Editor's Introduction. Experiences in Groups and Other Papers

The last of the papers eventually published in Experiences in Groups and Other Papers had already been completed by 1951 when Bion (at the Tavistock Clinic) met Francesca McCallum, who was to become his wife. At the Tavistock Francesca was approached by John Harvard-Watts, who asked her whether she would to try to persuade Wilfred Bion to allow his papers on work with groups to be published together as a book. Bion agreed, reluctantly at first; he felt the book could go ahead if he added a paper, ‘Group Dynamics: A Re-view’ . It is in this paper that Bion brings together his theoretical model of group processes explicitly with Klein's theories.

The whole book, however, was not published until much later – 1961. This was because, as Francesca later explained:

Due to his absorption in psychoanalysis, the writing of seven papers between 1952 and 1957, and his habitual lack of interest in past work as he always preferred to concentrate on the present – Experiences in Groups was not published until 1961. It proved to be his most successful book in terms of copies sold. Its success surprised him, especially as he was used to being told by reluctant publishers in the 60s that his books sold, “very, very slowly”.1

Although Melanie Klein was not supportive of his group work, Bion persisted with his view that a psychoanalytic perspective on group mentality was compatible with individual psychoanalysis, stating in the introduction to Experiences in Groups and Other Papers:

I am impressed, as a practising psychoanalyst, by the fact that the psychoanalytic approach, through the individual, and the approach these papers describe, through the group, are dealing with different

1. Francesca Bion, ‘The Days of Our Years’ (1995): see Appendix A, Volume XVI.

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facets of the same phenomena. The two methods provide the practitioner with a rudimentary binocular vision.

In his Introduction Bion also stated something of his fundamental orientation as a psychoanalyst. He was convinced, he wrote,

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