Comment on Sergio Caruso's Article “On the Conjunction of Basic Assumptions in the Enlarged Group”

This paper is great fun to read. It is stylistically excellent as well as colorful. It uses theory creatively. I found the ideas to be well constructed and supported by the lively vignette and the evolving discussion of these events. While I do not specialize in the field of large group psychodynamics, I found this paper convincing, and I look forward to learning how this field's specialists respond to this paper.

I have my own personal response to the paper, which I would have enjoyed contributing at the actual event depicted in the article. Of course, like any observer of any process, I would then have influenced the outcome of the events, and I had “observed” these events well after they occurred, and saw them through the author's lens, in a condensed and inevitably personally biased account. In any case, perhaps there was a fascinating additional illustrative dynamic in the writing of the paper. A “real” leader of the large group has created his own son, which is this paper. It has greater reality than Elijah's now that it is published. It has gained immortality in its publication and later citations. On the local scene, Dr. Caruso has reclaimed authority, containing the contents of the conference on his own canvas, within his own frame. He has had the first published word, and perhaps the last word on the events of that day.

With publication, Caruso involves a new large and vaguely structured group: the psychoanalytic readership. He becomes Elijah in a new context, this journal. The content of this paper challenges Bion in a fundamental way (just as Elijah challenged the organizers of his large group on “Psychoanalysis and Science”. Caruso says he is really supporting Bion by enhancing his theories. But this is what all “rebels” have said regarding Freud, as they chip away, etching their own names on the granite wall that forms the base of some grand statue of the Professor. The paper itself, then, is a further illustration of the author's thesis of a conjunction