ABSTRACT
The groups that Wilfred Ruprecht Bion concerned himself with directly were groups of 8 to 10 individuals who met together to try to understand the tensions the individuals composing them were experiencing. It is true that Bion did his seminal work on groups in relation to individuals who had got themselves into the role of patient; first, battle casualties who were in the throes of rehabilitation; and then to patients seeking relief from neurotic suffering. At the Tavistock these ideas became married to another set of ideas that seemed to bring with them great illumination, namely, systems theory, and the resultant progeny are often known as Tavistock Groups. The two terms come out of two different vocabularies: one arises from efforts to construct a psychology of the individual from observing his social behaviour, and the other arises from efforts to account for the behaviour of individuals in groups.
