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This book contains a series of articles describing Bion's pioneering researches on groups. In them he persistently, but not always successfully, refuses to act as the provider or as a pairing figure. He confines his responses to the group aspect of members’ communication, stressing the difficulty of doing this and the ease of making “a blunder in a group
that he would never make in psycho-analysis by treating the group as if the procedure were psycho-analysis in public” (pp. 80-1). It seems that it is these attitudes combined with a relentless war on inappropriate fight-flight which makes it possible for the group to change and develop.
In vivid passages he displays the bitter conflict between what he calls the “sophisticated” or “work” group and the “basic assumption” group which functions blindly, automatically, timelessly.
The work group relies on the recognition of a need to develop rather than on the efficacy of magic, and mobilizes the emotions of one basic assumption in the attempt to cope with the emotions and phenomena of another basic assumption. Bion makes the point that the group has no consciousness and so it is left for the individual to be both conscious and articulate. He observes that the basic assumptions do not conflict with one another, they alternate; sometimes dependence is manifest, at other times pairing, or yet again fight-flight. In the work group, the individual prepared to suffer the pain of development suppresses one pattern of linked emotions by the substitution of another.
Whereas the early papers in this book deal largely with the basic assumptions or myth of the group as obtrusive and interfering with work group function, the later papers deal with the use of the same myth in promoting development. The last part of the book is a review of group dynamics and newcomers to these papers will find it useful to read the first twenty pages of the “Re-view” as an introduction to the book as a whole; it bears reading more than once. Bion sees