ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion began his investigative career with the study of groups. There he made a number of significant observations. Groups are formed to perform a unified task. Such a group, unified in this purpose, is called a “work group”. The group leader becomes the magnet for the projection of omnipotent expectations from the individuals in the group. The fundamental anxieties that underlie the basic assumption group resistances were originally thought of as “proto-mental phenomena”. Bion likened the problem of the individual coming to terms with the emotional life of the group as akin to that of the infant in its first relationship, viz., with the breast/mother. The attempt to make a rational investigation of the dynamics of the group is therefore perturbed by fears, and mechanisms of dealing with them, that are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position.
