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By way of a set of suggestions W. R. Bion offers in “The Mystic and the Group,” this essay begins to consider the relationship between ideas concerning the necessity of deprivation for proper psychoanalytic practice and interpretation and the metaphysical constitution of things. Bion’s conceptual opposition of the mystic and the group, given in his understanding of the role of the mystic in the group, opens a way to investigate—admittedly, against Bion’s grain—the mysticism of the group as resistance to individuation.