Seminar 7. 27 March 1979. The Tavistock Seminars

Bion: [first part of recording missing] … an establishment, shall we say, like the government of this country; then it buds off plenty more, called “devolution”, and each bit of the devolved thing takes in a whole lot of other people – so you get bigger and bigger bureaucracies. In this respect I think we in psychoanalysis are well in the mainstream: there's the British Psychoanalytical Society, there's the International Psychoanalytical Association, there's the European Psychoanalytic Society, and I don't know what else – there are plenty of them, all of them presumably with their distinguished people, all of them with the distinguished people swallowed up in the administration, never having a chance of getting near a patient because they have to spend so much time organizing things. This raises a very difficult problem – that of whether people who are engaged in thinking can indeed combine it in any way, and, if so, how?

Q: I am wondering if the individual's thinking in his own time is different from that of the group's time.

Bion: What happens to your feelings, opinions, ideas and theories when, as here, we all come together? They would appear to be sunk without a trace, swallowed up in the group where we would hope to get some kind of discussion or clarification of the problems with which we have to deal. But the curious thing is that as soon as we are contained in a group, it seems to be very difficult indeed to go in the direction of developing thoughts or ideas or feelings of our own;

we are dominated by a need to be like everybody else and to think what everybody else thinks and feels – although how to tell what everybody else thinks or feels may be something we would find very difficult to formulate.

Somebody posed a question to me the other day – I