Group Process in the work of Bion: insights for adult learning in a Christian context
John Williams
W.R.Bion: Context and Background
The British psychoanalyst W.R.Bion became influential in adult education in the 1960s and 70s because of his insights into how unacknowledged process in groups cuts across the manifest learning objectives of the group. A practitioner within the analytic school who himself underwent analysis with Melanie Klein, Bion is indebted to Freud’s treatment of the distinction between what is presented and what lies hidden in human behaviour. While Freud’s division of the psyche into three component parts of Id, Ego and Superego has been subject to criticism, his basic insight that overt responses and reactions that generate personal tension and conflict turn out to be covertly driven or modified by desires and drives emanating from a subconscious level of the self, remains hugely significant in human relations thinking as well as in psychotherapy. In this context the distinctive contribution of Bion was to extend this kind of analytic model from the field of dyadic relationships into that of group behaviour. This article explores Bion’s work in relation to the specific context of Adult Christian Education, and concludes with a case study of group process in a practical learning context.
Within adult education interest has focused on Bion’s claim that in every group there are two groups operative: the ‘work group’, which represents the ‘official’, externally presenting account of what the group exists for; and the ‘basic assumption group’, which acts out of hidden or unacknowledged motivations and drives and whose true purpose is concealed. ‘The work group is that aspect of group functioning which has to do with the real task of the group.’ It is aware of its purpose and can define its task; it is structured to further the attainment of the task; its members co-operate as discrete individuals; and the group successfully learns from experience. In Freudian terms the work group manifests a healthy adult ego function. Each of these attributes has its parallel in the criteria for good practice in learning groups which could be used to assess the work of adult educators.
Bion regards the ‘work group’ as an ideal rarely achieved in practice, because the tacit assumptions prevalent in the group form the basis for how it behaves. The ‘basic assumption’, deduced from observation of the emotional states displayed by the group, by attending to factors other than the stated task, or to process rather than content, elucidates the behaviour of the group insofar as it is not operating as a work group. A group operating out of its basic assumption typically displays a lack of questioning or reflection, reliance upon emotional responses and a disinclination to learn from experience. It may manifest a ‘conspiracy of anonymity’ in which no-one is prepared openly to admit to certain attitudes which observation suggests to be the actual mind of the group. Efforts are made to deflect leaders from the task in hand: ‘what one sees in reality is a work group which is suffused by, intruded into, and supported by the basic assumption group’, just as the conscious ego is influenced at all times by the unconscious.
Bion identifies the basic assumptions as dependency, fight-flight and pairing. In the dependency mode, group members act as if they believe themselves to be ignorant, inadequate and immature and in need of simple guidance and pastoral care from an authoritative and omnicompetent leader. This leader eventually falls out of favour for failing to live up to expectations, and a new and more perfect replacement is sought. In fight / flight mode, the covert purpose of the group is to preserve its own existence against a perceived threat, either by heeding the rallying call of the leader to fight against the enemy or to develop strategies for saving face and fleeing from it. The ‘enemy’ may be uncomfortable truths which group members would rather not face: the ‘group mentality’ is mobilised to prevent this catastrophe, by projecting the uncomfortable truths onto some external foe or avoiding the issue and changing the subject. Alternatively, a group may engage in what Bion calls ‘pairing’, looking for salvation from, typically, two of its members who together will bring to birth the new era and rescue the group from its present problems.
Affinities with Christian theology
Christianity favours analyses of the human condition that distinguish between surface and depth, that which is presented and that which is concealed, external expression and internal process. Jesus’ teachings draw attention to the critical disjunction between appearances and reality, for example in his denunciation of the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees and his radical reinterpretation of the meaning of ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’. In the Sermon on the Mount he intensifies the demand of the Law by applying it to what is going on within a person as well as to outward performance. St. Paul in turn picks up this radicalisation of the Law in his candid account of the human dilemma: ‘I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, and what I hate I do’. Elsewhere he analyses the predicament in terms of the war between the flesh and the spirit, and their respective fruits. St James denounces the person who seems to contemplate God’s word and yet fails to let it challenge personal experience, comparing such a person to one who looks into a mirror and yet goes away forgetting immediately their own appearance. There is an absence of reflective awareness, of personal honesty that leads to the possibility of learning from experience.
These traditions challenge the understanding of religion as projection deeply rooted in the work of Freud and philosophically expounded before him by Feuerbach. What Freud uncovers, but misapplies as a sweeping critique of the whole of religion, is that alienated form of faith that serves as a false security by projecting a God-figure in the role of transcendental ‘nurturing and controlling Parent’, to use the terminology of Transactional Analysis. Such a faith militates against that painful but ultimately salvific honest personal confrontation with the self that is envisaged in the biblical passages noted above. Paul Avis concedes that ‘a great deal of Christianity is blatantly a form of infantile wish-fulfilment’ and affirms the view of the Anglican priest-psychologist R.S.Lee, to the effect that ‘wish-fulfilment plays a large part in shaping our ideas of God’, and that Freudian analysis can alert us to this and help us to move on to a more adult form of faith. It is this more positive use of Freud, via the work of Bion, that has influenced thinking and practice about small groups in Adult Christian Education.
The New Testament passages cited above might be interpreted as offering an individualistic analysis of the human predicament and supporting a view of Christian spirituality as heroic personal endeavour and self-discipline alone. But they must be placed alongside the biblical emphasis on the corporate nature of the project of Gospel faith. Jesus gathers a company of disciples, i.e. of co-learners, whose lives and personal pilgrimages will, from the moment of his call to follow, be bound up with one another. Jesus’ challenges to individuals in the Gospels are accompanied by the expectation that those who respond will be incorporated into a confraternity / sorority whose destinies are intertwined for the sake of the Kingdom of God. In Gethsemane Jesus endures a solitary agony, but the Gospel insists that he must do so for our sakes: thereafter we shall not struggle alone, and St John illustrates this by having Jesus on the Cross give his Mother and the Beloved Disciple into each other’s care, the nucleus of the new community that is the product of the generative power of those foundational events of Christ.
To read of the tribulations of St Paul as he shoulders the burdens of all the churches in striving that ‘Christ be formed in them’, is to observe how ‘becoming church’ involves the complexities of group process. Without this, Christianity remains inauthentic; it falls prey to ‘bad faith’, to projection and wish-fulfilment, shirking the honesty about our condition and the hard learning from experience that come from opening our lives to each other and are part and parcel of the process of Christian maturing. When Paul tells the Corinthians that ‘when one part suffers, every part suffers with it; when one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it’, he is not merely stating a beautiful theological truth; he is giving expression to the demanding work of ecclesial body-building. The kind of learning group that draws on Bion’s methods and insights offers a secular counterpart to this by providing a setting in which sustained attention to the process of group formation constitutes the only task of the group, thereby laying bare the underlying issues involved in ‘becoming one body’.
Application to adult Christian learning groups
Bion’s ‘dependency’ type of ‘basic assumption group’ has clear resonances for adult Christian Education. Firstly there is frequently the assumption that a clergy person present in a parish-based learning group will ‘lead’ the group. Bion himself often reflects on the bewilderment and anger generated by his own refusal to take up such an anticipated role in his patient groups. Secondly there is the expectation that whoever takes up the role of group leader will deliver the authoritative information the group ‘needs’: what they need it for usually goes unexplored. However, the clergy person who declines the role of group leader, and the facilitator who employs interactive and participative methods, does not thereby eliminate the issue. Bion cited the church as the social institution most attuned to helping people to process the ‘dependency’ state. For dependency is not an evil to be exorcised, but a necessity of life which we need to learn to handle positively rather than allowing it to become a pathology.
This function of religion lay at the heart of the work of Bruce Reed, the founder of The Grubb Institute, whose seminal work The Dynamics of Religion contains an Appendix commenting on the relevance of Bion’s theories. A dysfunctional dependency involves offloading personal responsibility for learning from experience by projecting all the saving knowledge onto a ‘guru’ figure at whose feet it is only necessary to sit in order to be protected from uncertainty. But a healthy dependency is a foundation of spiritual freedom, as theologians since Schleiermacher have attempted to articulate. We are contingent, finite and ‘unfinished’ creatures whose personhood comes to fruition only in relation to each other and to the source or ground of our being. The group that is able to discover this by developing its own honest sense of interdependency becomes a context for holistic spiritual growth; the group that deals with dependency only by crying out for sound teaching from an authoritative leader is cutting itself off from the potential source of its health and salvation.
Reed has attempted to incorporate this distinctively salvific perspective into his application of Bion’s theory by developing the idea of ‘oscillation’ in which a group moves between phases of ‘W-activity’ and ‘S-activity’. The former is more task-focussed, analytical and proactive, while the latter is characterised by a more intuitive and symbolic state of receptivity; periods of ‘creative regression’ from W into S are necessary for healthy functioning in the face of life experience. This is a useful reformulation of Bion’s ‘work group - basic assumption group’ distinction in a direction which incorporates a more positive role for the religious function than a framework relying more dogmatically on Freud would allow.
The application of Bion’s other basic assumptions is more problematic. The imagery of both fight and flight is embedded in the Christian tradition and creates for the learning group a challenge as to when these human instincts constitute a ‘basic assumption’ drive and when they might actually become a ‘work group’ imperative. Christians do need to learn what to fight against and what to flee from, and how to choose which strategy to adopt and when; and all of this is best understood as a corporate rather than purely individual responsibility. Mobilising ‘fight’ effectively can motivate a Christian group to costly campaigning on a social or ethical issue; mobilising ‘flight’ can keep those who campaign from succumbing themselves to the very evils they are combating.
‘Pairing’ draws on messianic or visionary language to depict a scenario that carries considerable ambiguity in a Christian environment. A learning group may appropriately set its aims in relation to a source of vision and creative energy that is experienced not only as a product of the group consciousness (or ‘synergy’) but as coming from beyond. Bion’s account of pairing focuses on the falsity of the hopes and expectations generated by the ‘pair’, and indeed he maintains that it is imperative in order to sustain this mood that the hopes must not be realised. Christian eschatology vividly portrays the tension of the faith community living in between reality and vision, with what is yet to come (the Kingdom of God) only partially inaugurated and occasionally glimpsed: this tension forms the matrix of creative discipleship. A group that draws its energy and its hope from this shared promise of God’s future would seem to be a more positive and authentic environment than Bion’s theory allows.
Case study: description of a learning event
The subject of this reflection is a meeting of a parish group within a diocesan Local Ministry Scheme. The purpose of these groups is to model and foster collaborative ministry and to generate and communicate vision and fresh ideas for parish development. This group was two-thirds of the way through its first year. It consists of five men, including the vicar, and four women; on this occasion one of the men was absent. I was attending the meeting in order to facilitate a review of the group’s progress. The venue was in the home of one of the members, and the meeting ran from 7.30 to 9.30pm.
A woman who was chairing the meeting welcomed me and opened in prayer. One person, whom I shall call Beryl, was missing. There was a sense that people were not entirely surprised by Beryl’s absence, yet at the same time they were reluctant to start without her. After a few minutes she arrived, and I recognised her as the person who had spoken with me at some length during the first Training Day for the new entrant parishes the previous September. She had expressed various misgivings and asked me some hard questions. I felt uneasy: this earlier conversation with Beryl had led me to think that she might be a rather ‘awkward’ member of the group. As everyone settled down I noticed that Beryl appeared much less relaxed than the others.
I began by simply asking them how they felt about themselves as a group, seven months on. Two of the men began to tell me what the group had been doing, including designing and leading a Lent Course and working on a parish Vision Statement. I interjected that it would be enormously helpful to me in due course to get an update of their activities, but for the moment I would like to concentrate on their experience of being a group. One of the men said that this hadn’t been difficult as all of them were already busy doing various things for the church before they became part of the group. I ventured the comment that my initial sense was that by and large they were quite comfortable with each other and that presumably they already knew each other quite well. Most people indicated their agreement with this, but it produced a marked reaction from Beryl, who said with some hesitation that she did have something to say about this but it would be better if she said it a little later in the meeting, so as not to disturb my agenda.
I responded that I was very happy to stay with the subject of how well they all knew each other. There was a slightly awkward silence, after which Beryl said that perhaps she had better say now what she felt. Everyone agreed and made encouraging noises, and Beryl drew a sheet of paper from her bag, with a prepared statement on it. I felt my unease rising: was this going to hi-jack the whole process of the meeting, and would the group expect me to get things back on track? Beryl said that she was not criticising other members of the group, and she realised that the problem was probably her own, but she did not feel that she knew people more than superficially. I assumed there was some personal history behind this, all of it unknown to me but some of it known to at least some of those present. She went on to say that her anxiety about the group was that it might end up just doing all the things people were already doing in the church, in the way they were already good at, whereas she had formed the impression that it ought to be about something more, with more depth and vision about it.
Everyone listened to this attentively and when Beryl finished no-one spoke for several seconds. Several people then thanked her, but nobody took up the points she had raised. Feeling quite nervous, I said that it seemed to me that Beryl had offered the meeting an alternative approach to what it might mean for the members of this group to know one another, and that she seemed to be suggesting that this might affect how the group might go about its task, and I wondered what others felt about this. Someone asked Beryl whether she meant they needed to do some team-building, and the vicar remarked that although he generally thought that team-building exercises were a waste of time, in this instance there could be value in the group spending some time ‘just being together rather than doing’. One person pointed out that Beryl had missed the first few weeks of the group’s life because she had been in Australia. Anxious that some people might think this rather insensitive, I made an observation about it being harder to get on board with a group’s formation part way through. Beryl responded firmly ‘no, it goes much deeper than that’, and I wondered whether my intervention was ill-judged.
One of the women asked Beryl why she had wanted to become part of the group. Beryl said that she hadn’t wanted to at all, indeed would much rather have run away from it, but people had been telling her that they felt she would have a valuable contribution to make. One of the men then said to Beryl that he felt it was important to have her in the group because she brought a distinctive angle on things, she saw things in a different way. Another woman added that she too had been very apprehensive about joining the group, and for the first few months had wondered what on earth she was doing there, but presently things had seemed to fall into place. Visibly emboldened by all this, Beryl said that she had recently spent a wonderful retreat at a certain place, and thought it would be very good for the group to go there for a 24-hour stay and enjoy the experience of being with each other and spending at least some of the time in silence.
At this one of the men, who had earlier been the first to say that everyone already knew each other well, became more agitated. He challenged Beryl by saying that first she had claimed they didn’t know each other, and now she was wanting them to go away and be silent together, and how would that help them to get to know each other any better? Beryl stood her ground and insisted on the value of silence as another way of building relationships, and several others present, including two women who had not yet spoken much, added their support to this. The man who had made the challenge then said with a shrug that they must be in a different sort of group from the one he thought he’d joined. I suggested that this conversation was raising some valuable questions about different personalities, which would be good for the group to work on.
The upshot of all this was that someone proposed that Beryl get in touch with the Retreat House to find some available dates for the Core Group to spend 24 hours together, and report back to the next meeting. Everyone agreed to this, though the man who had originally questioned the idea clearly remained sceptical. Another woman member confessed that she too was quite fearful of silence, but felt the experience might be good for her. By now it was after 9.00pm and the woman chairing the meeting (who had not really ‘chaired’ the lengthy discussion) said we needed to move on and asked whether there were any other matters people wanted to discuss.
Reflection on the event in the light of Bion and group process theory
In this group the ‘work group’ appeared to have manifested rather too easily and prematurely, without the ‘basic assumptions’ being named and dealt with. The air of getting straight down to business was quickly disrupted by what Beryl had to say. One or two people’s immediate response was to take flight from the troublesome question and seek to consolidate the group’s identity as a sound, practical working unit. However, the evident desire to include and affirm Beryl meant that this reaction was fairly muted. My suggestion that the conversation was raising interesting questions about the impact of different personalities on group formation was on the whole well-received and may have contributed to the decision to support Beryl’s proposal for a Quiet Day. However, an alternative interpretation might suggest that the agreement to Beryl’s proposal constituted a form of ‘flight’- a way out of the immediate difficulties by deferring further attention to a future date. It could also be that the initial approval of Beryl’s idea came close to a ‘pairing’ response in the sense that the Quiet Day became the group’s hoped-for salvation.
Before Beryl’s intervention the group was making a very good impression of passing seamlessly from the ‘forming’ to the ‘performing’ stage. My remark that they all seemed pretty comfortable with each other, which I made knowing full well that Beryl was not feeling comfortable at all, was calculated to bring the issue into the open. Beryl’s statement triggered what was perhaps the group’s first serious episode of ‘storming’, in the initial response to it by the two men who had been most ready to catalogue the group’s achievements and to insist that they all knew each other very well already. Although this episode of ‘storming’ did not lead immediately to a constructive period of ‘norming’, it may be that the proposed ‘Quiet Day’ contributed to this, allowing the group to begin to establish a pattern of engagement and withdrawal, action and reflection, doing and being.
Beryl feared that the group might imagine that it knew what it was about merely because its individual members were already busy in various fields of ministry, without ever engaging adequately with the question of ‘who are we?’ as a group. A year or so into their life, parish development groups often begin to feel they are achieving less than they had hoped. The root cause may lie one or more stages back from the presenting problem: failure to address group identity and build the trust that goes with it makes it harder to arrive at group aims, and therefore jeopardizes group achievements further down the line. The person who asked Beryl why she had become a member of the group in the first place was beginning to recognise the need for these stages to be gone through. Several members then became much more honest about their own fears. The man who commented that some of the others must have joined a different sort of group from the one he had was articulating a critical point in this process.
The group’s future seemed most likely to be jeopardized by a refusal to attend to its Individual and Group Maintenance needs as well as focusing on the Task. In this respect Beryl’s presence in the group will be a constant irritant, a reminder of what is needed. The group is extremely keen to include and affirm Beryl; failure to address the questions she is raising would probably result in her leaving the group at a later date. How this all turns out will be a vital learning experience whatever the outcome. In Christian theology, a relational understanding of personhood drawing on the doctrine of the Trinity stresses growth into maturity through relationship. By means of a series of reflections bouncing off each other we can journey towards a more holistic realisation of who we are under God. Process theories help to sharpen and focus how this happens. They dispel any ‘cosy’ notion that a relational approach to human development is somehow rendered reassuring by being presented in ‘spiritual’ language. Christian growth through reflection is often a struggle and involves painful self-discovery.
Concluding reflection
One of Bion’s early patients was Samuel Beckett, and an affinity has been noted between Bion’s observation of group interaction and Beckett’s style of dialogue. Beckett’s characters speak in a seemingly aimless round of commonplaces, misunderstandings, non sequiturs, repetitions, jokes and occasional flashes of philosophical profundity. Often the words are all there are to stave off the void; the meaning ‘outside’ remains elusive, even absent, yet what is created ‘inside’, among and between people, is strangely empathetic and humane. Bion describes conversations in groups rather like this, and admits to being perplexed about what was going on and how to address it. But only by staying with the unsatisfactory and the provisional and avoiding premature closure was he able to move on to formulate his theories. Perhaps this is a parable for the Christian learning group: if we are to grow in grace, in faith and holiness, to grow into God, then we shall find the resources for this only within and among ourselves in honest and open fellowship. This is where God ‘comes through’: salvation will not come from anywhere else, because everywhere else is the unknown.
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