Links and Perspectives on the Individual and the Group

When two personalities meet, an emotional storm is created.

Bion regards the human being as essentially a group or political animal. He says that the human being is a group animal, at war both with the group and with those aspects of his own personality that constitute his “groupishness.”1 Yet he cannot exist without groups even if it be only the group he asserts he does not belong to or the internal group with which the solitary individual is in a dynamic relationship. Bion regards individual and group psychology as different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, group psychology illuminating aspects of the individual that may seem alien to individual psychology. He makes many references to this duality and the dilemma it creates for the individual.

The two papers under consideration here—“The Concepts of Vínculo and Dialectical Spiral: A Bridge Between Intra- and Intersubjectivity,” by Ricardo Bernardi and Beatriz de León de Bernardi, and “Vínculo as a