Building on Bion: Roots

Origins and Context of Bion's Contributions to Theory and Practice

Malcolm Pines, Robert Lipgar

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781846423680
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychotherapie

Two volumes of original papers by leading thinkers and practitioners of group therapy... The diverse collection that has informed and stimulated my thinking.'

- International Journal of Group Psychotherapy

'The concepts that I liked were about the truth, the unknowable and unknown, and the functions he devised to communicate what is going on in the patients' world to other psychoanalyst.

I am glad that I read these books with their wide range of ideas and I have gained insights which will make me more aware in my psychodrama practice.'

- British Journal of Psychodrama.

'The book begins with a wonderful introduction by James Grotstien, a theorist whose grasp of Bion is enriched by his own formidable ideas. He sets the stage for what's to follow, toucing on Bion's groundbreaking work with groups, his formalizing of psychotic experience and several key concepts, like Bion's elaboration on the concept of projective identification. Grotstien's prose is remarkable. He conveys ideas about the most complex internal states with a clarity and reach that is unparalled, even by Bion himself. This is without a doubt a richly rewarding and ultimately exhausting text.'

- www.mentalhelp.net

This stimulating collection of papers by distinguished international contributors from the fields of psychoanalysis, group analysis, management consultancy and social science explores formative influences affecting Bion's emotional and intellectual development. The authors revisit in depth the origins of Bion's ideas, setting them in the context of his World War I experiences, his contact with Trotter, and his later work with the Tavistock Clinic and psychoanalysis. Chapters discuss the roots of his epistemology, re-examining and extending basic assumption theory; links between Bion and Foulkes; group mentality and Bion in Italy. Through these the spirit and shape of his work can be discovered by those new to Bion, and rediscovered by those who feel well acquainted with him.

This is a collection of original and insightful papers which, along with its companion volume Building on Bion: Branches, will not only deepen understanding of Bion's contributions to theory and practice, but will also be invaluable to those who work with groups, in both therapeutic and management contexts.

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 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 effectively 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 psychotherapy 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 distinction 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 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 difficulties 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, institutional, and culture settings. We will seek here to understand the complex 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 met together to deal with the psychological difficulties of its members.¹ (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 (maintenance of cohesiveness through shared fantasies). As ‘group animals’ we struggle with our need for individuality and the exercise of individual responsibility and our need for belonging. This challenge is coupled with an awareness of relentless tension between work requirements (the psychological work of ‘learning from experience’) and valency for the ‘basic assumptions’ (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’, three clusters of emotions and desires, shaping attitudes and beliefs.² These are identified as ‘fight/flight’, ‘pairing’, and ‘dependency’. All three are considered to serve as defenses, protections from psychotic anxiety (fragmentation 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 individuals 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.’

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 appropriate 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 interventions 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?

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

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Roots and Early Developments
• Part II: Bion’s Context: Contemporaries and Refinements
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index