ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is rooted, in its concepts and methods, on what takes place between two people in a consulting-room. Too often in applied psychoanalysis there is a parasitic relation between the object of enquiry— such as art, religion, politics, or organizational life— and the medium of enquiry— that is, the experience of individual psychoanalysis or the analysed mind. Experiences in Groups could have been predicted or derived from classical psychoanalytic practice or its so-called applications. Experiences in Groups can be read as a series of inspired reflections or musings on the emotional experiences presented to its author in the presence of groups. The formulations that Wilfred Bion, more tentatively than his followers' practice sometimes suggests, put forward in these papers—about group "mentality", the interrelations of organization, structure, and culture, the distinction between work group and basic-assumption group, and the tripartite differentiation of the latter— are all grounded in these presented emotional experiences.
