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When Wilfred Bion's life-work in psycho-analysis made its full amazing circle towards his last years, this was nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in his return to the early interest in group phenomena. By applying what he had then discovered about groups to what he later learned about the structure of the mind of the individual, he was able to formulate, in the fictional presentation of A Memoir of the Future, a conception of group life within the individual person as a distinct level of mental functioning allied to narcissistic organisation but not identical to it.
This idea had perhaps been implied in his earlier formulations on Basic Assumption Groups. There, in Experiences in Groups, he had suggested that of the three BA Groups only one may be active at a particular moment while the others are confined to the “protomental” level with its intimate relation to bodily processes. This constituted his indication of direction for research into psycho-somatic phenomena. It was not stated explicitly but in retrospect one can discern a hint of internal BA group life. This evocation of primitive, perhaps tribal, life in the depths of the mind which can surface as group behaviour or, conversely, express itself through bodily processes, has a frightening, even haunting, impact. Bion seems to suggest that we must think of the stages of bodily development, even the embryonic stages, and certainly the pre-natal months or weeks, as having distinct representation in the structure of the self.
But in this schema, this “imaginative conjecture” of his, the mentality of these primitive parts of the self differ very much from those processes which psycho-analysis has been designed to study. Just as the functioning in the BA Group sweeps away the most important attributes of individual mentality, such as observation, thought, judgment, these primitive parts of the personality do their thinking with the body and obey laws that are closer to neurophysiology than to psychology. Corre