the analyst himself undergoes a
transformation in O with the patient, and his agenda of developing a rigorous
scientific schema for psychoanalysis. In transformation, the analyst is no
longer a detached, objective observer, but rather one who is immersed in a
process which he may never understand. The only way that I can presently see
to try to bring the two together is to consider that the in-the-moment trans-
formation of being and the truth value as intuited might somehow later be
reflected upon, and that systematically relating these experiences to
observable data could provide a basis for formulating models and theories and
making predictions at the more ‘surface’ level. This process could be
compared with that of western researchers, such as Herbert Benson (1997),
who study the blood pressure and brain waves of eastern ascetics. Such
findings are useful, but obviously not the essence of mediation. Self-
transformation is what makes psychoanalysis so difficult to convey to
non-initiates, and the fear of an encounter with O is what makes the whole
242 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

process vulnerable to dogmatic slumbers when the wish for certainty steps in
at the point of unknowing and faith.

Bion’s two theories of groups

After tours of duty at Northfield and Tavistock, Bion made a decided shift
away from the practice of group psychotherapy to individual psychoanalysis.
Nevertheless, he continued throughout his career to see the two disciplines as
closely interrelated and referred to groups in his later writings, sometimes
very caustically with an implicit critique of the crustacean resistances of
groups, particularly the psychoanalytic establishment itself, to change. His
skepticism about groups is an aristocratic one, and not unlike Plato’s view that
philosophers (Bion rather referred to ‘geniuses’ and ‘messiahs’) should run the
city-state and are the best group leaders.
The group theory for which Bion is deservedly famous is that of the basic
assumptions: dependency, fight/flight, and pairing (Bion 1974, pp.92–93).
He considered that groups operate as if the members anonymously share
certain beliefs which they then act upon. Furthermore, these assumptions are
of a primitive, psychotic-like character, recapitulating the infant’s relationship
to the mother’s breast (Bion 1959, p.127). Bion insightfully saw that
group-as-a-whole phenomena have their own existence, irreducible to the
psychology of the individuals who compose the group.
Later, in Attention and Interpretation, Bion proposed another vantage point
which supplemented rather than contradicted the earlier one. This theory is
about the relationship between the mystic and the group, or more generally
about the group’s difficulty assimilating genuinely new ideas. He relates this
problem to the pairing assumption, in the sense that the group struggles with
conception and birth and the hope it engenders, along with dread and an
attempt to crush the feared development. Regarding the dynamic of hope
mixed with fear, one is reminded both of Yeats’ (1919) lines about the beast
slouching towards Bethlehem, and T. S. Eliot’s opening lines of The Wasteland,
in which hope, memory, and desire are anticipated with anxiety. The
archetypal instance of the group crushing a new idea and its representative
(then assimilating them in a way that hardly resembles what was originally
and uniquely stated) is, of course, Christ, and Bion suggestively uses the term
‘messiah thoughts’ for the new ideas that come into the group.
In what follows, I will try to show that Bion’s epistemology influenced
both theories, in a way that makes Bion’s differences with other group
theorists more comprehensible.
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 243

The basic assumption states

Bion’s genius first showed itself in relationship to groups. Although, in Expe-
riences in Groups (1959, p.21), he expressed skepticism about the curative
power of groups, it was in fact Bion’s exceptional ability to detach from the
group which positioned him ideally to perceive its dynamics. When given the
challenge of the Northfield experiment to conduct therapy groups of soldiers
hospitalized for war neuroses, Bion manifested two unique abilities. One was
the ability to intuit what Agazarian and Peters (1981) called the ‘invisible
group,’ that is, the noumena of the group-as-a-whole as distinct from the
visible manifestations of the individuals in the room. Bion (1959,
pp.118–119) stated ironically that ‘I attach no intrinsic importance to the
coming together of the group’, implying that the ‘group’ pre-exists as an idea
and that its meeting only provides its manifestation as sense data. The second
was his ability to detach sufficiently from both peer pressure and leadership
countertransference, maintaining what Hinshelwood (1994) has called the
reflective space, to perceive the maneuvers and strategies the group engaged in
to avoid its task. Bion was thus able to establish agendas for group psycholo-
gists for decades to come, especially within the Tavistock and A. K. Rice
traditions: namely, to study how groups and organizations work ‘as a whole’
with respect to their unconscious dynamics, and to interpret and work
through resistances to carrying out the tasks of the group. In part, it may be
that one of the reasons that Bion was able to identify group-as-a-whole
processes was because, in keeping with Kant, he was not reifying the mind as
something with a location ‘in a body’ as Freud and Klein had done. Klein had
said, consistent with Freud’s emphasis on biological drives, ‘The infant is an
intensely embodied person.’ Bion might have said, by contrast, that ‘The
infant is an inchoate thing-in-itself seeking to be contained in a body and in a
group.’
A brief comparison of Bion’s approach with that of his contemporary, S.
H. Foulkes, will suggest how epistemological assumptions affect and shed
light upon group theory. The Tavistock approach sired by Bion and the others
has existed side by side in England (and elsewhere) with the Group Analytic
school of Foulkes for about half a century. (Their respective facilities are
actually within walking distance of each other in London.) Some, like
Malcolm Pines, Earl Hopper and Morris Nitsun have worked extensively
within both approaches. Despite their common focus on group-qua-group
dynamics, the differences between the two vantage points are striking. Pines
(1982), for example, has pointed out the Foulkesian focus on the self and its
244 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

place in the group, giving group analysis an affinity with Kohut’s self
psychology. Foulkes’ school places much more emphasis than Bion on group
development from a leader-centered to a democratically run process. Bion’s
sense of the group is that it is caught in a karmic cycle of regression and pro-
gression. (An excellent recent paper by Rubenfeld (2001) on ‘complexity
theory’ suggests that Bion and Foulkes may each have seen but one part of the
proverbial elephant: groups do evolve, but they don’t evolve in a linear
fashion, rather in unexpected jumps and ‘cascades’.) Nitsun (1996) suggests
that Bion’s approach addresses the group’s aggression and self-destructive
impulses more thoroughly than Foulkes’. All these differences are based
partly in the epistemological premises of the two approaches.
Foulkes was reared in the gestalt psychology school of Wertheimer in
Germany (not to be confused with Fritz Perls’ gestalt therapy.) Gestalt
psychology emphasizes pattern perception and therefore has a link to the then
emerging phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (Smith and Smith 1995). Phe-
nomenology, in keeping with the Aristotelean as opposed to Platonic
tradition, gives epistemic credence to experience as such, while applying
rigorous ‘corrections’ to grasp the flow of experience independently of
implicit assumptions and beliefs. Phenomenology-qua-method emphasizes
the need to ‘bracket’ the cognitive and theoretical biases of the observer in
order to get a ‘pure’ distillation of the experience itself. (De Maré 1972,
p.154, and Foulkes and Anthony 1965, pp.157–185 describe the important
role of phenomenology in Foulkes’ approach.) Although Husserl was
profoundly indebted to Kant, he dealt with the thing-in-itself or noumenon
in an entirely different way from either Kant or the positivists. He assimilated
it into the phenomenological world in ways that continue to interest and
confound philosophers (Smith and Smith, 1995, pp.285–290).
The point here is that the phenomenological and gestalt perspectives tend
to trust and encourage the self and its growth and development more than a
perspective based on ‘the thing-in-itself.’ Carl Rogers (1961, 1992), for
example, was a phenomenologically (and later, existentially) based psycho-
therapist who placed empathy and unconditional regard at the head of the list
of therapist assets. Empathy is helpful in recognizing gestalt configurations
occurring in the patient and the group. However, empathy can interfere with
grasping the ‘thoughts-without-a-thinker’ which come into the group in a
‘psychotic-like’ way (beta elements) and that tend initially to interfere with
group development.
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 245

Bion was never a nihilist, never – even in his most difficult life crises, of
which he had several – a person without hope. However, neither was he an
optimist about the human condition. Both the Kantian and mystical perspec-
tives gave Bion an awareness of the great obstacles in the way of relinquishing
memory and desire in order both to grasp the ‘thing-in-itself ’ and to achieve
the ‘categorical imperative,’ Kant’s version of the golden rule in which one
seeks to behave in such a way as to exemplify how all others should act. (Bion
was never a relativist or an eclectic.) Basic assumption theory was his
testament to the way groups are haunted by ‘thoughts-without-a-thinker’ and
to the powerful resistances in the way of thoughtful, morally concerned
human dialogue and action in groups.

The relationship between the messiah and the establishment

In Attention and Interpretation, Bion proposed a second group theory which,
however, has never been acknowledged as such. In this theory, he ‘zooms in’
on the pairing assumption, and finds within it a paradigmatic relationship
between the individual and the group. Although he never explicitly refers to
the story of Christ, the parallel is obvious. The hope of the group is actualized
in the pair who produce a ‘messiah,’ whose role is to introduce a genuinely
new idea into the group. Hartman and Gibbard (1974, pp.317–324) explored
this aspect of the pairing assumption in terms of ‘mystical fusion,’ ‘deification’
and utopian fantasies. The new idea is then ambivalently received by the
establishment (but of course often eventuates in a new, even more dogmatic
establishment!). The subsequent development of the group is then a
manifestation of the relationship between the new idea, its bearer, and the
establishment, i.e. the group’s traditional values and beliefs, as well as its basic
assumption resistances to change.
The true messiah is, for Bion, the one who is able to exist in the absence of
memory and desire long enough to have the genuinely new awareness. The
establishment wants to avoid the dread and transformation implicit in this
awesome proximity to O. Thus, the group dynamic evolves out of a dialectic
between the noumena and the group’s memory, desire, and understanding,
between the fateful encounter with the ‘O’ther versus the living and partly
living of the Chorus of Eliot’s (1980, p.214) Murder in the Cathedral.
Although Bion tends to place the burden of this transformation on the
genius who is able to receive the new awareness, there is another way to view
such a dialectic which is more consistent with Foulkes’ notion of the group
evolution to a democratic process. It is that the group members are also
246 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

capable of transformation in O. We say that ‘God is in our hearts,’ which

means we each have a touch of divine awareness, of mystical experience, so
that members and the collective may be the bearers of new awareness as much
as the leadership. Part of the group leader’s task is to help the group to
recognize and access these states (cf. Schermer 2001), so that Bion’s view of
‘messiah thoughts’ is not incompatible with Foulkes’ evolution of a
democratic process, in that the group-as-a-whole can develop the capability
to be the bearer of such insights.

Bion’s relationship to Freud and Klein

Explicating Bion’s relationship to Freud and Klein is a task that already has
been undertaken by Meltzer (1978), the Symingtons (1996) and others. Here,
I would like only to make a few comments relevant to the epistemological
vertex.
Bion’s work can be seen both as an extension of the work of Freud and
Klein and a radical revolution in theory and practice. This ‘binocular perspec-
tive’ is not exclusively relevant to Bion’s work. Lacan (1977), for example,
re-cast Freud’s writings in terms of the linguistics of Saussure. At the same
time, he spearheaded the ‘back to Freud’ movement in France in that he tried
to remain true to the most central tenets of the Freudian perspective. Kohut
(1977) claimed a radical revision of Freud, but many of his ideas about
narcissim were in fact richly anticipated by Freud (1914).
Bion was a student and analysand of Melanie Klein. He also lived over
forty years of his life while Freud was alive. He was profoundly influenced by
both, as well as their students at the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
Eventually, he established himself as an independent thinker seeking a
broader view that could encompass both but go well beyond them. With
respect to Freud, Bion seemed more interested in the nature of a psychoana-
lytic session than in the particulars of Freud’s theories. Bion rarely used
Freudian concepts such as drives, repression, or psychic structure as such.
Nevertheless, there are some striking parallels in Bion to Freud.
For example, Freud (1915) early suggested a notion of what he called
‘primary repression.’ These are instinctual contents that are built into the
infant but are never accessible as such. The comparison of the primary
repressed with noumena, O and beta elements, is inevitable. Freud’s emphasis
on dreams and psychoses as realms which infiltrate even ‘normal’ ‘daytime’
experience infuses everything Bion wrote. In Bion’s Grid rows, preconception
and conception, there are shades of Freud’s notions, developed in his
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 247

pre-psychoanalytic work on aphasia (Greenberg 1997) of ‘object presenta-

tions’ and ‘word presentations’. Bion seemed to allow himself to use what he
wanted from Freud and blissfully ignore the rest, a freedom of spirit that has
been pointed out by Hinshelwood (Bléandonu 1994, pp.ix–xii). He was
totally uninterested in Freudian dogma except perhaps as a social
phenomenon. He derived his rigor from the discipline of thought, not from a
point-by-point elaboration of his predecessors.
Paulo Sandler has recently written some important papers and a book
(2000) in which he takes a position contrary to the view that Freud was an
empiricist. He argues that, instead, Freud was steeped in Kantian philosophy
and that this is the basis of his discovery of the unconscious. Certainly, even
the distinction conscious/preconscious/unconscious echoes Kant’s ‘catego-
ries.’ The radical hypothesis of Freud was that most of our mental life is inac-
cessible to our awareness, a view much more consistent with Kant’s idea of the
mind as a filtering ‘net’ than Locke’s notion of mind as a ‘clean slate’. If
Sandler is right, then, in retrospect, Bion did not revise Freud, but rather
brought out what was already implicit in Freud. Bion, in a certain respect, gave
us a new reading of Freud.
Melanie Klein’s ideas had a clear influence on Bion’s early work, although
he later diverged from her, going on his own path, more as regards theory, I
suspect, than practice. Bion’s notion of ‘attacks on linking’ clearly derives
from Klein’s ‘splitting.’ Container/contained is a direct outgrowth of the
notion of projective identification. K-links is an extension of Klein’s
‘epistemophilic instinct.’ PS« D is a different formulation of the
paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions, as oscillating states which persist
throughout life rather than the exclusive province of infantile development.
His focus on the individual patient, moving from group leadership to psycho-
analysis, was probably influenced by Klein. He always held, with Klein, that
countertransference is an interference rather than a useful tool (1990b, p.122)
In effect, Bion’s divergences from Klein are a prime example of his notion of
‘projective’ transformations (Bléandonu 1994, p.190). He took Kleinian
thought up one or two levels of abstraction and, by giving them increased
dimensionality and power, transformed them.
Melanie Klein’s epistemology is obscure because, in principle at least, she
adopted Freud in entirety. However, she was a brilliant thinker in her own
right, and her frequent reference to Freud’s notion of ‘psychic reality’ – an
inner world different from but related to the outer world – is not empirical,
but presumes a life, ‘intensely embodied,’ which is its own universe of
248 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

discourse. She was brought up in the heady intellectual atmosphere of

fin-de-siècle Vienna, and must have been exposed to various philosophical
trends that were developing then, for example, via her exposure to a group of
intellectual friends of her brother, Emanuel (Grosskurth 1986, p.17). Her
tendency to make direct interpretations of unconscious processes to both
children and adults implies that she may have inutuitively felt these processes
to be surprisingly transparent, the unconscious is everywhere, but we
selectively inattend to it! In this respect, she could be regarded as a
‘phenomenologist of the deep,’ i.e., one who made explicit what our
experience is/was like. This also seems to me to represent a feminist and a
maternal perspective about knowing. A study of the philosophical premises
implicit in Klein’s work is much needed.
So we can see that Bion went back well before Freud, to Kant (and well
before that to Plato and to Meister Eckhart and Isaac Luria, the mystics) to try
to take psychoanalysis to a different place. He kept articulating, in effect, ‘it
looks like this (phenomena), but it isn’t quite.’ At one point (1990b, p.131), he
noted that the ancient Greek astronomer, Aristarchus, presciently thought the
earth revolved around the sun, despite the evidence of the senses, but that it
took hundreds of years to develop the telescopes so that Galileo and
Copernicus could prove it. He implied that psychoanalysis accesses events
which we may only begin to understand decades or centuries hence, when we
have the vocabulary and ideas to describe what we are today ‘seeing’ in the
consulting room. Bion echoes, although from a vastly different vertex,
Atwood and Stolorow’s (1993) notion that psychoanalytic theories at present
are not the result of objective science per se but rather intersubjective ‘faces in
a cloud’ which reflect the theoreticians’ own personalities. The debates about
which school of psychoanalysis is correct must have seemed futile to Bion and
more a reflection of the theorist’s narcissism than the search for truth. At the
same time, his broad vision of psychoanalysis is the highest praise one can
give to Freud (and what Freud always said of himself ) – that the founder cou-
rageously opened the door (and we have hardly begun to overcome our fear of
walking inside!)

Summary, conclusions and a dream

What I have tried to suggest is that Bion’s epistemological premises were the
cornerstone of his clinical thinking, theorizing, and world view. He utilized
philosophy in a systematic, coherent way, drawing on a serious interest in it.
This opens him up to the criticism that, like the philosophers, he was
 BUILDING ON ‘O’: BION AND EPISTEMOLOGY 249

speculating on shaky grounds, and that for scientists, it is better to ‘stick with
the facts.’ However, it is my opinion that the most innovative scientists are
philosophers at heart. Certainly this was true of the quantum physicists Mach
and Heisenberg who explicitly wrote about philosophy. As for Einstein, he
possessed the questioning attitude and logical rigor of philosophy, if not the
knowledge of the field. An ur-philosopher, he used one or two pieces of data
to reconceptualize all of physics. Similarly, there were a few ‘selected facts,’
not reams of data, which guided Bion in his reconceptualization of psycho-
analysis.
The most important philosophical underpinning of Bion’s thought is the
Kantian notion of the noumenon, which he linked to the unconscious.
However, he drew on other philosophers to elucidate specific points. It is
interesting to consider whether he used Kant’s philosophy as a ‘model’ for
psychology, something which rankles most philosophers, or whether he was
not just transposing Kantian ideas but rather elucidating them. We need a phi-
losopher to read Bion and give us his or her answer to this question.
Most importantly, Bion firmly held to the position consistent with Kant
that the ‘noumenon,’ the knowledge we are seeking, is ultimately
unknowable. But he is clear that without pursuing the thing-in-itself we are
treading on thin ice. Eventually, he came to believe that unknowability is a
reflection of the infinitude, the spontaneous, the chaotic, and the catastrophic
in the psyche. At that point, he needed the mystics more than the logicians to
articulate his position.

While writing this chapter, I had a dream, which I realized upon awakening
was related to what I was writing. In the dream:
I am at a seaside resort in England with a colleague. The weather is
inclement, and we are walking along a sandy beachfront. A huge riptide
threatenens to engulf the beach and all who are on it. Somehow, everyone is
spared. We go up on a walkway and head towards a wooden cabin at the end
of the beach. The cabin has a porch and there is a bulletin board announcing
lectures. We are going to hear a lecture on the basic assumptions and the
Northfield Experiment by someone who worked there with Bion.
Although the dream could be called an ‘anxiety dream’ which has certain
meanings for me in terms of my ‘personal unconscious,’ it also seems to me to
be an allegory about this chapter. (Not incidentally, Brighton is a seaside town
250 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

in England, and I grew up in Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn, NY, USA – and

Brighton contains the letters B-I-O-N in proper order!) I associated to the
beach something opposite to the stormy weather and the tide, namely
Winnicott’s serene quote from Rabindranath Tagore: ‘On the seashores of
endless worlds, children play.’ Winnicott and Bion were both interested in
the spontaneous emergence of creativity from the deep unconscious. For
Winnicott, although he was quite aware of the relationship between
creativity and destruction, maternal holding and the transitional object, gave
this emergence manageability and joy. For Bion, the encounter with O can be
stormy and dangerous, like a rip tide, a view which is profoundly articulated
by Eigen (1998, pp.61–79). We can see too that O is somehow related to the
primal mother, the ‘O’cean, and of course both Winnicott and Bion were
aware of the connection between the maternal object, the group, and the
unconscious, O.
The lecture in the cabin reminded me of a time some years ago when
Harold Bridger came to Philadelphia to give a talk on the Northfield
Experiment, and, as was characteristic of Bridger’s great civility, gave a
balanced but realistic portrayal of the differences between Foulkes, Bion, and
some of the others who conducted groups there. Here we see the potential for
rational discourse versus the way of a direct encounter with O, the experi-
ence-in-itself. Here, Bion perhaps returns as the ‘O’cean, reminding us about
the ‘void and formless infinite’ that is at the root of our various cogitations.

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Milner, M. (1987) The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men. London: Tavistock.
Nitsun, M. (1996) The Anti-Group. London: Routledge.
Pines, M. (1982) ‘On mirroring in group psychotherapy.’ Group Therapy Monograph No. 9,
New York: Washington Square Institute.
Reik, T. (1948) Listening with the Third Ear. New York: Farrar, Straus & Co.
Rogers, C. R. (1961) On Becoming a Person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Rogers, C. R. (1992) ‘The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality
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Rubenfeld, S. (2001) ‘On complexity theory in group psychotherapy.’ In F. Wright (ed)
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Sandler, P. (2000) Origens da Psicanálise na Obra de Kant, Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora.
Schermer, V. L. (1999) ‘To know a mind: Freud, Oedipus, and epistemology.’ Psychoanalytic
Studies 1, 2, pp.191–210.
Schermer, V. L. (2001) ‘The group psychotherapist as contemporary mystic: A Bionic object
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Segal, H. (1981) ‘A psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of psychosis.’ In Segal, H. The
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Turner, W. (1911) ‘Plato and Platonism.’ Available on the World Wide Web at:
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Endnotes
1. The author would like to thank Paolo Sandler MD for his erudite and detailed com-
ment and critique of a draft of this chapter.
2. The existential playwright, Samuel Beckett, was one of Bion’s early patients, and cer-
tainly A Memoir of the Future, if not some of Bion’s other works, seem to parallel the
‘theater of the absurd’ for which Beckett was known.
3. The logical positivists understood Kant to mean that these propositions and categories
were considered by him to be ‘absolute’ and uncontradictable. Modern physics, of
course, led by Einstein, devastated the categories of space and time as they were under-
stood by Kant and his contemporaries. Some Kantian scholars propose that Kant did
not hold such a rigid position.
4. ‘Non-sensible’ means ‘not described in terms of the perceptions of the senses.’ Thus,
for example, one ‘sees’ a ‘triangle’ that the teacher draws on the blackboard. What one
‘sees’ is a configuration of white marks on a black background which forms a discern-
ible pattern. But to a mathematician, a triangle is defined in terms of logical axioms
which are not ‘visible’ as such. Similarly, a ‘screen memory’ would include sensory im-
ages, but the repressed memory of which it is a derivative is ‘known’ by intuition and
logic, not by sense memories. Thus, the deep unconscious consists of noumena, rather
than phenomena. This was one of Bion’s key points.
5. Bion (1992, p.315) includes ‘understanding’ as an additional obstacle to the listening
process. Describing such interferences, he states ‘These are memory, desire, and under-
standing. All are opacities obstructing “intuition.”’ ‘Memory and desire’ can thus be
understood as a ‘shorthand’ for all mental processes which produce perturbations. This
is remarkably similar to the Zen Buddhist notion of ‘no mind.’
 10

Bion and Foulkes on Empathy

Malcolm Pines

What therapeutic significance was placed on empathy by these two great

pioneers of group analysis?
First: Foulkes’ paper ‘My Philosophy in Psychotherapy’ (1974), written
not long before his death in 1976. (I was present at his death which occurred
while he was taking a group in a very hot summer when he clearly should have
been resting: he died in the service of his art and science.)
Undoubtedly we need to have the capacity for empathy with our fellow
humans. We are involved far more than we usually know; too much so,
perhaps. The idea of this empathy comes from a certain philosophical
attitude, by seeing things in proportion, as part of the human problem in
which we are all continuously involved. With that capacity and with
maturity we can retain a certain necessary detachment, despite all empathy;
these do not need to be in opposition to each other. The good therapist
should, at the same time, be above the situation. Such an attitude will make it
easier to see both the tragedy and the comedy of human existence, see the
absurdity in certain respects. It allows a feeling for a sense of humour; if we
have that, we are not merely better off ourselves, but also in our function as
therapists. In this way our work becomes more interesting, more satisfactory
and more effective for our patients. (Foulkes 1974, p.280)
In an earlier passage in that same paper he writes:
the true therapist has, I believe, a creative function – in a way like an artist, in
a way like a scientist, in a way like an educator… I have sometimes
compared this function with that of a poet, especially in conducting a group.
By this I mean the therapist’s receptiveness, his ability to see a bit better, a bit
deeper, a bit sooner than others, what his patients are really saying, or

254
 BION AND FOULKES ON EMPATHY 255

wanting or fearing; to help them to express this and sometimes, though

rarely, to express it for them. (Foulkes 1974, p.279)
Here Foulkes illustrates what I call the passive feminine aspect of empathy, the
opening of self to other. There is much else in this paper, in which he brings
together his 40 years of experience as a psychoanalyst and group analyst. To
my mind some other passages converge with fundamental aspects of Bion’s
conceptions. ‘I think that the real nature of mind lies in each individual’s need
for communication and reception, in every sense of the term.’ He writes about
language which in each individual is what goes on in his ‘own’ mind, but at
the same time it is a shared property of the group; the individual is forced into
language from the beginning by the surrounding culture. But as well as by the
use of language, individuals communicate without knowing it, through
unconscious processes that are between them, which permeate each
individual, ‘transpersonal processes’. ‘Just as a mind is shared, so is what is
social, not outside; but deep inside the person, as well’ (ibid.).
Clearly we need a deep study of similarities and differences between the
fundamental concepts of Foulkes and of Bion. Hopefully some of these may
be explored in this book.
Now I turn to Bion. Interestingly, there are no entries in the indices for
empathy, so I extended my search to include sympathy and compassion,
which are different but related concepts. I found two very interesting contri-
butions, both included in Cogitations (Bion 1992). On 11 February 1960 Bion
writes on compassion and truth (Bion 1992, p.125):
1. Compassion and Truth are both senses of man.
2. Compassion is a feeling that he needs to express. It is an impulse he must
experience in his feelings for others.
3. Compassion is likewise something that he needs to feel in the attitudes of
others towards him.
4. Truth is something man needs to express; it is something he needs to seek
and to find; it is essential for fulfilment of his curiosity.
5. Truth is something he needs to feel in the attitudes of others towards him.
6. Truth and compassion are also qualities pertaining to the relationship that
the man establishes with people and things.
7. A man may feel he lacks the capacity for love.
8. A man may lack the capacity for love.
256 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

9. Similarly, he may feel he lacks a capacity for truth, either to hear it, or to
seek it, or to find it, or to communicate it, or to desire it.
10. He may in fact lack such a capacity.
11. The lack may be primary or secondary, and may diminish truth or love,
or both.
12. Primary lack is inborn and cannot be remedied; yet some of the conse-
quences may be modified analytically.
13. Secondary lack may be due to fear or hate or envy or love. Even love can
inhibit love.
14. Applying 8. and 10. to the Oedipus Myth, the death of the Sphinx is a
consequence of such lack, as the question posed was not intended to elicit
truth, and consideration for itself could not exist to erect a barrier against
self-destruction. Tiresias may be said to lack compassion less than regard for
truth. Oedipus lacked compassion for himself more than he lacked regard
for truth.
Bion is invoking the essential qualities in human relations of reciprocity and
intersubjectivity. I am moved by this passage, by the counterpoint between
truth and compassion.
Though neither Foulkes nor Bion seems to have read much of each other’s
writings, I believe that Foulkes would have had no problem accepting this
thesis. Incidentally, though we know that Foulkes had read Experiences in
Groups, Sutherland (1985/2000) to whom I shall refer shortly, writes that he
never heard Bion discuss Foulkes in his presence.
Bion writes of the essential presence of sympathy in human experience in
a passage in Cogitations, a paragraph headed ‘Concern for Truth and Life’:
By ‘Concern’ I mean something that has innate feelings of consideration for
the object, of sympathy with it, of value for it. The person who has concern
for truth or for life is impelled to a positive, not merely passive, relationship
with both… Concern for life does not mean only a wish not to kill, though
it does mean that. It means concern for an object precisely because that
object has the quality of being alive… It means being curious about the
qualities that go to make up what we know as life, and to have a desire to
understand them. Finally, concern for life means that a person must have
respect for himself in his qualities as a living object. Lack of concern means
lack of respect for himself, and a fortiori, of others, which is fundamental
and of proportionately grave import for analysis. (Bion 1992 p.247)
 BION AND FOULKES ON EMPATHY 257

These passages in which Bion writes about concern, compassion and

sympathy, can be related to empathy.
So, now to empathy. The Norwegian philosopher Vetlesen (1994) writes:
‘Empathy is anchored in a deep-seated human faculty, one disposing a subject
to develop concern for others (vide Bion, footnote). Hence, empathy is
reduceably other-regarding or -directed; whereas there is such a thing as
self-pity or self-love, there is no self-empathy.1 Vetlesen goes on:
In empathy there is always a thou, never only a me. Empathy sets up, indeed
helps produce and sustain, a relation, the between or zwischen, involving
subjects relating to another; its locus is the interpersonal as distinct from the
intrapersonal. It is by virtue of this faculty that I can put myself in the place
of the other by way of a feeling-into and a feeling-with. (Vetlesen 1994, p.8)
Empathy not only turns on the ability to see, it also requires an ability to listen.
Both seeing and listening mean paying attention to. They are characteristics
of what might generally be called attentiveness. Perception always requires
attentiveness, attentiveness is made possible by receptivity, by the capacity to
view oneself as ‘addressed’ by some situational incident.
In writing about addressing or being addressed I am reminded of the
Russian philosopher Bakhtin’s emphasis on speech communication as being
that which addresses the other or through which one is addressed. In a sense
one is clothed by the attention, perception and words of the other.
I searched through James Grotstein’s Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? (1981)
for any mention of empathy. So far I have found it only in Grotstein’s own
chapter and that by Frances Tustin.
Grotstein writes:
Bion emphasised the importance of the self, of the need for the self to have
an empathic relationship by the self for itself, and believed that there must
also be an object whose empathic containment of the self is of vital
importance for the infant’s welfare. Bion was therefore the first Kleinian to
give metapsychological enfranchisement to the independent importance of
an unempathic (non-containing) external reality. I shall never forget an
interpretation he gave me once in my own analysis which began somewhat
as follows, ‘you are the most important person you are ever likely to meet;
therefore it is of no small importance that you get on well with this
important person’. (Grotstein 1981, p.33)
So here Grotstein is linking containment with empathy, which is an inter-
esting subject to be explored. As this containment is not passive but active,
258 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

responding sensitively and appropriately to the infant’s needs, this is both

empathy and sympathy, the action of being with the other.
To turn to Tustin: frequently she uses the term empathy in describing very
early states of mind and with pathological states of mind present in autism.
She states that Bion has added to her understanding of early infancy by
drawing attention to the mother’s capacity for empathic reflection, for which
she uses the apt term of ‘reverie’. Through reverie the newborn infant is
sheltered in what might be termed the ‘womb’ (Tustin 1981, p.185) of the
mother’s mind just as much as, prior to her physical birth, she was sheltered
within the womb of her body. Tustin uses the concept of ‘flowing-over’ as the
process by which the illusion of ‘primal unity’ is maintained. Tustin distin-
guishes between the ‘softness’ of primal unity and the ‘hardness’ of two-ness if
the loss of the state of primal oneness has been experienced too early, harshly,
suddenly.
Tustin also evokes the empathic process when she describes what she calls
‘ecstasy’. (Tustin 1981, p.191). Ecstasy arises from states of intense
excitement which are beyond the infant’s capacity to bear and process alone.
‘If the mother cannot hold the infant together in these intense states of
excitement and cannot seem to bear the “overflow”, and process it by empathy
and understanding, the infant experiences a precocious sense of “two-ness”
which seems fraught with disaster.’ Then the infant feels adrift and alone and
seeks pathologically to reinstate the sense of oneness. This leads to states of
confusion with the maternal object.
In working with psychotic children Tustin attempts to describe elemental
depths and elemental terrors as parts of everyone’s infantile experiences
through which we are psychologically born through being ‘borne’, that is
carried, by maternal reverie and sympathy.
I raised the question of Bion’s attitude to empathy with my co-editor
Robert Lipgar; his opinion is that ‘Bion was keen on individuation, adaptation
to reality, working towards learning and knowing which could approximate
Truth and Reality and not very impressed with empathy. His interest was in
how we think, how we learn, how we know’.
Again, what now of sympathy? (See Wispe 1986.) The scope of sympathy
must be greater than that of love for the other; it rests on empathy which can
be directed to persons who are not unique to us, not only our loved ones, but
to those whom we do not love. Sympathy is facilitated by the basic faculty of
relating to others, which is empathy. Sympathy has a larger audience than the
 BION AND FOULKES ON EMPATHY 259

narrow circle of family and friends. The chief challenge to sympathy is indif-
ference, which has often been described as being the opposite of love.
Sympathy as an essential feature of social animals, such as mankind, is
receiving much attention in evolutionary psychology, as exemplified by the
study of chimpanzee groups by Franz de Waal. De Waal (1996), one of the
world’s leading primatologists, writes that it is hard to imagine human
morality without the following tendencies and capacities found also in other
species.
Sympathy is shown when animals give care to or provide relief to
distressed or endangered individuals other than progeny: this is called
‘succorance behaviour’. If we, or animals, are vicariously affected by someone
else’s feelings and situation, we are being sympathetic and this behaviour is
shown in the individualised bonding, affection and fellowship of many
mammals and birds. Animals are attached by emotional bonds, exhibit
emotional contagion – they are affected by the emotions of others – and this
leads to caring behaviour, to ‘cognitive altruism’, behaviour in the interests of
others. ‘Despite its fragility and selectivity, the capacity to care for others is a
bedrock of our moral system, which functions to protect and nurture the
caring capacity’ (Sutherland 1985/2000, p.88).
The other biological essentials for the social life of primates and ourselves
are: internalisation of social rules; reciprocity; the capacity for ‘getting along
together’. The capacity to care for others is manifested through empathic
understanding and sympathetic actions.
Both Bion and Foulkes view the process of psychotherapy as ways of
helping persons to discover the truth about themselves. When we look at the
group situation, Bion’s thrust is that the uncovering of primitive regressive
defences, the basic assumptions, releases the individual’s capacity to work
towards higher levels of understanding, understanding-in-the-moment of
truth. The therapist’s task ends with establishing that capacity. His long-time
friend and colleague J. D. Sutherland wrote that Bion was an extremely caring
person, but that he was not sympathetic or empathic towards the person’s
struggle to maintain a sense of safety of the self, the self imperilled by
exposure to the group situation. Sutherland does not make direct comparisons
between the approaches of Bion and Foulkes, but what he does write is:
‘Foulkes was convinced total group interactions had to be used in therapy, and
I believe that Bion, had he done more group therapeutic work, would have
accepted that position, though he would have insisted on what might be
260 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

loosely put, as more rigour and more depth, more attention to the primitive
relationships’. (Sutherland 1985/2000, p.83).
By ‘total group interactions’ I believe that Sutherland is referring to
mirroring, resonance and the other factors which Foulkes described as
group-specific. It is through such processes that persons come more deeply to
recognise the truth about themselves through their work with others, through
being seen, and seeing denied, split-off, unwanted parts of the self in others;
accepting the vision of others about hidden aspects of the self which come to
the fore in the interactions within the group situation.
Deception is usually quickly uncovered (de Waal 1996, p.75). We can see
through the defences of others in ways in which we cannot see within
ourselves. This has a direct impact upon defensive narcissism, the arrogance
that Bion wrote about. Group therapy is in many ways a humbling experience,
recognising how much we are made of common stuff, stuff that we hold in
common with others, basic earthy material. Bion wrote about the importance
of acquiring ‘common sense’, that is all the senses working together to create a
sense of unity and integration of the self. The capacity for detecting cheating
is again a biological given (de Waal 1982, 1996); cooperation in groups, from
primates upwards, necessitates the capacity to detect cheating for otherwise
the cheat would obtain unfair advantage from the labours of others. This form
of detection is more intuitive than empathic; intuition leads to immediate
grasp of the reality of a situation, whereas empathy is a much less immediate
process. Kohut emphasized that prolonged empathic immersion in the
experience of the other is the main tool of psychoanalytic understanding,
which is why the analytic process is so lengthy. If intuition was all that we
needed to understand the other person and to translate understanding into
action, therapy could be almost instantaneous.
As group members begin to recognise the truthful similarities and differ-
ences between themselves and the others, they can begin to appreciate the
complexity of personality, to see what is similar and what is different in the
other person(s). This inevitably counters the primitive defences of splitting
and projection which lead to other persons being perceived as similar to
oneself or totally dissimilar. This occurs particularly in inter-group conflicts
when groups draw together to create a common identity that gives them a
sense of strength and righteousness, which inevitably leads to the other group
being seen as dangerously dissimilar and a threat to security. This is a powerful
force in ethnic, political and religious conflicts, but when persons can
recognise similarities and dissimilarities within their own group, and break
 BION AND FOULKES ON EMPATHY 261

down stereotypes of what they see in other groups, then progress can be made
in reducing inter-group conflict. Both Bion and Foulkes would have wanted
their work to lead in that direction. In the sphere of international tensions the
psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan (1997) has done very interesting work in the
reduction of ethnic tension through group programmes that involve
disputants, such as Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Israelis and Arabs, Russians
and Estonians. My friend and colleague Patrick de Maré (1990) has led the
way in the use of median groups which enable persons to progress towards a
fuller sense of citizenship and an overcoming of primitive prejudices.
I am trying to show how we can make use of the insights of both Bion and
Foulkes to create two vectors which have points of convergence and which
help us to uncover the deeper truths which groups so often try to hide from
themselves. The place of empathy, sympathy, compassion and pity continue to
call for our attention. Human beings are capable of experiencing and acting
upon those feelings; we also are capable of anihilating those feelings with the
result that we become inhumane, arrogant, capable of horrific actions towards
others whom we cease to regard as in any way being of the same common
stuff as ourselves. Bion’s experiences in WWI immersed him in the horrors of
front-line warfare and he never ceased to draw on his experience in his explo-
ration of primitive psychic processes. Foulkes did not undergo such trauma as
he was behind the lines in his post as a telephonist.
I speculate that the differences in their war-time experiences are of signifi-
cance for their contrasting explorations of individuals and groups. Farhad
Dalal (1998) has also suggested that Foulkes had unconsciously to hide from
himself the full impact of his flight from Nazi Germany in 1933 and the
increasing psychic trauma of the increasing persecution of Jews which led to
the Final Solution of the Shoah.

References
Bion W. M. (1992) Cogitations. London: Karnac Books.
Dalal, F. (1998) Taking the Group Seriously. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
de Maré P., Piper R. and Thompson S. (1990) Koinonia. London. Karnac Books.
de Waal, F. (1982) Chimpanzee Politics. Baltimore: John Hoplain’s University Press.
de Waal F. (1996) Good Natured. The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Foulkes S. H. (1974) ‘My philosophy in psychotherapy.’ In Selected Papers. Psychoanalysis and
Group Analysis. London: Karnac Books.
262 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Grotstein J. S. (1981) ‘Wilfred Bion: The Man, the Psychoanalyst, the Mystic. A Perspective
on his Life and Work.’ In J. S. Grotstein (ed) Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? Beverley Hills:
Caesura Press.
Sutherland J. D. (1985/2000) ‘Bion revisited: Group dynamics and group psychotherapy.’ In
M. Pines (ed.) Bion and Group Psychotherapy. London: Routledge, republished. Jessica
Kingsley Publishers.
Tustin F. (1981) ‘Psychological birth and psychological catastrophe.’ In J. S. Grotstein op.cit.
Vetlesen A. J. (1994) Perception, Empathy, and Judgement. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Volkan V. D. (1997) Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New York: Farrar, Strauss
& Siroux.
Wispe L. (1986) ‘The distinction between sympathy and empathy: To call forth a concept,
word is needed.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50, 2, 314–21.

Endnote
1. James Grotstein (1981) would not agree with this as he has written on self-empathy,
and in this I agree with him. Vetlesen does not take account of the world of inner
objects.
 The Contributors

Dennis Brown is a psychoanalyst and group analyst at the Institute of Group Analysis,
London and formerly Consultant Psychotherapist at St. Mary’s Hospital and Medical
School, London. He is co-author of Introduction to Psychotherapy (1979, with Jonathan
Pedder; 1981; 2000, with Anthony Bateman) and co-author of Psyche and Social World
(with Louis Zinkin; published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2000).
James S. Grotstein is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine
and a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and the
Psychoanalytic Center of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of over two hundred
published articles and eight books. His most recently published book is Who Is the Dreamer
Who Dreams the Dream?: A Study of Psychic Presences (Analytic Press, 2000).
Robert Hinshelwood is Professor at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University
of Essex, UK. He was previously Clinical Director at The Cassel Hospital and past Chair
at the Association of Therapeutic Communities. He is also a member of the British
Psychoanalytical Society and a Fellow at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Earl Hopper is a psychoanalyst, group analyst and organizational consultant in private
practice in London, where he is Honorary Tutor at the Tavistock NHS Portman Clinic. He
is also on the Faculty of the Post-Doctoral Program in Group Psychotherapy at Adelphi
University in the USA. He is a Past President of the International Association of Group
Psychotherapy, Past Chairman of the Group of Independent Psychoanalysts of the British
Psychoanalytical Society, and a Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Associa-
tion. His most recently published books are The Social Unconscious: Selected Papers and
Traumatic Experience in the Unconscious Life of Groups (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003).
Robert M. Lipgar, Ph.D., ABPP, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and Clinical
Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at The University of Chicago. He is a Fellow in
the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems and a Life Fellow in the American
Group Psychotherapy Association.
Claudio Neri, M.D., has been deeply involved in group psychotherapy from the
beginning of his career. His meeting with Wilfred R. Bion and contacts with his work
have been of paramount importance for him in the development of personal ideas which
are synthesized in Group (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998). He is also co-editor of
Dreams in Group Psychotherapy: Theory and Technique (with Robi Friedman and Malcolm
Pines; published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001).

263
264 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Malcolm Pines is a Founder Member of the Institute of Group Analysis, London, Past
President of the International Association of Group Psychotherapy and a former
consultant at The Cassel, St George’s and Maudsley Hospitals and the Tavistock Clinic.
His is Past President of the Group-Analytic Society and Editor of the International Library
of Group Analysis, author of Circular Reflections: Selected Papers on Group Analysis and Psycho-
analysis (1998) and co-editor of Dreams in Group Psychotherapy: Theory and Technique (with
Robi Friedman and Claudio Neri, 2001) both published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Paulo Cesar Sandler, M.D., M.Sc (Med), is a psychiatrist (AMB) and a training analyst at
the Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo. He is also Past Director of the
Mental Health Program at the Faculdade de Saúde Pública, Professor at the Instituto de
Psicologia da Universidade de São Paulo where he specializes in the work of Bion and
psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and an Honorary Member of F.A.B. (Brazilian Air Force).
He has translated Bion’s later works, including the first foreign version (Portuguese) of A
Memoir of the Future, Bion in New York and São Paulo, Four Talks with W. R. Bion, Cogitations
(with his wife, Dr Ester Hadassa Sandler) and the short papers as well as a revised edition
of Bion’s four basic books. He has authored papers and books on extensions of Bion’s
theory of alpha-function, links and dreams, including An Introduction to ‘A Memoir of the
Future’ and A Apreensão da Realidade Psíquica (Imago Editura, 1997–2003), a
transdisciplinary work in ten volumes that researches the origins of psychoanalysts and its
scientific foundations.
Matias Sanfuentes is a psychologist and psychotherapist for both individuals and
groups. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies,
University of Essex. He is Full Member of the Associación Chilena de Psicoterapia
Analítica de Grupo and a Member of the Federación Latinoamericana de Psicoterapia
Analítica de Grupo (FLAPAG).
Victor L. Schermer, M.A., C.A.C., C.G.P., is a psychologist and psychoanalytic therapist
in private practice and clinic settings in Philadelphia. He is Director of the Study Group
for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Process and a Clinical Member of the American Group
Psychotherapy Association. He has published several books and numerous articles on
group psychotherapy and other subjects. Since 1975, he has maintained a special interest
in object relations theory, self psychology and, in particular, the work of Bion. He is the
author of Spirit and Psyche (Jessica Kingsley Publishers).
Nuno Torres is a psychologist and Ph.D. student at the Centre for Psychoanalytic
Studies, University of Essex, UK. He has been conducting research on Bion’s concept of
‘group diseases’, applied to addictions, psychosomatics and suicide. He is a member in
training of the International Society for Bonding Psychotherapy and a member of the
Group-Analytic Society (London). In 2001 he co-edited with J. Paulo Ribeiro the book A
Pedra e o Charco (Lisbon: Iman Editions), a biopsychosocial approach to substance abuse in
Portugal.
 basic assumption(s) (ba) 32–4, 40–1, mysterious ‘third’ in theory of

Subject Index 49, 52, 54, 97, 120, 127, 153,

162, 175
groups 14–15
as postmodern thinker 148
group 121 relationship to Freud and Klein
language of 125 246–8
states 243–5 two theories of groups 242–6
abandonment of leadership 36 and work 52, 53 basic assumption states 243–5
absolute truth 10, 73–6 Battle of Kosovo (1389) 171 relationship between messiah
accuracy of communication 105–6 bees (England) vs wolves (Germany) and establishment 245–6
Adam and Eve 16–17 94 writings of
addicts 219 being-ness 241 (1917–19) War Memoirs
adrenal glands 135 beta elements 12, 17, 126 (published 1997) 59, 61,
aesthetics, group 156 thoughts without thinker 2312 62–3, 65, 66, 68, 71, 76,
affiliation 13 binocular vision 12–14, 40, 47, 106 78, 79
vs task 32–3 biogenetic perspective 124 ‘Amiens’ 71, 75–6
Africa 70 Bion, Wilfred ‘Hauser’s conversations
Agazarian and Bion 159–61 binocular vision 12–14 with ‘Carter’ 69–71
agency Chair of Medical Section of British ‘inner dialogue ’ 68–9,
at large 14 Psychological Society 55–6 79–80
and role expectations 17 context: contemporaries and (1940) ‘The war of nerves:
aggregates 213 refinements 151–261 civilian reaction, morale
aggregation 164, 212 and Agazarian 159–61 and prophylaxis’ 91
see also Incohesion: and Dalal 156–9 (1943) ‘Intra-group tensions in
Aggregation/Massification and Foulkes 153–80 therapy’ 91
aggression 222 on empathy 254–61 (1946) ‘The Leaderless Group
AKRI (A.K. Rice Institute) 161 and Nitsun 155–6 Project’ 92
conferences 31 double life 9–12 (1950) ‘The imaginary twin’
aliveness 241 early roots and developments 18, 121
alpha-elements 60 27–150 (1952) ‘Group dynamics: a
alpha function 182–3 on contributions to review’ 11, 85, 90, 111,
reversal of 185 psychoanalysis 59–84 118–31
amoeboid type 211–12, 221 early years 9–25 Bion’s relation with Freud’s
analytical mental experiment 137 experiences treating psychotics group concepts 122–2
analytic third subject 14 18–23 countertransference 126–7
Anlage of cultural products of society journeying in Italy 132–50 psychotic mechanisms and
156 and Klein 120–1 early stages of Oedipus
annihilation, fear of 210–12 particular view of complex 127–8
anthropological psychoanalysis psychoanalysis 138–9, regression 123–5
132–50 142–3 thought 125–6
‘Anthropology’ (Pascali) 138 between past and future 148–9 (1953) ‘Notes on the theory of
anti-alpha function 74 and Trotter 86–112 schizophrenia’ 18, 120
anti-group 155, 173 background ideas of Trotter (1955) ‘Language and the
anxiety and mental growth 103 in Bion’s work 91–112 schizophrenic’ 120, 125
apathy 133 dread of human extinction (1958) ‘Amiens’ 67
Arabs 261 110–11 (1961) Experiences in Groups
archetypal unconscious 233 epistemology and growth 29–58, 96–100, 118,
Arf Arfer (Bion’s name for God) 10 of mind 100–6 119, 141, 199, 229, 243
Argentina 7 focus on group morale ‘Group dynamics’ 50
assimilated elements by the mind 91–2 (1961) Tower of Babel 61
107–8 m is s in g lin k b e twe e n (1962) Elements of
asymmetrical logic 159 Tro t t e r a n d Bion Psycho-Analysis 59, 60, 61
Attachment Theory 169, 175, 182 111–12 (1963) Learning from Experience
attacks on linking 47 p s ych o - s o m at ic a nd 59, 60, 72, 74, 106
authoritarianism 173 somato-psychic (1965) Transformations 59, 60,
parallelisms 106–10 66, 67, 72, 73
baD (basic assumption dependency)
suspension of leadership (1967) Second Thoughts 18–22,
40, 41, 54, 97
group approach 92–5 74, 106, 111
baF/F (basic assumption flight/flight)
theoretical advances in ‘Attacks on linking’ 20
33, 40, 97
Experiences in Groups ‘Commentary’ 21
ba I:A/M see Incohesion:
96–100 ‘Development of schizo-
Aggregation/Massification
war memoirs 59–84 phrenic thought’ 19
baO (oneness) 12, 202
and epistemology 226–53 ‘Dif ferentiation of the
baP (basic assumption pairing) 40, 97
and group mentality 181–97 psychotic from the
Balkans 70, 171

265
266 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

non-psychotic person- Christianity 70, 237 epistemological gauging device 60

alities’ 19 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) epistemology 226–53
‘On arrogance’ 20 102, 175 and growth of mind 100–6
‘On hallucination’ 20 ‘Clays, The’ (Burri) 138 listening process 238–42
‘Theory of thinking’ 20–1, cohesion, theory of (Bion/Turquet; three epistemic vertices 230–8
64 modified Kernberg/Lawrence) Kantian ‘thing in itself ’ or
(1970) Attention and 199–209 ‘noumenon’ 230–3
Interpretation 10, 60, 64, common sense 78 modern philosophy of science:
77, 100, 228, 229, 236, communication 158, 165, 200, 214 logical positivism 233–6
242 accuracy of 105–6 mysticism 236–8
‘The mystic and the group’ patterns of traumatised groups Estonians 261
64 212–17 ethics 173
(1970) The Grid and Caesura 60 compassion 261 Europe 49, 63
(1974) ‘Leadership: the and truth 255–6 European Association for Transcultural
individual and the group’ complexity theory 172 Group Analysis (EATGA)
202 concern for truth and life 256 166–7
(1975, 1977, 1979) A Memoir conformity 133 evolutionary biology 108
of the Future trilogy 62, consciousness, philosophy of 193 exclusiveness 173
68, 70, 71, 74, 78, 90 consensus norms 173 experiences in groups 93
(1975) ‘Threats to identity in containercontained relationship 12, external and internal worlds 171
the large group’ 202 133, 143, 171, 222, 247
(1977) ‘Emotional Turbulence’ containing function of group 36 fairness 173
68 containment 183 false depressive position 72
(1977) Two Papers: The Grid and Copernican revolution 110 Far East 70
Caesura 226 countertransference 126–7 fascism 139
(1979) Bion in New York and coupling phantasies (in group) 140–1 fear of annihilation and traumatic
S$atilde;o Paulo 71 courage 134, 135 experience 210–12, 220–1
(1979) The Dawn of Oblivion Crusades 171 femininity 76
111 crustacean type 211–12, 221 field model 147–8
(1982) The Long Week-End 62, cult of heroes 72 fight–flight
63, 68, 71, 78 cynicism 133 as basic assumption 11, 33, 97, 200
(1985) Italian Seminars 134–5 phantasies (in group) 141
(1990) Brazilian Lectures 227 Dalal and Bion 156–9 figuration 218
(1992) Cogitations 59, 62, 63, democracy 173 forming estimate of attitude of group
72, 74, 228, 255, 256 denial 73–6 towards oneself 43
‘Compassion and Truth’ (c. dependency as basic assumption 11, Forsyte Saga, The 148
1960) 63–4, 255–6 33, 97, 201 Foulkes and Bion 153–81
‘Concern for Truth and Life’ depersonalisation 123–4 foundation matrix 173
256 depressive position 19, 71–3, 144 fourth and fifth basic assumptions
‘Metatheory’ (c. 1960) 64, see also PSD oscillation Incohesion:
66 despatialisation 170 Aggregation/Massification
Bion/Tavistock model 32, 34 Developments of Psycho-analysis (Klein) (I:A/M) 198–225
bizarre objects 19, 187, 231 124 Turquet, Lawrence and Hopper
body boundary disorders 169 dialectics, group 155–6, 173 161–4
bonding 182 Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself ) 75 fractal 218
boundaries and barriers: analogy with discourse, way of conducting 133–5 France 7, 246
body image 168–9 dispersion 144 Freud-Klein Controversies, The (King and
Brazil 7, 237 Distinguished Service Order (DSO) Steiner) 70
Britishness 76 medal 71 Freud, Bion’s relationship to 246–8
British Psychoanalytical Society 121, Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? 257 Freud’s group concepts, Bion’s relation
124, 202, 209, 222, 24 dramatization 136 with 122–2
Group of Independent dread of human extinction 110–11 fundamentalism 173
Psychoanalysts 209, 22 dreams 75, 249–50 furniture of dreams 187
British Psychological Society 55, 56 dynamic administration 164 ‘Future of an Illusion, The’ (Freud)
Building on Bion: Branches (Ettin and 175
Wilke) 31 ecology, group 156
ecstasy 258 gang organizations 15
catastrophic transformation 237 empathy 239 Garden of Eden myth 16
Central America 70 Bion and Foulkes on 254–61 Germany 48, 168, 207, 261
certainty 101 passive feminine aspect 255 gestalt psychology 244
charismatic leaders 219, 221 encapsulation 211 godhead knowledge 16
cheerleaders 220 England 93, 243 Great Britain 7
chosen traumas 170 Enlightenment 228 Greco-Roman period 228
Christ 242, 245 entitlement 173 Greek Cypriots 261
 SUBJECT INDEX 267

Greek myths and traditions 61, 133 here and now 44 Wilfred Bion, July 1997,
gregariousness 10 hetero-criticism 66–71 Turin, Italy 7
and mind 85–117 Higher Being 237 International Congress of
Grid, the 60, 227, 229, 235–6, 237, Holocaust 48 Psychoanalysis
246 homo apertus 73 (1908) 87
[figure] 235 homo clausus 173 (1953) 120
horizontal and vertical axes 60–1 Hopper, Turquet and Lawrence 161–4 International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
group(s) hovering attention 238–9 118, 119, 120, 186
aesthetics 156 human extinction, dread of 110–11 inter-subjective psychoanalysis 147
analysis, values of 173 Human Relations 30, 119, 121 interventions and leadership 34–8
animals 46 hyperbole 66, 73 invisible group 243
basic assumptions 121 hypocrisy 133 theory 160
Bion’s two theories of 242–6 hypothesis building 44 Israelis 261
culture 99 Italy 7
outcome of conflicting interests I:A/M see Incohesion: Bion’s journeying in 132–50
47–51 Aggregation/Massification speculative imagination in 137–8
dialectics 155–6 identification 89 I–Thou relationship 138
diseases 109–10 illusory nature of groups 156
dynamics 47, 128 imposed norms 173 Jews 48, 168, 261
ecology 156 inclusiveness 173 judgements and mindlessness 59–66
experiences in 93 Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 220
identity of individual and individual (I:A/M) 164, 198–225
identity of group 12–14 as fourth basic assumption in Kantian ‘thing in itself ’ or ‘noumenon’
instinct 15 unconscious life of groups 230–3
management and psychological work 209–20 beta elements: thoughts without
34–8 fear of annihilation and thinker 231–2
matrix 165 traumatic experience ‘O’: archetypal unconscious or
mentality 98–9 210–12 unknowable otherness 233
and ‘having a mind’ 181–97 interaction, normation and Klein, Bion’s relationship to 246–8
vs individual needs 99 communication patterns K[nowledge] link 60, 101
pool of anonymous of traumatised groups
212–17 La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Keats) 185
contributions 45–7
personification of Incohesion: Lawrence, Turquet and Hopper 161–4
morale 91–2
Aggregation/Massificatio leaderless group project 92–3
natural 155
n 217–20 leadership 206–7
phantasies 140–1
summary of theory 220–2 abandonment of 36
phenomenology 14
individual charismatic 219
psychology 14, 96
group identity of, and individual and interventions 34–8
and psychosis 190–2
identity of group 12–14 suspension of, group approach 92–5
relationship to, as intrinsic to full life
needs vs group mentality 99 learned response patterns 53
of individual 42–5
relationship to group as intrinsic to learning from experience 42
total group interactions 259–60
full life of 42–5 hatred of 103
Group Analysis 157
instinctiveness 125 and intellectual development vs
group-analytic organisational
Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War moral outlook 102
consultancy 164
(Trotter) 88, 90, 91, 111 Leicester Conferences (group relations
Group Analytic Society 163
instinctual drives 53 workshops) 31, 161, 162
Group and the Unconscious, The (Anzieu)
Institute of Group Analysis, London libido 89
169
163, 222 lie question 100–1
group-as-a-whole 91
Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London linking, attacks on 47
perspective 159
222 links 60
Group Cohesion (Kellerman) 198
integration 144 listening process 238–42
groupishness 125
intellectual development and learning logical positivism 229, 233–6
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
from experience vs moral lone wolves 220
Ego (Freud) 44, 175, 206
outlook 102 Los Angeles 9, 237
group role perspective 160
intellectual impairment inherent to L[ove] link 60
Grubb Institute, UK 161
guidelines and technique 38–42 group functioning 101–2
Maastricht workshop 167
guilt 48 interaction, normation and
machinery of intercommunication 46,
communication patterns of
189
hallucinations 231 traumatised groups 212–17
Mahabarata 228
Handley Page bombers 76 intergroup dynamics 175
masses 213–14
H[ate] link 60 internalisation of social rules 259
massification 164, 212, 214–16
hatred of learning 47 International Centennial Conference
see also Incohesion:
helplessness 211 on the Work and Life of
Aggregation/Massification
herd instinct 88, 90, 96
268 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

maternal love, failure of 103 ‘O’ truth 72, 74, 78, 237, 241, 250 psychosis
matrix, group 165 archetypal unconscious or as attack to thinking apparatus 103
meaning 182–5 unknowable otherness 233 groups and 190–2
meaninglessness 187 building on 226–53 psycho-somatic and somato-psychic
‘Measures of the Earth’ (Pascali) 18 observing self-system 160 parallelisms 106–10
Mediterranean 133 Oedipal triangulation 15 Psychotherapy Through the Group
member role perspective 159 Oedipus complex 61, 119, 174 (Whitaker and Lieberman) 31
me–ness 12, 163, 207 psychotic mechanisms and early psychotic mechanisms and early stages
mental activity in groups 32–6 stages of 127–8 of Oedipus complex 127–8
mental digestion 108 and Sphinx 16–17, 127, 256 psychotics, Bion’s experiences treating
mental experiments 136 omnipotence 17 18–23
mental instability 104 omniscience 17
messiah oneness (baO) 12, 202, 207 Q-methodology 55
and establishment, relationship Oxford University 228 qualia 183
between 245–6
thoughts 242 pairing as basic assumption 11, 33, rational group 139
meta-psychological construct 53–5 97, 200 rational leadership 206
metapsychology 154 paranoid-schizoid position 19, 144 receptivity 241
metapsychosociology, towards 153–81 see also PSD oscillation reciprocity 259
MI (membership individual) 202 Paris Society of Psychosomatic regimental nomination experiment 93
Middle East 70, 171 Medicine 202 regression 119, 123–5
mind person perspective 159 relationship to group as intrinsic to full
and gregariousness 85–117 personification of Incohesion: life of individual 42–5
group mentality and ‘having a mind’ Aggregation/Massification religious dialogue 173
181–97 217–20 religious phantasies (in group) 140
growth of, and epistemology 100–6 phantasies, group 140–1 representations 184
mindblindness 193 pity 261 reserved space 15
mindlessness 73 Politics (Aristotle) 42 reversal of alpha-function 185
mirroring 36, 165 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) 65 reversible perspectives 13
modern philosophy of science: logical platform experiment 137 role suction 206
positivism 233–6 primacy as method 44 Rome seminars 145, 146–7
morale primary process Rorschach ink blot tests 168
boosters 220 logic 170 Russians 261
group 91–2 Socratic dialogue 226
primary repression 246 Sack of Jerusalem (70 AD) 171
as therapeutic agent 92
primary task 35 SAVI (system for analysing verbal
moralism 173
primitive mentality and work group interaction) 160
moral outlook vs intellectual
mentality 139–42 schizophrenic thinking 19, 128
development and learning from
pro-group 155, 173 schizophrenics, psychoanalytic work
experience 102
projective identification 12, 66–71, with 182
mother-infant dyad, rebalancing of
126, 127, 128, 143 Scottish Command, British Army 10
social even in 175
in groups 17, 46 second thoughts 71
Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot) 245
projective transformations 247 secondary belonging groups 168
‘My Philosophy in Psychotherapy’
Prometheus 16 secondary process logic 170
(Foulkes) 254
proto-mental phenomena: secondary splitting 209
mysticism 229, 236–8
meta-psychological construct self-criticism 66–71
narcissism and socialism 13 53–5 self-preservation as basic instinct 97
nationalism 139, 173 proto-mental states 12, 109 sense-making 44
natural groups 155 proto-mental system 106 sense of truth 65, 72, 101
Nazis 48, 261 PSD (paranoid-schizoid/depressive sex as basic instinct 97
neuroscience, new 193–4 position) oscillation 77, 133, sexual knowledge 16–17
New Directions in Psycho-analysis (Klein) 144–5, 201 Shoah 261
119, 120 illustration of 145–6 sibling family 15
new neuroscience 193–4 Psyche and the Social World, The (Brown Sicily 133
new reality principle 192–3 and Zinkin) 168 singleton state 202
Nitsun and Bion 155–6 psychic envelopes 168 small group work 185
normation, interaction and psychoanalysis social construction 166, 175
communication patterns of Bion’s particular view of 138–9, social psychology 175
traumatised groups 212–17 142–3 social reality 69
Northfield Hospital 11, 64, 91, 242 as truth-verifying process 142 Social Unconscious 170
experiments 92–3, 243, 249, 250 psychoanalytic anthropology 132–50 sophisticated group 41
Rehabilitation Wing 92 psychoanalytic processes 172 sophisticated work group: higher level
noumenon 230–3 psychological work and group of functioning 51–3
nutrition as basic instinct 97 management 34–8 South America 70
 SUBJECT INDEX 269

space cadets 220 unassimilated elements by the mind

speculative imagination 133 107
in Italy 137–8 unassimilated sense impressions 231
scientific aspect of 136–7 uncertainty principle 101
Sphinx and Oedipus 16–17, 127 unknowable otherness 233
splitting 17, 65, 73–6, 128 unconscious life of groups and
staff consultation as conservation 165 group-like social systems,
stereotype subgroups vs functional fourth basic assumption in
subgroups 160 198–225
structural relationship of individuals United States 7, 250
and groups 172 universalism 173
subjugating third subject 14 University College Hospital 87, 89
succorance behaviour 259 unknown, the 77–80
suggestion 88, 99 unprocessed anxiety 17
suspension of leadership group
approach 92–5 valency 40, 201
symbol formation 122 as factor of group cohesion 97
symbolic leadership 206 values of group analysis 173
symmetrical logic 159 vertices 22
sympathy 258–9, 261 violence of emotions 66, 73
Viva Zapata 220
T (training) group 161 voice of the herd 98–9
taker of groups 37, 42 void and formless infinite 237
task
vs affiliation 32–3 War Office Selection Boards (WOSB)
takes a task to make a group 30–2 93–4
Tavistock Clinic 30, 31, 34, 39, 40, Wasteland, The (Eliot) 242
119, 121, 242, 243 we-ness 208
experiences (1948–51) 93 Wertheimer, Germany, gestalt
Tavistock Institute of Human psychology school 244
Relationships 161 wolves (Germany) vs bees (England)
technique and guidelines 38–42 94
Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 220 work group 121
therapeutic community movement 92 and ba group 52
thing in itself 229, 230–3 mentality 54
thirdness models 14–15 and primitive mentality
‘32 sq. m of Sea’ (Pascali) 138 139–42
thought(s) 125–6 ‘World 3’ (Popper) 146
without thinker 21, 133, 146–8 World War I 8, 10, 49, 91, 93. 94,
three-person psychology 174 167
time collapse 170 World War II 10, 30, 48, 49, 71, 118,
total group interactions 259–60 139
Totem and Taboo (Freud) 175, 206
Tower of Babel myth 16
transcendent function 241
transcultural work 166–8, 175
transformations 229
transparency 35
transpersonal communication 175
transpersonal processes 255
traumatic experience 210–12
traumatised groups, interaction,
normation and communication
patterns of 212–17
triangulation 174
Trotter, Wilfred 87–9
and Bion 89–112
truth and compassion 255–6
truth-verifying process, psychoanalysis
as 142
Turin, Italy 7
Turing test 193
Turkish Cypriots 261
Turquet, Lawrence and Hopper 161–4
 Bottomley, H. 73, 83 Durkin, J.E. 156, 177

Author Index Bowlby, J. 182, 209

Bracher, K. 63, 81 Eckhart, J. 228, 237, 248
Bradley, A.C. 228 Edelson, M. 57
Bramwell, M. 87 Eigen, M. 233, 238, 250, 251
Brandchaft, B. 229, 239, 252 Einstein, A. 136–7, 249, 253
Abelin, E.L. 15, 22 Brando, M. 220 Eisold, K. 36, 56, 58
Abraham, G. 226 Bråten, S. 15, 23 Eksteins, M. 81
Agazarian, Y.M. 156, 159–61, 173, Bremner, J. 196 Elias, N. 157, 158, 175, 177, 218,
175, 176, 243, 250 Bridger, H. 165, 250 223
Aitches (army officer) 66 Britton, R. 214, 223 Eliot, T.S. 83, 228, 242, 245, 251
Alexander, F. 207, 223 Brooke, R. 63 Elliott, B. 169, 178
Allison, H.E. 230, 232, 250 Brown, D. 11, 13, 14, 153–80, 205, Epstein, M. 238, 251
Alvarez, A. 193, 194 209, 223, 263 Erikson, E. 207, 215, 223
Amacher, P. 230, 250 Brown, S. 55 Ettin, 31
Amaral Diàs, C. 100, 112 Brucke 230 Ezriel, H. 32, 40, 56
Anscome, G.E.M. 253 Buber, M. 228
Anthony, E.J. 157, 178, 209, 244, Bullock, A. 63, 81 Fairbairn, W.R.D. 18, 23, 24, 158,
251 Burkitt, I. 158, 177 204, 209
Anzieu, D. 156, 168, 169, 176, 206, Burland, J.A. 22 Farr, R. 195
223 Burri, A. 138, 139 Ferenczi, S. 115, 136, 149
Aristarchus 248 Bychowski, G. 207, 223 Fest, J. 63, 81
Aristotle 42, 244 Byrbe, R. 196 Fisher, S. 168, 178
Atwood, G. 229, 239, 248, 250, 252 Flügel, J.C. 113, 116
Campbell, D. 166, 177 Fonagy, P. 192, 195
Bach, S. 22 Carnap, R. 233 Foulkes, M. 11, 13, 14, 41
Bachelard, G. 78, 80 Carson, N.M. 56, 57 Foulkes, S.H. 93, 131, 147, 150,
Bacon, F. 78 Cavalletti, A. 136, 149 153–9, 165, 166, 167, 170–3,
Bagby, R.M. 176, 179 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. 206, 219, 223 176, 178, 204, 205, 218, 222,
Bain, A. 12, 23, 57, 58, 163, 178, Cheshire, N. 87, 88, 113 223, 243–6, 250, 251, 254–6,
199, 208, 225 Christov Bagargiev, C. 138, 149 259–61
Bakhtin, M. 257 Churchill, W.S. 63 Frege, G. 228, 234
Balfour, F.H.G. 57 Clark, A. 102, 113 Freine, Major de 66, 67, 68
Balint, M. 209, 212, 223 Cleveland, S.E. 168, 178 French, J.R.P. 113, 116
Bargate (army officer) 66 Clifford (army officer) 66, 67, 69, 73 Freud, S. 8, 10, 16, 17, 21–4, 29, 44,
Barham, Admiral Lord 24 Cohn, H.W. 157, 173, 177 52, 55, 60, 61, 63–5, 67–9,
Baron-Cohen, S. 193, 194 Colman, A.D. 56, 57 72, 75, 78, 81–4, 87–90, 96,
Bateson, G. 156, 176 Coltart, N. 210, 223, 238, 251 102, 103, 106, 110, 113, 115,
Baumann Z. 148, 149 Cook (army officer) 69 116, 122–3, 135, 150, 154,
Beckett, S. 253 Cooper, L. 32, 34, 36, 56 157, 170, 175, 176, 178, 189,
Bednar, R. 198, 223 Copernicus, N. 248 192, 194, 197, 199, 207, 223,
Bennis, W.G . 161, 176 Corrao, F. 132, 133, 149 227–31, 237–9, 243, 246–8,
Benson, H. 241, 250 Correale, A. 147 251
Berg, D.N. 57 Cutting, J. 195 Friedman, M. 113
Berke, J. 223 Cytrynbaum, S. 57 Frith, C. 193, 195
Berkeley, G. 228
Bexton, W.H. 57 Dalal, F. 13, 23, 154–61, 170, 173, Gabriel, Z. 112
Bianchedi, E.T. 109, 112 175, 177, 261 Gaburri, E. 147, 150
Bion, F. 63, 79, 80, 81, 83, 89, 90, Damasio, A. 194, 195, 196 Gaddini, E. 215, 223
111, 112, 235 Darwin, C. 88, 106, 110., 113 Galilei, G. 136, 248
Bion, N. 228 Da Silva, G. 195, 197 Gantt, S.P. 156, 159–61, 176
Bléndonu, G. 22, 24, 30, 55, 56, 89, Dazzi, N. 146, 149 Gargani, A. 142, 150
90, 100, 113, 115, 116, 119, De George, F. 229, 251 Gelder, M.H. 56
121, 124, 127, 129, 227, 230, De George, R. 229, 251 George V, King 87
231, 234–6, 247 de Maré P. 154, 174, 177, 209, 220, Gfaller, G.R. 218, 223
Biran, H. 12 223, 244, 251, 261 Gibbard, J.S. 57, 176, 245, 252
Blackwell, D. 156, 165, 176, 177 Dennett, D. 194, 195 Gibbons, G.S. 178, 179
Bleger, J. 195, 197 Descartes, R. 78, 228 Gillespie, W. 87, 113
Bleuler, E. 193, 195 Desilet, G. 147, 149 Glaister, N. 89
Bond, B. 81 de Waal, F. 259–61 Glasser, M. 219, 224
Bonnard, A. 88–9, 113 de Zulueta, F. 220, 223 Glover, J. 88, 113
Borges, J.L. 22, 24 Diamond, N. 157, 173, 177 Goethe, J.W. von 82–3
Boris, H.N. 90, 113 Di Paola, F. 137, 149 Gomez, L. 106, 114
Borne, L. 135 Dirac, P.A.M. 62 Gomnaes, I.L. 23

270
 AUTHOR INDEX 271

Gould, G. 8 Keats, J. 185 Mead, G.H. 158, 159, 179

Gould, L.J. 12, 23, 57, 58, 163, 178, Kellerman, H. 198, 224 Mehta, L. 101, 114
199, 208, 225 Kernberg, O. 199, 206–7, 209, 222, Meissner, W.W. 238, 252
Graves, R. 63 224 Meltzer, D. 57, 106, 114, 185, 193,
Greenberg, V.D. 247, 251 Khaleelee, O. 204, 224 196, 227, 246, 252
Grinberg, L. 23, 24, 57, 100, 114 Kibel, H. 240 Menzies, I.E.P. 162, 179
Grosskurth, P. 248, 251 Kierkegaard, S. 102 Menzies-Lyth, I. 103, 114, 206, 225
Grotstein, J.S. 9–24, 57, 100, 103, King, P. 70, 81, 209 Merleau-Ponty, M. 229, 252
114, 225, 227, 232, 233, 237, Klein, E. 248 Metzinger, T. 196
238, 241, 251, 257, 262, 263 Klein, G.S. 163, 178 Miller, E. 124, 125, 129, 130, 186,
Guntrip, H. 204, 208 Klein, M. 8, 9–14, 16–8, 22, 24, 40, 196, 204, 224
Gustafson, J.P. 32, 34, 36, 56 55, 60–2, 64–9, 73, 77, 78, Miller, J. 106, 114
81–6, 100, 106, 114, 115, Milner, M. 237, 252
Hadfield, J.A. 89, 114, 116 119–22, 124, 127–30, 143, Milton, J. 9, 227
Halliday, J.L. 109, 114, 116 144, 162, 164, 167, 183, 186, Mitchell, S. 147, 150
Harrison, T. 11, 23, 89, 92, 93, 114, 193–6, 199, 204, 208, 209, Mitrani, J. 192, 196
115, 116 227, 229, 243, 246–8, 257 Money-Kyrle, R. 22, 114, 186, 195,
Hartman, J.J. 176, 178, 179, 245, 252 Klein, R. 212, 225, 237 196
Harwood, I. 172, 178 Kohut, H. 204, 207, 212, 215, 225, Monroe-Blum, H. 225
Hautmann, G. 144, 145, 150 238, 239, 241, 244, 246, 252, Montgomery, Field Marshall see Law,
Heidegger, M. 237, 241, 252 260 B.
Heimann, P. 22, 82, 114, 124, 130, Kothari, M. 101, 114 Morris, C. 196, 197
186, 195 Kreeger, L. 179, 209, 224 Moscovici, S. 195
Heisenberg, W.K. 228, 240 Kuhn, A.B. 237, 252 Munroe-Blum, H. 198, 225
Helmholtz, H. von 228, 230 Myers, F. 87
Hinshelwood, R.D. 12, 86, 92, 93, Lacau, J. 23, 24, 246, 252
105, 112, 114, 116, 126, 127, La Ruelle, M. de 80 Nagel, T. 194, 196
129, 130, 181–97, 243, 252, Law, B. 63, 82 Nelson, H. 24
263 Lawrence, W.G. 12, 13, 23, 57, 58, Neri, C. 14, 132–50, 263
Hitler, A. 48, 63 154, 161–4, 175, 178, 199, Niebuhr, B.G. 228
Hobson, P. 193, 195 207–9, 218, 225 Nissim Momigliano, L. 143, 150
Homfray (army officer) 66, 69 Lax, R.F. 22 Nitsun, M. 154, 155–6, 161, 165,
Honnuth, A. 174, 178 Lear, J. 189 173, 175, 179, 243, 244, 252
Hood, V.G. 57 Lee, S.A. 57
Hopper, E. 12, 58, 154, 156, 161–4, Le Roy, J. 167, 178 Oakley, C. 224
166, 169, 175, 178, 198–225, Lewin, K. 114, 116, 147, 150, 160 Ogden, T.H. 14, 23, 172, 179
243, 263 Lichtenberg, J. 13, 23 O’Shaughnessy, E. 191, 196
Hoxter, S. 196 Lieberman, M.A. 31, 32, 57, 160, Osborne, E. 23
Hugg, T.W. 56, 57 180, 203, 225 Ovid 9
Hume, D. 60, 62, 78, 102, 116, 209, Lipgar, R.M. 12, 13, 14, 29–58, 80, Owen, W. 167
228, 230 92, 112, 129, 258, 263
Humphreys, N. 194, 195 Lippitt, R. 114, 116 Papineau, D. 194, 196
Husserl, E. 244 Lloyd-Morgan, C. 194, 196 Parker, J.D.A. 176, 179
Hyman, P. 196 Locke, J. 60, 78, 247 Pascali, P. 138, 139
Lubbe, T. 195 Paton, H.J. 228
Isaacs, S. 82, 124, 130 Luria, I. 228, 237, 248 Payne, S. 114
Lussana, P. 143, 150 Pearson, K. 88, 114
James, D.C. 166, 178 Lyell, C. 111 Perls, F. 244
James, W. 87, 228 Lyth, O. 64, 82, 89, 114 Peters, R. 159, 176, 243, 250
Jaques, E. 103, 114, 131, 162, 178, Pierce, 228
190, 195 McCleary, L. 198, 225 Pines, M. 20, 30, 37, 42, 57, 89, 112,
Jaynes, J. 16, 23 MacCurdy, J.T. 88, 113 115, 118, 130, 164, 172,
Jones, E. 87, 88, 114, 116 McDougall, 52, 102 177–9, 195, 209, 214, 223–5,
Joyce, J. 137 Mach, E. 249 243, 252, 254–62, 264
Jung, C. 24 Mahler 15 Piper, R. 174, 261
Jünger, E. 63 Main, T. 92 Plato 84, 146, 228, 237, 242, 244,
Malan, D.H. 32, 57 248
Kaës, R. 167, 178, 191–3, 195 Mancia, M. 109, 114 Poincaré, J.H. 62, 137
Kanner, L. 193, 195 Mann, R.D. 176, 178, 179, 209, 252 Popper, K. 146, 150, 229, 233
Kant, I. 8, 20, 60, 62, 65, 75, 78, 83, Marrone, M. 169, 178 Premack, D. 194, 196
84, 228–34, 236–8, 240, 243, Marziali, E. 198, 225 Pritchard, C. 228
245, 247–9, 253 Mason, A. 144, 150 Proner, K. 109, 115
Kaplan-Solms, K. 194, 196 Matte-Blanco, I. 24, 155, 158–60, Puget, J. 171, 179
Kaul, T. 198, 223 170, 172, 178, 237, 238, 252
272 BUILDING ON BION: ROOTS

Quine, W.V.O. 228, 233 Stephenson, W. 8, 55 Wolf, E.S. 207, 212, 215, 225, 239,
Stern, D. 196, 197 253
Rance, C. 165, 179 Stock-Whitaker, D. 203, 225 Woodruff, G. 194, 196
Rayner, E. 158, 172, 179 Stolorow, G. 250 Wordsworth, W. 62
Reale, G. 142, 150 Stolorow, R.D. 229, 239, 248, 252 Wright, F. 148, 150, 252
Redl, F. 206, 207, 225 Stone, W.N. 54, 57, 58, 211, 225
Reik, T. 239, 252 Strachey, L. 87, 115, 251 Yalom, I.D. 32, 35, 36, 44, 54, 57,
Rhees, R. 253 Sutherland, J.D. 30, 42, 57, 95, 106, 201, 225
Ribeiro, L.S. 112 115, 120, 130, 256, 259, 260, Yeats, W.B. 132, 134, 150, 242, 253
Rice, A.K. 31, 57, 243 262 Young, A.J. 169, 177
Rickman, J. 9, 30, 64, 85, 86, 89, 91, Symington, J. 23, 24, 227, 231, 246,
92, 95, 113, 115, 116, 117, 252 Zinkin, L. 158, 168, 176, 177, 178,
131, 174, 179, 199, 209 Symington, N. 23, 24, 227, 231, 246, 180
Rifkind, G. 164, 179 252 Zweig, A. 72
Rioch, M.J. 57
Riviere, J. 82 Tabak de Bianchedi, E. 23, 24, 57
Roberts, J.M. 81, 209, 225 Tagore, R. 250
Rogers, C.R. 244, 252 Talamo, P.B. 60, 63, 80, 82, 140, 144,
Rosen, I. 224 145, 149, 150
Rosenfeld, H. 18, 126, 130 Target, M. 192, 195
Rouchy, J.C. 168, 179 Taylor, A.J.P. 82
Rubenfeld, S. 191, 196, 244, 252 Taylor, G.J. 176, 179
Russell, B. 62, 228, 229, 233, 234, Teilhard de Chardin, P. 228
238 Thelen, H.A. 57
Rutan, J.S. 54, 57, 58, 211, 225 Theocritus 228
Thoma, H. 87, 88, 113
Sandler, P. 10, 59–84, 228, 232, 233, Thompson, S. 174, 261
247, 252, 253, 264 Thorner, H.A. 72, 82
Sanfuentes, M. 11, 118–31, 186, 264 Torres, N. 10, 85–117, 264
Saravay, S.M. 115, 117 Toynbee, A. 228
Sassoon, S. 63 Trist, E. 92, 94, 115, 116, 119, 121,
Saussure, F. de 246 130
Scharff, D. 218, 225 Trotter, W.B.L. 8, 10, 86, 87–112,
Scharff, J. 218, 225 115, 116
Scheidlinger, S. 120, 122, 130, 207, Turing, A. 193, 196, 197
225 Turner, W. 237, 253
Schermer, V.L. 12, 124, 130, 195, Turquet, P. 12, 57, 58, 154, 156,
212, 225, 226–53, 264 161–4, 169, 175, 179,
Schilder, P. 168, 179 199–209, 222, 225
Schlapobersky, J. 174, 179 Tustin, F. 193, 196, 211, 225, 257,
Schlick, M. 233 258, 262
Schore, A.N. 176, 179
Scott, W.C.M. 168, 179 Vetlesen, A.J. 257, 262
Segal, H. 18, 126, 130, 196, 197, Volkan, V.D. 170, 180, 261, 262
231, 252 Vygotsky, L.S. 158, 180
Shakespeare, W. 64, 77, 132, 134,
150, 220 Wallerstein, R.S. 115, 116
Shepherd, H.A. 161, 176 Weddell, D. 196
Shepherd, M. 195 Whitaker, D.S. 31, 57, 160, 180
Shlain, L. 16, 23 Whitehead, A.N. 228, 229, 233
Shooter, F.H.G. 57 Whiten, A. 196
Sidis, B. 88, 115 Whitman, W. 149, 150
Skelton, R. 24 White, W.A. 88
Skynner, A.C.R. 164, 179, 209 Wilde, O. 65
Smith, B. 244, 252 Wilke, G. 31, 165, 166, 180
Smith, D.W. 244, 252 Wilson, A.N. 111, 115
Solms, M. 194, 196 Wilson, J. 170, 180
Sor, D. 23, 24, 57 Winnicott, D.W. 62, 68, 131, 156,
Spensley, S. 193, 196 158, 166, 172, 173, 180, 204,
Spero, M. 165, 166, 179 207, 209, 212, 225, 250
Spillius, E.B. 195, 196 Wiseman, J. 220
Stacey, R.D. 172, 179 Wispe, L. 258, 262
Stark, M. 250 Wittenberg, I. 196
Steiner, J. 18, 23, 70, 81 Wittgenstein, L. 229, 233, 235, 253