ABSTRACT
The tendency of the human gregarious instinct to unite, to group together, to form “One” is, according to Bion, “a negation of the group”, because “the group and the infinite must be considered as epistemologically prior to everything else”. The individual is always an integral part of a group from which he “individualises himself”. Following Freud who, in Totem and Taboo and in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, had studied the unconscious forces underlying groups, Bion, in his Experiences in Groups, has approached group phenomena from a psychoanalytic point of view and isolated three main “basic assumptions” (attack/flight, pairing, dependence) which interpose themselves spontaneously between the group and the task that it has set itself. He had established a parallel between group formations and individual formations, whereby the individual always finds that he is designated by the group to adopt one position or another, for example, that of the leader. Within the individual, the deep presence of unexpressed basic assumptions can lead to an internal conflict reactivating an original state called a “protomental state”, in which the physical and the psychological are still undifferentiated, a state that becomes the “matrix” of psychosomatic illnesses because they are always linked to a group.
Bion then focused his interest on the “dependent basic assumption group”, which, thanks to the permanent use of projective identification between the group and the leader – the Messiah, the genius, God, the president, “our Father”, etc. – gives the impression that it is constituted to maintain intact the brilliant or revolutionary idea emanating from the leader. But in reality this idea, which is so subversive that it can destroy any group that has the job of conveying it, must be rendered inoffensive by the Establishment that has the task of maintaining group cohesion.
