ONENESS AND ME-NESS IN THE baG?

"...the group is often used to achieve a sense of vitality by total submergence in the group, or a sense of individual independence by total repudiation of the group..."

Wilfrid Bion, Experiences in Groups

Wilfrid Bion spent only a fraction of his long and creative career actively working with groups and writing about them, but it was in this arena that he made his first original contributions (which continue to spur our thought today), and there is a sense in which he never left the group, because as we know for him psychoanalysis was primarily the study of how we think, and for him how we think is in relation to the other.

His conceptualization of groups as sharing unconscious, as well as conscious, purposes and patterns of interaction is taken for granted by us today, as if groups had always been studied from this point of view. His description of group members unconsciously cooperating in a few characteristic, repetitive patterns which give the impression that they share a basic assumption about their purpose still informs not only our observations of group interactions that do fall into the patterns he identified, but also our efforts to comprehend others we discern which apparently do not. As a result, his way of looking at groups has led on to the description of other basic assumption states beyond those he identified as Dependency, Fight/flight and Pairing (familiarly known as baD, baF and baP). Specifically, in 1974 Pierre Turquet described a fourth basic assumption which he called 'Oneness' , in which members 'seek to join in a powerful union with an omnipotent force' or 'to be lost in oceanic feelings of unity' (baO). And two decades later, W. Gordon Lawrence, Alistair Bain and Laurence Gould described a fifth basic assumption which they named 'Me-ness' , in which the assumption is that there is to be no group at all -- just unaffiliated individuals, whose only joint purpose will be to thwart the formation of a group out of fear that they might be submerged in it or persecuted by it if it did form (baM).

Though Lawrence, Bain and Gould proposed Me-ness as a separate, fifth basic assumption, they also used this language: "To state this over-neatly, baM equals not-baO." I don't remember being particularly struck by this brief sentence when I first read their paper after it was presented at the 1995 conference of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations in London, and they do not elaborate on that hint of complementarity in their paper, but it seems it must have stuck in my unconscious and given me a clue to some puzzling behaviors in groups I was working with then and over the following year, and even groups I had been involved with in past years.

Most of my observations have been of workplace organizations, where I saw basic assumption Fight/flight as most common when the primary concern of the group was competition, basic assumption Dependency when it was about caretaking, security and supplies, and basic assumption Pairing when it was future planning or exploration and discovery. These challenges seem to occur with varying frequency and degrees of prominence in different kinds of workplace groups, and sometimes I felt as if I could have detected what kind I was in just by determining the nature of the most prevalent basic assumption. Fight/flight seemed endemic where today's highly competitive, not to say cut-throat, economic marketplace was the arena in which the group had to act, Dependency when health and welfare were its charge, and Pairing when the group was there to come up with something new and visionary and redemptive in whatever field (my fantasy was that Pairing would be particularly characteristic of political campaign organizations, but I never consulted to any of those).

But increasingly it seemed to me that something else was happening, and that it was common over the full range of organizations that I came into contact with, regardless of the arena in which their work was performed or the nature of the group's task. I didn't have a word for it but it grew to feel all too familiar as I found myself regularly running through the basic assumptions, not forgetting the possibility that it was the work group I was observing, and reacting by (invisibly, I hope) shaking my head and (silently, I am sure) saying to myself, "It's something else." It was here that my pre-conception of the group came up against a mis-match with the actual group before me, and that thought (accompanied, of course, by frustration) occurred. The frustration was not lessened when the thought that kept on obtruding itself was nothing more specific than, "It's something else." So I was inexorably pressured to actually process this thought and exercise a capacity for thinking, a psychic activity that Bion had long since recognized as something we often like to avoid!

Thus crowded by recurring circumstance into thinking, I expanded my one thought to something like, "It's something else, but what? and where and when and who and how and why?"

For me, where was easy: it seemed to happen in most workplaces I observed.

When was a little harder (I took 'when' to mean 'in what circumstances'). What circumstances were common to each of these groups? Like many organizational consultants, I was often in workplaces where some variant of downsizing, re-engineering, merger, take-over, or outright dissolution of the group was in progress, recently completed or looming large on the horizon. Anxiety prevailed in this climate and it seemed to me that a considerable part of this anxiety was focused around the group formation, reformulation, or dissolution process itself. Members whose status was unthreatened and whose economic future was secure seemed as likely to feel it as those who were in danger of losing their status and income. I wondered if this now-common anxiety could be the trigger for the pattern that I still thought of as "something else".

Thinking about who was confusing. Making efforts to be especially careful about identifying who seemed to be leading whenever "something else" was happening, I noticed that although there did seem to be consistency in leader identity, the pattern of interactions in which they took the lead exhibited a kind of oscillation, sometimes very rapid, between two types. So it was hard to characterize what kind of leadership I was seeing, and on what basic assumption it was founded, even though the person of the leader was identifiable and consistent enough that one could posit a valency for this form of leadership.

How did they do what they did? This seemed almost impossible to think about in the presence of the phenonomena of "something else". Patterns seemed to break up as quickly as they emerged. There seemed to be an unusual number of interruptions to meetings, or to the pursuit of any one topic in any given meeting, along with discontinuities in time, place and attendance list. Efforts to establish an orderly succession of events or topics would be met by the "something else" leader with distractions, irrelevancies and disconnections which would soon be joined in or followed up by other members. I felt distracted, irrelevant, disconnected and stupid myself. It did not seem surprising, feeling as I did, that my attempts to make sense of what we were all experiencing often failed to establish effective connection with the thinking of others who were present. Afterwards I would gradually return to feeling normally aware and connected, but when I tried to reconstruct the interactions of the group they would still seem opaque and disconnected in my mind. It took a while for me to recognize that consistent, repetitive attacks on linking were the common factor -- they were so successful that my own efforts to create logical links between the occurrences were for a long time unavailing.

Let me tell you very briefly about what I saw in three of the groups in which I observed these patterns.

First I will describe events in a group of educators and other professionals employed by an urban school district, met to form an interdisciplinary working group to plan and implement a project to train and support elected officers in running parent organizations. A leader very quickly arose who expressed doubt about the need to establish such a group at all. The reason she gave was that they were all united by a deep, shared commitment to the children and families of the district, as a result of which they already spontaneously collaborated in giving parent associations adequate support, without meeting and planning together. In spite of considerable evidence that the majority of parent organizations were in difficulties and wanted help, two other members expressed support for this view. At the same time, all three denied any lack of support for the project and all said they would gladly participate in it. They assured us they would show up and do their part in the all-day sessions with parents -- but they did not want to be part of a group to plan and implement the project. One of these people never attended another meeting, and, since attendance was a condition of participation, had no further part in the project. The others continued to be part of it, but the issue of whether there was, or should be, a group never went away. Members in general seemed often to behave as if the group were unnecessary or undesired even if they gave lip service to its importance. The position of the original 'anti-group' leader switched, from the view that they were already effortlessly united, to the view that as independent and highly individual professionals with proven skills in their various spheres they had no need for joint planning and mutual help to participate successfully. She invariably arrived late for group meetings or left early, or came and went sporadically without more than a murmur about an important phone call, and without making any pretense of trying to catch up on what happened during her absences. One or two others followed her example but to a lesser degree. On some occasions the group seemed to be able to obliterate any consciousness of me as a separate presence, while on others they might suddenly act as if I were a 'star' about to perform. As a group we had difficulty keeping to consistent meeting times. Outside the group a great deal of individual work went on, voluminous materials were prepared and translated into another language, and complex logistics involving meals and child care were arranged. At the periodic day-long events with parents (meant to foster collaborative leadership skills they could use to develop their parent associations) the group pulled itself together, arrived punctually, and worked hard (though as separately as possible). Each member seemed to feel involved in his or her separate part of the day, and gratified by his or her own individual successes. During the initial phase of the project, which lasted several months, a cohesive core group gradually developed, but had to deal with recurring distractions, interruptions, disconnections and lack of validation from the whole. Sometimes I felt an almost frantic quality to the resistance to group formation, though all participants expressed with apparent sincerity their interest in helping the parents -- and their belief that the project did in fact help (something that the progress of parent association projects confirmed). The only reservation they ever expressed, and the only difficulty they ever made, was about working jointly as a group to plan and prepare for events which they would have to carry out together. This was especially striking in that their role was defined as teaching, facilitating and modeling collaborative leadership. It was not until the final day in the first series of parent workshops that the whole group came together in a spontaneous and clearly collaborative program, surprising themselves as well as me.

Next is the example of the 'virtual group' of an on-line mailing list attempting to reformulate itself as a working group with a defined task. There were difficulties in defining an acceptable shared task, but these seemed dwarfed in magnitude by the difficulty in agreeing to become a working group at all. The list had lost two listowners within a few months and during their ordeal concerns had been expressed about its survival. One subscriber seemed to take the lead in appealing, now to the fantasized unity of a list which need 'do' nothing in particular to enjoy a sense of oneness, then to an idealized individualism as of some 'last frontier' on-line where each is his own law. Some others also contributed similar messages, with on-line support switching from one of these positions to the other (either unstriving union or utter independence) in consecutive posts. At times the very mention of the word 'task' in someone else's message seemed to occasion long, excitable, confusing responses in which selected fragments of others' work-oriented posts would be focused on in a way that obliterated meaning, partly by disconnecting them from a logical sequence, and partly by distracting attention from the central point of the overall argument of the post. A number of successive steps towards group formation and task definition were met with this pattern of response: with appeals to an idealized union that did not depend on structure or shared effort, alternating (apparently randomly) with appeals to frontier individualism; and all couched in messages that broke up the internal logic of 'grouping' messages as well as breaking up connected discourse between those attempting to further the change. The tone of these messages often seemed highly emotional, as if some dire threat loomed. Progress was slow but the work (W) group stubbornly re-emerged from each of these episodes. Once a functioning task-oriented sub-group seemed acknowledged by the list to be in existence, objections to defining its task were tacitly dropped and this proceeded actively. Now it seemed there were considered to be at least two segments of the list -- more if the significant proportion of silent 'lurkers' were a separate segment -- and the dynamic shifted to one of rivalry between sub-groups.

Last I will recall for you a small, geographically scattered staff department of a profitable division of a large national corporation, met to consider reorganizing itself in order to better address the changing business environment of the corporation. Its' department head alternately spoke of himself as of the patriarch of a close-knit, almost incestuous family, and as of the isolated leader of an uncommunicative collection of "fiercely independent" individualists. Separate interviews with each member of the group revealed both views of the department, seen sometimes as an ingrown family and sometimes as a fragmented set of individuals who could barely coordinate a group conference call, let alone collaborate on complex projects. Our consultant team was called in when the department head, in an atmosphere of changing demands from higher-ups, decided to explore the possibility of instituting a team approach to the group's tasks. When we met with the whole group gathered in one room, interactions in which the staff seemed to behave as dependent, playful children of a doting but capricious father would prevail for a while, then give way suddenly to the behaviors of proudly independent professionals who had absolutely no need either of one another or of their department head to perform superbly. Efforts to locate and work in some middle ground repeatedly resulted in variations on a theme of, "you just don't understand, you'll have to get to know us better -- we're different from the other groups around here because we're really a family (or really independent!)" Attempts to tease out diversity issues, which appeared to be causing significant friction in the real world of that middle ground where they were neither siblings nor totally independent (i.e., issues of gender, race, and educational level), provoked denials that important differences existed, or if any were admitted to exist, that they interfered with the complete unity of the 'family' (or, alternatively, with the equal independence of individuals). When the group spent a weekend retreat exploring with the consultants the team paradigm as it might be utilized in redesigning their work, the agenda -- which they had approved in advance -- and the individual events and activities which made it up were continually interrupted by members suggesting changes or merely going insistently off-topic. Even when the whole group was able to agree on a suggested change, to substitute a topic they all agreed was more important to them than one on the agenda, it too was sabotaged by distracting interruptions, asides and prolonged tangential discussions. The department head often took the lead in breaking up the focus of the group, cueing exchanges that assumed alternatively the 'seamless union' view of the group or the 'perfect independence' view of its individual members. The atmosphere at points like these might become highly charged; tears were sometimes shed. When either of the consultants tried to make sense of the experience out loud, the department head and some other group members would take up a disconnected fragment of the consultant's remarks and react to it in isolation, ignoring the central point or the logical construct of which it was a subsidiary part. Or someone would act to split the consultants, huddling with one or the other and implying that he or she was the more sensitive or the more receptive to the group's concerns. Just when the group seemed on the verge of deciding whether teamwork might have some advantages worth pursuing, the department head initiated a 'family gathering' following a meal, at which the members reminisced about their shared history and cracked in-jokes. No decision was made. The majority of members stated in private to the consultants that change was much needed, the superior of the department head continued to press from above for change, the department head (and others) mentioned that his health demanded that responsibility and authority be redistributed -- but the group as a whole decided a couple of weeks later to continue as they were for the time being.

These are abbreviated descriptions of experiences in three diverse groups, two of them workplace groups and the other that recent upstart the on-line 'virtual group', in all of which certain patterns were observed, including:

1. preoccupation with the formation, reformulation or dissolution of the group,

2. seemingly random oscillations between Oneness and Me-ness,

3. with the same leaders spearheading both Oneness and Me-ness indifferently,

4. and both leaders and members displaying a high incidence of attacks on linking.

In these fours ways they are representative of experiences with other groups not described here, including a religious organization, a consultation team, and a sales group. My inclination, after reviewing not only the rationally identifiable similarities but the emotional experience of being in these situations and attempting to do work, was to think of this combination as representative of one basic assumption. I think of it as ba Grouping (or baG), tending to arise in response to situations where the formation, reformulation or dissolution of a group is in question; a basic assumption in which Oneness and Me-ness function alternately and indifferently much as fight and flight do in basic assumption Fight/flight; one where fantasies of total union or total independence take the place of achieving realistic interdependence, which is averted or obliterated by attacks on linking. This is my hypothesized answer to what the "something else" was that I saw happening.

And why? Whether it appeared in the form of a fantasy of seamless union or of a fantasy of self-sufficient individualism, this "something else" pattern often seemed to serve the group as a whole in avoiding (or as an unconscious preliminary to?) dealing with the great stress and practical difficulty of conscious, rational, practical wrestling with the formation, reformulation or dissolution of an actual group of anxious, struggling individuals. At other times it seemed to serve to buffer the individual member from the risk of investing energy and emotion in a group threatened with the vicissitudes common to formation, reformulation or dissolution.

The initial descriptions of Oneness and Me-ness evidently arose, in both cases, from a combination of specific experiences of working conferences based on Bion's thought, and more general observations of societal trends. My systematic observations have been in workplace organizations, with the exception of a 'virtual group' on-line and a religious organization. Today's workplace organizations are certainly overloaded both with the real experience of repeated group formation, reformulation and dissolution and with the continual threat of such occurrences. In some of them such changes happen so frequently as almost to give the impression that they are being 'morphed' by the special effects crew of a film company. In that respect they may be atypical and hypotheses based on observations in them biased accordingly. But I would speculate that similar combinations of events, leadership and group response might be observable in the social/political movements which arise in a time of the rapid break-up and reformulation of geo-political entities. (Lawrence, Bain and Gould indicate in their cited paper their belief that circumstances such as those we see in the former Yugoslavia do favor the occurrence of Me-ness.) I would further hypothesize that basic assumption Grouping was notable as a world-wide phenomenon in the 1960's and 70's, when young people everywhere confused not only their parents but social commentators with their apparent seesawing between communalism and individualism. Not surprising, perhaps, that it was in this world atmosphere that Turquet first described Oneness. Today there are other broad societal conditions that make it important for us to refine our understanding of the processes set into motion in workplaces and in broad socio-political movements when groups are continually forming, merging, fragmenting, re-aligning and dissolving.

I don't know whether my contribution to that effort will be helpful, or will be experienced by you as a distraction, a disconnect, even an attack on the links created by my predecessors and teachers. After all, I am part of this world of 'morphing' groups, and susceptible to its prevailing dynamics. While I have found the concept of basic assumption Grouping useful in thinking about groups with which I work, you may have other and better explanations for the kind of occurrences I describe. I present mine for your consideration in the hope that others with their varied experiences may be able to help confirm or disconfirm the usefulness of such a construct.

Besides my debt to Wilfrid Bion, I owe many thanks to my teachers at the Washington School of Psychiatry, among whom as visiting faculty was a distinguished chairperson of the panel on Bion's Work with Groups and Further Developments, Isabel Menzies Lyth; to Justin Frank (who also taught me vividly in Washington) and Hannah Fox for their nourishing and imaginative leadership of the Bion study group at the Metropolitan Center in New York; to my fellow study group members, analysts whose willingness and ability to work often at the interface of individual and group applications of Bion's thought are so stimulating; to my teachers at the White Institute in New York, especially Larry Gould, Tom Gilmore and Ken Eisold; and to the consultants and clients with whom I have worked. The cultivation of my knowledge was theirs; any misuse of it has been mine.

Bion, W.R. (1961), EXPERIENCES IN GROUPS, Tavistock Publications, London

Turquet, Pierre M. (1974), "Leadership: the Individual and the Group", in Gibbard, G.S. et al, eds, THE LARGE GROUP: THERAPY AND DYNAMICS, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco and London

Lawrence, W.G., Bain, A., and Gould, L., "The Fifth Basic Assumption," paper read at the 1995 Conference of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations in London

Bion, W.R. (1967), "A Theory of Thinking", in his SECOND THOUGHTS, Heineman, London

Bion, W.R. (1967), "Attacks on Linking", in his SECOND THOUGHTS, Heineman, London

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Diane Hatcher Cano

©1997 - Copyright by Diane Cano