Experiences in Groups
Basic assumption groups. Read as much in organisations now as in clinical training.
As work-group function consists essentially of the translation of thoughts and feelings into behaviour which is adapted to reality, it is ill-adapted to give expression to basic assumptions.
Experiences in Groups gathers the papers Bion wrote from his work with therapy and training groups at the Tavistock Clinic, published together in 1961. It sets out how a group operates on two levels at once. On one, the work group pursues its stated task, cooperating and testing its assumptions against reality. On the other, the group behaves as though it holds a shared, unspoken belief that Bion calls a basic assumption. He names three: dependency, in which the group looks to a leader to supply security; fight-flight, in which it organises around an enemy to attack or escape; and pairing, in which it invests hope in a couple whose union will deliver a saviour. Each defends the members against the anxiety the real task provokes. For the clinician, the book supplies a working vocabulary for what moves beneath the manifest content of any group, and a way to read the pull toward these states as information rather than obstruction.
About the author
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (1897 to 1979) was a British psychoanalyst who commanded a tank in the First World War and later underwent analysis with Melanie Klein. At the Tavistock he pioneered the study of groups, describing basic assumption states of dependency, fight-flight, and pairing. His theory of thinking holds that alpha function transforms raw experience into thinkable material, and that a container receives and metabolises what is projected into it. His later work reaches towards O, the unknowable, and K, the link of knowing.
Details
- 1961
- English
- Routledge
- Routledge, 1961
- 200
- 9780415040204