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INTERPRETATION
Chapter Five - A Beginning – Page 179
It occurs to me that this session comes at a stage in the group where the students have
come to be able to use the group. What took me to that was the recognition that in this
session they repeatedly bring in a kind of complaint about their experience on the
course, and the pain of the difficulty and vulnerability that is involved in this kind of
learning. This seems to illustrate well Bion’s (1961, 1962a) notion, outlined in Chapter
Two Part Two on Page 56, of the hatred of learning from experience.
As reminder, Bion made use of his experiences and observations with psychotic patients
to describe the way in which deviations can occur from those alignments of functions
within the person which can otherwise enable learning and thought (1959, 1962a).
Bion’s notion of attacks on psychological and emotional linking by disturbed
individuals, both keen to gain assistance but profoundly threatened by the provision of
that assistance, can be used to understand how both groups and individuals will at times
feel hatred towards the prospect of learning from experience and envy of the capacity,
and will seek to destroy the opportunity to gain such learning.
Bion also described the way in which groups can operate as if there is one of a set of
underlying basic assumptions for how the group should operate, Dependency (as if the
group were met to be dependent on the leader(s) for all that takes place), Fight-Flight
(as if the group were met for the purpose of either fleeing from participation or of
fighting, possibly alternating between the two), or Pairing (as if the group were met for
the purpose of two members getting together to be creative, perhaps by producing The
Messiah). Alternatively, at other times the group can operate in Work mode, when
members co-operate in the primary task for which the group are met. Basic assumption