ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion's initial interest in groups ran roughly concurrently with S. H. Foulkes own. For Bion, as for Foulkes, 'the group is essential to the fulfilment of a man's mental life'. In Basic assumption dependency, the assumption is the group meets to make the group feel safe. To this end, it invests omnipotent and omniscient qualities in its leader. In basic assumption pairing, the group invests hope in two or more people 'getting together' and coming up with the 'solution'. D. Brown suggests basic assumptions phenomena are common in hierarchically structured groups. A group's contact-shunning behaviour Hopper calls 'aggregation': 'a collection of people who have absolutely no consciousness of themselves as being members of a particular social system'. The anti-group is a group-analytic construct encapsulating all 'destructive processes that threaten the functioning of the group'. The anti-group may also be construed as developmental phenomenon. For example, certain individuals/subgroups may adopt a contrary position that aggravates the rest of the group.
