Response

To the Editor

Saul Scheidlinger’s letter provides an opportunity to emphasize a key point in my paper —one that defines an important difference between perspectives on individual and group behavior. As many of your readers may not be aware of the controversies that have arisen around these clinical issues, it may be worth the effort to clarify them.

Scheidlinger is an extremely distinguished contributor to analytic work in groups, but he represents an analytic approach stressing individual behavior in group settings. That is, he may explore particular instances of transference, for example, that may be revealed in a group setting by one member to other group members, but he is relatively unaware of complex group processes involving the entire group. Many others, myself included, stress what has come to be called the ‘group-as-a-whole,’ that is, the ways in which the behavior of individuals in groups arises out of the interplay between individual motives and group process: individual members shape the group and are simultaneously shaped by it.

What Bion taught us to see was the subtle, hidden or unconscious collusive ways in which group members bring about group ends. That is, groups are not simply the passive victims of their leaders; they powerfully shape the thoughts and actions possible for members within them, including the thoughts and actions of leaders. In my view, this is not merely a matter of Bion’s ‘complex and controversial group theories’, as Scheidlinger puts it. It is a matter of clinical observation, observation about group behavior that has been verified and extended in countless circumstances.

In using Bion’s work on groups, I wanted to stress the participation of the entire Viennese Society in bringing about this first psychoanalytic schism, not merely the admittedly authoritarian behavior of Freud. Scheidlinger, because of his stress on individual behavior, places the emphasis on the primary responsibility of Freud, and so he points to his ‘authorita