You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In 1940, Bion sent a paper to his former analyst, John Rickman, concerning the use of group methods in the therapeutic rehabilitation of traumatized soldiers. The paper was known later as the Wharncliffe Memorandum, because of the establishment in which Rickman was posted at the time, the Wharncliffe Emergency Hospital. Rickman's attempts to put into practice these ideas of Bion's were felt to be so incompatible with the existing medical relationships – the power and authority structure in particular, as well as the initial chaos involved at the beginning of such a venture – that his attempts failed. It subsequently became known as the Wharncliffe Experiment.
In the autumn of 1942 Rickman was working at the Northfield Military Hospital in Birmingham, with permission to try out new forms of treatment. Bion joined him there, and they applied some of the main ideas in the ‘memorandum’ paper. Substantially, these notes (published here as ‘On Groups’), found among Bion's War Office Selection Board (WOSB) notes, are the backbone of that approach. They were fleshed out for ‘Intra-Group Tensions in Group Therapy’, which was published in the Lancet, 27 November 1943, and subsequently included as the first in the papers about group mentality collected together in 1961 and published as Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (this volume), at the instigation of John Harvard-Watts and Francesca Bion.
Bion's primary aim was to acquaint the men with a method for studying their intra-group tensions,1 in relation to the levels of organization in
Later, as a psychoanalyst, Bion, following Freud's structural model of the mind, was to consider internal anxiety situations within the psyche of the individual as particular instances of ‘intra-group tensions’, arising from the fact that the processes of introjection and projection are associated with identificatory phantasies that produce an inner world containing groups – object relations – constituting group mentality as an inextricable pa
Later, as a psychoanalyst, Bion, following Freud's structural model of the mind, was to consider internal anxiety situations within the psyche of the individual as particular instances of ‘intra-group tensions’, arising from the fact that the processes of introjection and projection are associated with identificatory phantasies that produce an inner world containing groups – object relations – constituting group mentality as an inextricable pa