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It is truly an honour to give the 10th Annual Margaret Rioch Lecture.3 I use the term ‘lecture’ loosely, given this format. Rioch would have enjoyed (as well as challenged) the transformation of a lecture to a blog.4 Special thanks to Washington-Baltimore Centre Programme Chair Joseph Schmidt for organizing and WBC president Michael Speer for authorizing such a creative forum and to all of you who are participating with me. I offer my appreciation to our discussant, leadership scholar James MacGregor Burns as well.
The title of this talk, ‘On Beyond Bion’, pays tribute to a small book by a great American philosopher, Theodore Geisel, known to many as Dr Seuss. Geisel authored On Beyond Zebra (Geisel (Seuss), 1955), a phantasmagoric exploration of a boy who challenged his playmates to stretch their imagination beyond the traditional twenty-six letters of the alphabet - from A (Ape) to Z (Zebra) to create an extended alphabet. You might say he dealt in unauthorized space:
In the places I go there are things that I seeThat I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
Wilfred Bion, of course, was such a thinker; a creator of new realms and constructs. His work, especially his ideas concerning the group- as-a-whole, the here-and-now, and basic assumption life, continue to be vital to our understanding of group life. Bion was certainly On Beyond Zebra.
Four decades after Margaret Rioch founded the A. K. Rice Institute (AKRI) to carry on the work of Wilfred Bion and others; it is possible that some of you will know nothing at all about Wilfred Bion or Margaret Rioch. Nevertheless, both remain with us today as shadow,