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This short paper was published in the same volume of the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic in which Harold Bridger published his account of the Northfield Experiment – the group initiative to which Bion and Rickman had also contributed. The core principle of that initiative appears in ‘The Leaderless Group Project’ as follows: “The therapeutic occupation of the group was the study of the tensions within itself.”
In the field of Officer Selection Bion had felt it important to be able to find realistic opportunities to observe how potential leaders of men would fare in their attempts to maintain relationships under conditions of strain. In situations of strain, observed Bion, the soldier would be drawn by the threats in the prevailing emotional circumstances into relinquishing his feelings of concern and responsibility for his fellows and to look instead to his own interests. Bion was to meet this predicament again later in his career when he became familiar with the theories developed by Melanie Klein, particularly her descriptions of the tensions between the depressive position – in which the capacity grows for personal concern for the welfare of internal and external objects – and the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the survival of the endangered self takes precedence.
Many years later, when Bion was training to become a psychoanalyst, one of his seminar leaders was Hanna Segal. She had asked each member of her seminar what they thought was the most significant capacity required to function as a psychoanalyst, and she recalled Bion's response, which stood out as having been derived from hard-won experience. He had said, without hesitation, “the capacity to maintain an important relationship under strain”.
It was this capacity, together with that of being able to understand and to manage the anxieties inherent in being part of a group, which
were studied by Bion and his colleagues in the Northfield Experiment in the 1940s, in what Eric Trist (1985) termed the ‘gr