On the Genealogy of Group Dynamics

Time Grows Ever Shorter

Nietzsche asks his readers to consider “these English psychologists.”

“Just what do they want?” he asks. He also has some ideas, possibly sincere, and possibly just some bants:

“Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle humans, which it might well not admit to itself? Or perhaps a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green? Or a certain subterranean animosity and rancune towards Christianity (and Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of consciousness? Or even a lewd taste for the strange, for the painful paradox, for the dubious and nonsensical in life? Or finally – a bit of everything, a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and need for pepper?”

That is a lot to take at once, but man does it sound great. Maybe we can help by looking at just this one English psychologist for a bit.

Like most of the 20th century’s great Englishmen, Wilfred Bion was born somewhere other than England—in India. His life is, in truth, no more or less interesting than other members of his class and disposition. His first encounter with Europe, like many other colonial members of the Georgian upper-middle-class, came during the Great War, in which he served with distinction in the Royal Army’s fledgling Tank Corps. He first entered the Western Front on June 26, 1917, and by the time he was cited for meritorious service in the Battle of Cambrai, he’d been promoted to acting captain.

After the war, he remained in England, where he matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford, and earned a degree in history, with a medical qualification. From Oxford, Bion was drawn magnetically to London, and the "strange new subject called psychoanalysis." In London, he was introduced to Wilfred Trotter, whose work on crowd psychology, in the vein of Gustav Le Bon, earned him accolades for his 1916 text Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. Now nearly forgotten, that text was heavily cited by Edward Bernays, and includes a gold mine of references on the early history of psychoanalysis, including this gem:

“One is apt to suppose the chief function of a sound moral[e] is the maintenance of high courage and resolution through the ups and downs of warfare. In a nation whose actual independence and existence are threatened from without such qualities may be taken for granted and may be present when the general moral forces are seriously disordered. A satisfactory morale gives something much more difficult to attain. It gives smoothness of working, energy and enterprise to the whole national machine, while from the individual it ensures the maximal outflow of effort with a minimal interference from such egoistic passions as anxiety, impatience, and discontent.”

and also this one:

“It has already been pointed out how dangerous it would be to breed man for reason — that is, against suggestibility. The idea is a fit companion for the device of breeding against “degeneracy”. The degenerate — that is, the mentally unstable – have demonstrated by the mere fact of instability that they possess the quality of sensitiveness to feeling and to experience, for it is this which has prevented them from applying the remedy of rationalization or exclusion when they have met with experience conflicting with the herd suggestion.”

Well, that is already a little unnerving, but Bion seems to have been excited by it all. From contacts in London, the young clinician received a position working at the newly founded Tavistock Clinic—a loose association of psychoanalytic researchers whose profile rose steadily over the course of the 1930s. It was in the course of these initial projects with Tavistock that Bion somewhat successfully treated Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and encountered eminent German psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whom he later credited with offering breakthrough insights regarding “psychodynamics,” or “dynamics of groups,” the work for which he is best remembered. Here's a foreboding quote for the Jungbros:

"Jung's emphasis on the collective unconscious and the role of archetypes in shaping human behavior has been a valuable contribution to our understanding of group dynamics and the workings of the human psyche."

These early experiments provided a number of results and working papers for the Tavistock crew, but the most important thing (we can surmise) they did prior to the outbreak of the Second World War was to somehow convince the British government their work was both indispensable and useful. Its outbreak saw the entire Tavistock group drafted into the service en bloc and ordered to set up a squirm sesh in the rear, doing various psychological cataloging experiments. Of these, by far the most important was their working paper on officer selection criteria and numerous memos concerning the treatment (again) of “shell-shocked” patients. Bion was attached to this latter group and sent to the Hollymoor Hospital in Birmingham, where we start to get really interested in things he said. Now we have enough lore to go on though, so let’s move on.

At Hollymoor, Bion was placed in charge of the “training wing.” He described his charges as “300–400 men who in their units already had the benefit of such therapeutic value as lies in military discipline,” virtues which had nonetheless “not been enough to stop them from finding their way into a psychiatric hospital.” The resulting “First Northfield Experiment,” conducted by Bion and John Rickman, remains one of the most influential and controversial psychological experiments.

Tom Harrison and David Clarke, in their 1992 systemic review of the Northfield experiments, record that staff were generally “impressed by the marked courage of their patients.” They continue: “the men of Northfield were highly intelligent and articulate and had more decorations for valor than was usual for the Army.” But they also concede a decisive dark side:

“Almost everyone was imprisoned in the mesh of his own obsessions, fears and anxieties. There was something, too, in the very atmosphere of the ward, something enervating and depressing like a non-olfactory stink, a bad smell in the head, as if the air had been infected by the collective melancholy and morbidity of the men who lived in it.”

That’s a revealing passage, with a sharp discontinuity. How, and better yet, “why?” were these men, in many cases the cream of the wartime British Army, subjected to conditions so appalling? Quite a bit of the speculation about the Northfield experiments hinges on exactly who was part of the experiment and what was being experimented on. In the immediate aftermath of the war, participants often stressed the pragmatic military nature of the assignment. Beginning in late 1943, patients were only admitted to Hollymoor if there was a reasonable chance of being rehabilitated to active service with their units. Much evidence suggests this was not the case in the earlier Northfield experiment, though—with one orderly recalling in 1946 that early assignees to Hollymoor were sent there for reasons of containment rather than rehabilitation. What kind of containment? Or rather, what was being contained?

Bion himself, though nominally in charge of the training wing and responsible for their care, was somewhat reticent on the matter. He did, however, warn against the “hideous blunder of thinking that patients are potential cannon fodder, and are to be returned as such to their units.” The creepiest (and so, the most likely) possibility is that Bion and Rickman were running on their own agenda, totally crosswise to the Army’s, and this probably has something to do with their getting sacked, which they were—before the initiation of the second experiment. Whatever they did, and whatever they learned, it unnerved the people who enabled it enough to make them try to pretend it didn’t happen.

How did a military hospital come to generate advances in psychiatry which have been described as a “radical departure from the authoritarian [military] regime where communication is essentially downwards?” Bion gives us some help in his write-up on the Northfield Experiment, published in 1943 and later included in his seminal text Experiences in Groups. Bion frames the genesis of the experiment naturally enough, as an outgrowth of his desire to fuse his own day-to-day activities with the work of rehabilitating patients:

“I became convinced that what was required was the sort of discipline achieved in a theatre of war by an experienced officer in command of a rather scallywag battalion. But what sort of discipline is that? In face of the urgent need for action I sought, and found, a working hypothesis. It was, that the discipline required depends on two main factors: (i) the presence of the enemy, who provided a common danger and a common aim; and (ii) the presence of an officer who, being experienced, knows some of his own failings, respects the integrity of his men, and is not afraid of either their goodwill or their hostility.”

This idea may seem familiar to anyone who has been in a structured environment. Incubating a “group identity” among individuals expected to function as a unit is a well-known approach. But Bion added another layer:

“At the same time, the organization could be used to further the main aim of the training wing—the education and training of the community in the problems of interpersonal relationships. If it could approximate to this theoretical construct [the scallywag battalion], it would enable the members of the training wing to stand (as it were) outside the framework and look with detachment and growing understanding upon the problems of its working.”

There’s a charitable way to interpret this, and then there are all the other ways. Inducing dissociative behavior in war veterans sounds extreme, either way. But maybe it was all just an experiment in treating shell-shock patients? Bion’s reference to “no one really understood what was happening at Hollymoor” implies something less straightforward. None of this appears to align with soldiers merely recovering from shell shock, nor with a simple return to active duty.

The secondary literature on this experiment drops these hints like a hostage victim blinking GPS coordinates. At least some staff, and possibly the British government itself, were not only participants in but also subjects of Tavistock’s research. Here’s how Dr. Bion described his impressions:

“I found it helpful to visualize the projected organization of the training wing as if it were a framework enclosed within transparent walls. Into this space, the patient would be admitted at one point, and the activities within that space would be so organized that he could move freely in any direction according to the resultant of his conflicting impulses. His movements, as far as possible, were not to be distorted by outside interference. As a result, his behavior could be trusted to give a fair indication of his effective will and aims, as opposed to the aims he himself proclaimed or the psychiatrist wished him to have.”

“Effective will and aims” sounds a lot like “revealed preference,” doesn’t it?

The apparent goal of these restrictions was to reduce the number of variables that would cause a test subject to act like a test subject. If the patient, for instance, is aware that they are at Hollymoor for psychiatric treatment, then according to Dr. Bion, psychiatric treatment may not be the best thing to do with them. If every patient admitted to the hospital is ostensibly there to be rehabilitated and returned to their units, then … uh … Bion seems to be implying that this can’t really be what he was after.

What eventually emerges is the concept of a kind of Potemkin’s Military Hospital. The patients, staff, administrators, commissioners, and military officials would have seen the Northfield Experiment as an unorthodox attempt to rehabilitate shell-shocked soldiers. The actual experiment, however, was a free-form attempt to use the emergent characteristics of particular groups within groups to steer the behavior of the larger group without resorting to traditionally authoritarian (military) methods.

Americans familiar with anti-military films like MASH, Catch-22, and Kelly’s Heroes might recognize the type of environment Bion describes. The Northfield doctors gave patients wide latitude to set their own schedules and agenda for treatment—with the stipulation that each day included mandatory “parade exercises,” an activity familiar to all military personnel. Additionally, patients were required to join a group, something we would now call a “therapeutic community” or fandom. But in the unformed language of the psychoanalysts in the 1940s, it was simply a group of patients whose meetings revolved around completing a specific task. It could be dancing lessons, painting, or football; but each patient was required to join at least one group or to create a group focused on an activity of their choice, and to recruit others to join it.