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The title “Experiences in Groups as a Key to ‘Late’ Bion” announces the news that has been discussed for some time from different psycho-dynamic points of view. At the same time, these approaches are not as self-evident as they may seem in intersubjective group analysis and Jungian analysis.
The analytical pair in psychoanalysis forms a “jointly created unconscious” (Civitarese, 2021, p. 1072) and is not only an encounter of two separate subjects with their respective unconscious parts. This leads to Civitarese's first hypothesis: The analytical pair needs to be understood as a “group-of-two.” To support this thought, Civatarese returns to Bion's Experiences in Groups (1961). He also includes other contributions by Bion, from Transformations (1965), in which he describes psychic changing processes and, in the book, Attention and Interpretation (1970) he writes for instance about the “negative capacity” and the “O” as evident. I partially agreed and became curious.
However, there is a limitation to this claim as a couple is not a group. The group with its specific qualities of multiple relatedness of the participants, i.e., there are at least three, is different from the immediate couple relationship.
The second hypothesis of Civitarese connects to a new theme: The analytic couple forms the basic assumptions in groups as described by Bion. Hypothesis three ties in with this, according to which the encounter in “O” is
contained in the encounter. I can agree with hypothesis two with the restriction just mentioned, but not with hypothesis three. A few brief thoughts on this are necessary within the scope of this review.
The three basic assumptions in groups are: dependence on the other, fighting against and fleeing from the other, and pairing with the other arise from (psychotic) fear. Certain situations that occur between the analytic pair (analysand-analyst) can be described in this way.
The encounter of two people in “O,” or the incomprehensible (ineffable), the “divin