Discussion of “Recovering Bion's Contributions to Group Analysis”

First, I must make clear that group therapy is not my area of expertise. My practice has been primarily individual psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I have led as well as been in groups profitably, but this was perhaps more luck than skill. I am noting this limitation in order to free my hand for areas that I feel more comfortable with. When asked by Dr. Kelman to address this topic, it was with the understanding that I would discuss Bion's work as a whole, rather than focus on his work on experiences in groups. This, of course, is an impossible task for a twenty-minute discussion. I will be quite happy if I succeed in interesting some of you in Bion's work. His work must be counted as one of the most creative achievements in psychoanalytic thinking.

As Dr. Eisold points out, Bion's book on groups was written early in his career. It was the first of over ten books. Bion's full originality did not blossom before Melanie Klein's death in 1960, when Bion was 63 years old. In a New York seminar in 1977, Bion was asked about his book on groups. “My God, are people still reading that?” he replied, perhaps mischievously. Most practitioners knew him for that work, although he had gone very far beyond it. Nevertheless, I believe it fair to say that Bion's grasp of group processes deepened over the years. His early work added to and took meaning from his work as it evolved and gathered momentum.

Bion was an object relations theorist. He studied linking processes and their disturbances: links between self-self, self-other, various mental functions and psychical objects. He depicted the development of the infant's ability to think as dependent on the mother's capacity to reverie on and re-form the emotions that the infant puts into her, a container-contained relationship. He was well aware that words like analyst and patient inadequately convey the actual functioning of two people alone together for therapy, and he sought to penetrate what goes on beneath these labels. His work i