Eric Miller Memorial Lecture, 16 March 2006

I am grateful to OPUS for giving me this opportunity to revisit both Eric's work and my relationship with him. I knew Eric best in 1981 and 1982, when I came to Tavistock to learn from him and Isabel Menzies. At the time he was working with the ideas that later became the article he co-authored with Olya Khaleele, called ‘Beyond the small group: society as an intelligible field of study’ (1985).

That article had a large impact on me because it provided a framework for understanding the changing organizational world in group relations terms. My intention here is to build on that perspective in order to frame a discussion of fundamentalism in terms of shifting basic assumption life, centring on their idea that different basic assumption groups emerge from the primordial proto-mental ooze to shape the overall emotional texture of large scale societal dynamics. I should say here that my perspective is a decidedly American one - whether or how these ideas pertain to other cultures is work that I will have to rely others to do.

Bion, too, was interested in large scale basic assumption states, wondering if inactive or suppressed BA states would manifest as stress related disease that could be studied epidemiologically. To my mind, the idea opens a theoretical can of worms, though, because of the many differences between large scale social systems and groups, which have definable boundaries and primary tasks. While cross-mapping their dynamics on to larger social systems seemed problematic, Khaleelee and Miller were clearly on to something. The overtones of basic assumption life seem to be unmistakably active in large scale social processes and, in particular, in how organizations and institutions within society are seen and understood, and in how social policies are developed. The story that their argument crystallized for me goes like this. From the end of the Second World War to somewhere