Bion

A group of strangers, left without a task, behaves as a single entity with a mental life that none of its members holds.

What he observed

In 1942 Wilfred Bion, assigned to the training wing of Northfield Military Hospital with several hundred soldiers and no staff to treat them individually, treated the wing as a whole. After the war, at the Tavistock Clinic, he led small groups of civilians with no agenda, addressing his interpretations to the group rather than to any member. In Experiences in Groups (1961) he reported what he found.

A group left without a task organizes itself around a shared, unspoken basic assumption about what it is for. In dependency, it behaves as though it met to be sustained by an omniscient leader. In fight-flight, as though it met to fight or flee an enemy. In pairing, as though two of its members will produce a saviour who must never actually arrive. No member holds the assumption, and asked, each would deny it. It is in the group's behaviour, and members act on it against their own judgement; the leader feels its pull as strongly as anyone.

Through what Bion called valency, each person's readiness to combine with others in one assumption or another, the group finds among its members the ones whose readiness fits the role it needs. The role is the group's, and it would have found someone to fill it. But it found this person because of something already theirs.

What it shows

It could be said that a family behaves as a unit because of its ties: blood, a history, a roof. Bion found the same organization among strangers within an hour. The ties are not what produces it.

In the model

A group held together long enough by a shared purpose is a nested field like any other, bounded by its goal. Valency is the paper's distribution seen in a room of strangers: an excluded form stabilizes in the member whose valve offers it least resistance, and the role reassigns when that member leaves.