ABSTRACT
The emotional state proper to a basic assumption is not wholly pleasurable. As with the analyst in psycho-analysis, so with the group. In my technique with the group, the individual, supported by the group, tries to keep the goodness of the group isolated from its badness, and will maintain either that he feels ‘bad’ because of the group or that he feels ‘good’ because of it, but will not easily admit that certain agreeable emotional states called ‘feeling better’ are derived from the group of which he complains nor yet that certain unpleasant emotional experiences called ‘feeling worse’ are inseparable from membership of the group in whose goodness he would prefer for the moment to believe. In addition to the reasons commonly discoverable in psychoanalysis for this kind of behaviour, the individual in the group has reasons that derive directly from peculiarities of the emotional states associated with the basic assumptions, and it is these peculiarities that I shall now discuss. The investigation is provoked by the fact that the emotions associated with any basic assumption appear to be experienced by the individual in their entirety. My original description of a group acting on a basis assumption did not do justice to some features of the group behaviour that are now relevant. It might have been thought that the group makes a common assumption and that all else, including the emotional state associated with it, springs from this. This 94 does not reflect my belief. On the contrary, I consider the emotional state to be in existence and the basic assumption to be deducible from it. As far as the group is concerned, the basic assumption is essentially a tacit assumption. Individuals behave as if they were aware of the assumption, and it is for this reason that the interpretation of the basic assumption carries conviction. It is a statement that gives meaning to the behaviour of the group as a whole, yet the assumption is not overtly expressed even when it is being acted on. We thus have a situation in which the individuals behave as if they were conscious, as individuals, of the basic assumption, but unconscious of it as members of the group. This is as it should be: the group has not a conscious; and it is not articulate; it is left to the individual to be both.
