ABSTRACT
Bion began his investigative career with the study of groups. Groups are formed to perform a unified task. Such a group, unified in this purpose, is called a “work group”. Resistant subgroups have certain characteristics. In other words, the incestuous male toddler may believe that he can produce a superior “Wunderkind” in mother’s body—superior, that is, to a child that father can produce, which includes himself, thus its perpetual futurity. The group leader becomes the magnet for the projection of omnipotent expectations from the individuals in the group. The group makes progress in reunifying and re-owning their projections and returning to their original mission after the group leader is able first to experience, then intuit, and finally interpret the subgroup anxieties that underlie their basic assumption deviations. A few citations from specific works show how representative group therapists have integrated Bion’s later metapsychological work with his group concepts.
