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Bion presented his paper ‘Group Methods of Treatment’ at the International Conference on Medical Psychotherapy in 1948, where he was introduced as a “Physician at The Tavistock Clinic, London”.
The paper begins with Bion making clear the requirement for a specific setting for the study of group processes. It requires us to shift our perspective from the setting designed specially for the psychoanalytic couple to that which is requisite to a group – as Bion puts it, a form that is ‘natural and proper to the group situation’. This implies minimum conditions necessary for the task, so that valid psychoanalytic observations may be made of its processes and functioning.
Bion is describing to the audience his own ‘internal equipment’ for studying a group while experiencing it. Bion felt that the concept of transference could not simply be imported wholesale into group work from the individual situation, although he was more comfortable with making use of the countertransference (to detect the operation of phantasies mobilized by the group's shared, or ‘pooled’, transference-based phantasies). Bion also felt it necessary to assume that the individual in a group setting possesses a specific capacity to be sensitive to the emotional situation that he appears to occupy not only in relation to other members, but also in relation to the group as a whole. Bion makes the point that the emotional components of the group situation are as salient for the individual as are the objects of the material world. Implicitly he is referring to the psychic reality of the emotions present in the group.
There appears in this talk a clear statement of Bion's method; it shows similarity to the neutrality and reserve of the analyst in the individual situation – his receptive ‘non-action’ – and demonstrates the centrality in his technique of the insight he had into the workings of
projective identification in the group context, which he related to the use of countertransference as a tool for enquir