Publication
Intra-Group Tensions in Therapy, Their study as the task of the group in The Lancet, 27th November 1943.
Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Other Authors A-Z (Bion)
Cited by Jacques Lacan
British Psychiatry and the War : 1947 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (1947 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Translated by Philip Dravers and Veronique Voruz
[JE notes that this description almost fits exactly my experience in Tavistock-style groups (Small, medium and large) in the late 1960’s.]
P15 of PN, P9-10 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Thus, I am going to try to present these two men for you au naturel, men of whom it can be said that the flame of creation bums in them. In the first, this flame is as if frozen in a motionless and lunar mask accentuated by the thin commas of a black moustache, which no less than the high stature and swimmer’s thorax which support him, give the lie to Kretschmerian formulations, since everything about him alerts us to the fact that we are in the presence of one of those beings who remain solitary even in the utmost commitment, as is confirmed in his case by his exploit in Flanders where he followed his assault tank with whip in hand and thus paradoxically forced the weft of destiny. In the other, this flame scintillates behind a lorgnette to the rhythm of a verb burning to return to action, in the man who, with a smile which makes his fawn brush bristle, likes to recall how he completed his experience as analyst with the management of men tested in the fire at Petrograd in October 1917. The former, Bion, and the latter Rickman have published together in the issue of 27th November 1943 of The Lancet, which is the equivalent both in its audience and its format to our Presse médicale, an article which, though amounting to only six newspaper columns, will mark a historic date in psychiatry.
Under the significant title: Intra-group Tensions in Therapy, Their Study as the task of the Group, the authors bring us a concrete example of their activities in a military hospital which, with the unadorned clarity it casts on both the occasion and the principles of the said activities and with perfect humility, I would add, takes on the value of a demonstration of method. I find in their work something of the miraculous feeling of the initial stages of the Freudian elaboration: that of finding in the very impasse of a situation the vital force of an intervention. Here we find Bion having to deal with some 400 ‘oddities’ (oiseaux) in a service that goes under the banner of re-education.
The anarchical importunities of their occasional needs – requests for exceptional authorisations, chronic irregularities of their situation – are going to appeal to him from the outset as destined to paralyse his work by subtracting hours from his working time, already arithmetically insufficient to solve the structural problem posed by each case, if taken one by one. It is from this very difficulty that Bion will begin in order to cross the Rubicon of a methodical innovation.
Indeed, how are these men to be considered in their present situation if not as soldiers who cannot submit themselves to discipline, and who will thus remain closed to the positive therapeutic effects which depend upon it, for the reason that it is the very factor which brought them together here in the first place?
But what does it take to tum this aggregate of irreducible characters – what one calls a disciplinary company – into a functioning troop within a theatre of war? Two elements: the presence of the enemy which solders the group in the face of a common threat, and a leader, whose experience of men allows him to set as precisely as possible the margin to be allowed for their weaknesses, and who can maintain this margin through his authority, in other words, through the fact that everybody knows that once a responsibility is assumed, he does not chicken out’ [il ne se ‘dégonfle’ pas]. The author is one such leader, for whom the respect of man is consciousness of self, and who is able to support anyone wherever he takes him.
As for the common danger, does it not rest in the very extravagances which undermine the rationale behind these men’s stay here, for indeed they oppose the primary conditions of their recovery? But it is necessary to make them aware of it.
And this is where the psychoanalyst’s spirit intervenes, the psychoanalyst who is going to deal with the sum of the obstacles opposing this awareness, like this resistance or systematic misrecognition [méconnaissance] he learnt to handle in the treatment of neurotic individuals.
But here he is going to treat it at the level of the group.
In the prescribed situation, Bion has even more of a hold on the group than the psychoanalyst has on the individual, since by right at least, and then as leader, he is part of the group. But this is precisely what the group does not really realise. This is why the doctor will have to pass via the feigned inertia of the analyst, and rely upon the only factual hold he is given, namely keeping the group within the reach of his words.
On this basis, he will undertake to organise the situation so as to force the group to become aware of the difficulties of its existence as a group, and then to render it more and more transparent to itself, to the point where each of its members may be able to judge adequately the progress of the whole – bearing in mind that the ideal of such an organisation for the doctor lies in its perfect legibility, such that he may be able to appreciate at any time the exit towards which each ‘case’ entrusted to his care is travelling, whether this be a return to his unit, release into civilian life, or persistence in neurosis.
Here is a brief account of the regulation he promulgates during an inaugural meeting of all the men: a certain number of groups will be formed, each defined by an object of occupation, but they will be left entirely to the initiative of the men, that is to say that not only will each individual aggregate to a group on his own accord but that he will also be able to promote a new group according to his own idea, with only this limitation that the object of the new group be itself new, in other words, that it should not serve the same function as that of another group. It is of course understood that it remains possible for each at any time to find rest in the ad hoc dormitory without any other obligation than to declare it to the head warden.
The examination of the progress of things established in this way will be the object of a general assembly which will take place every day at ten-to-twelve and will last for half an hour.
The article makes us follow, in a captivating progression: the first oscillation of men at the announcement of measures which, considering how things are usually conducted in such places, engender vertigo (and I can imagine the effect they would have produced in my former department at theVal de Grâce hospital); then the first shabby formations which present themselves rather as a means of putting the good faith of the doctor to the test: and soon the men take to the game, setting up a carpentry workshop, a preparatory course for liaison officers, a course in practiced cartography, a vehicle maintenance workshop, and even a group devoted to the daily task of updating a clear diagram detailing the activities in progress and the participation of each person. Reciprocally the doctor, taking the men to task as they themselves took him at his word, quickly enough finds the occasion for denouncing to them in their own acts this inefficiency which he incessantly hears them blaming on the functioning of the army – and suddenly the crystallisation of an auto-critique materialises in the group, marked among other things by the appearance of a voluntary chore which day after day changes the appearance of the rooms, from now on mopped and tidy, by the first calls made upon authority, the collective protestation against slackers, profiteers from the effort of others and indeed one can think of the indignation of this despoiled group (this episode is not in the article) the day that the leather scissors disappeared! But each time his intervention is called for, Bion, with the firm patience of the psychoanalyst sends the ball back to those concerned: no punishment, no replacement of scissors. Slackers are a problem put to the reflection of the group, as is that of the preservation of the scissors for work. Until such problems are solved, the more active ones will carry on working for the others, and the purchase of new scissors will be made at the expense of all.
In these conditions, Bion does not lack ‘guts’ and when a wise-guy proposes to institute a dance class, far from responding with a reminder of proprieties that without doubt the very promoter of the idea aimed to provoke, he knows how to bank on a more secret motivation which he discerns in the feeling of inferiority felt by any man denied the honour of fighting. Thus, oblivious to potential criticism, even scandal, he relies on it for social stimulation by deciding that the classes will be given in the evenings after work by female officers of the ATS of the hospital (these initials designate drafted women), and that these classes will be reserved for those who know nothing of dance and have yet to learn. And in effect the class, which takes place in the Presence of the officer occupying the function of hospital director, achieves for these men an initiation into a style of behaviour which, thanks to its prestige, reawakens in them the feeling of their dignity.
Within a few weeks the service said to be that of re-education becomes the seat of a new spirit that the officers recognised in the men at the time of collective events, those of a musical order for example. During such events the officers entertained a more familiar relation with the men, giving birth to the team-spirit characteristic of the department, and which impressed itself upon the newcomers who arrived on the departure of those it had marked with its good effects. The feeling that there were conditions specific to the existence of the group, maintained by the constant action of the animating doctor, is what held it together.
Here we find the principle of a group treatment grounded upon the testing and becoming aware of the factors required for there to be a good group spirit. This treatment takes on its original value in comparison to various other attempts made in Anglo-Saxon countries, in the same register but using different means.
Rickman applies the same method in the observation room where he is dealing with a smaller number of patients, but also with a regrouping of less homogenous cases. He must therefore combine it with individual interviews, but it is always from the same angle that the problems of the patient are approached. In this regard he makes the following remark which to some will seem striking that if one can say that the neurotic is ego-centric and loathes any effort of co-operation it is perhaps because he is rarely placed in an environment when every member would be on the same footing as himself when it comes to relating to one’s counterpart (sembable).
I offer the formula to those of my auditors who contend that the condition of all rational treatment of mental disorders lies in the creation of a neo-society, in which the patient would maintain or restore a human exchange, the very disappearance of which alone redoubles the depreciating effects of the disorder.
If I have lingered upon the reproduction of the lively details of this experience, it is because they seem to me to be pregnant with a birth of sorts that is a new outlook opening upon the world. And if there are some who object to this in view of the specifically British nature of some traits, I will respond to them that this is one of the problems to be submitted to this new viewpoint: namely, how is the mobilisable share of the psychical effects of a group to be determined? And does its specific rate vary according to the cultural arca? Once the mind has conceived a new register of determination it cannot escape from it so easily.
On the other hand, such a register gives a clearer sense to some of the observations that have expressed themselves with less success in the systems of reference already in use: such is the formula that circulates without reservation in the discourse of my friend the psychoanalyst Turquet*, when he tells me of the homosexual structure of the military profession in Britain and when he asks me whether this formula is applicable to the French army.
[* Pierre Maurice Turquet (13 December 1913 – 27 December 1975) was an English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic with a special interest in group relations. He was also a British Olympic fencer, who competed in the team foil event at the 1948 Summer Olympics. (From Wikipedia)]
There should be nothing surprising in the realisation that any specialised social organism finds a favourable element in a specific deformation of the individual type, when all our experience of man indicates that it is the very insufficiencies of his physiology which support the greatest fecundity of his psychism.
Thus, by referring to the indications I was able to extract from a piecemeal experience, I respond to him that virile worth, expressed in the most extreme type of traditional officer training in our country, appeared to me on several occasions to be a compensation for what our ancestors would have called a certain weakness in pleasures [faiblesse au déduit].
Related text
Experiences in Groups and other papers : 1961 : Wilfred R. Bion, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Bion)