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The paper is a rare example of Bion linking his method of observation in relation to group mental life, together with his speculations, to the institutions and wider culture of society. It has echoes of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a).
It begins with a beautifully concise summary of the reasons for setting up the first Northfield Experiment. The presenting problem is described thus: “[I]n the methods employed to deal with neurosis, some sort of equilibrium of insincerity had been achieved by patients, doctors and community alike.”
The treatment he described in these terms: “The only occupation that could be therapeutic was the study by the group of the nature of the affliction from which they individually and collectively suffered.” The outcome: “The experiment was brought to a close by the authorities, and since it has not proved possible to investigate their state of mind I cannot suggest a cause of failure.”
What he learned from the experiment, and went on to explore over the course of the next few years in what Eric Trist (1985) has called the ‘group decade’, stemmed from his finding that “something in the dynamics of unconscious tendencies in a group made the group peculiarly sensitive to any investigation of its emotional tensions” – the equivalent in group mental life to what Freud (1930a) had earlier described in the individual psyche as the active resistance presented by the dynamic unconscious to its contents and processes being rendered conscious by the psychoanalytic method.
Bion makes a learned case for the inclusion of what he calls ‘the emotional component in human relationships’ and the importance of the study of it rather than its manipulation. His major themes he outlines as: (1) The existence of disparate academic disciplines studying
group and institutional life, each with different languages and aims. (2) The problematic relationship between the rapid rate of technological advances and the slower, more fragile development of emoti