Take me to your leader

Given his war background, Wilfrid Bion had the unedifying task of identifying why some soldiers would follow their leaders ‘to hell and back’ while others would ‘turn and run’. The answer was how the group operated and the projections the group held about its leader.

The Object Relations School

Bion knew a bit about groups from personal experience. A ‘half-caste’ outsider, by dint of his Anglo-Indian birth, an insider from his elitist Etonian public school education and a practising psychoanalyst of the Kleinian ‘object relations’ school, he developed, in his seminal papers published between 1943 and 1952, a complete theory of groups.

Central to Melanie Klein’s (founder of object relations) theory is the concept of projective identification and how adult behaviour can regress to infantile mechanisms. This traces a proto-mental system to a time when a baby relates to his mother and the world as ‘objects’, through the first year putting these objects together but, under stress and anxiety, tending to ‘split’ them to part object relationships that can be ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

To protect him/herself from fears, an adult resorts to infantile regressions so that a splitting of both the object and the ego can occur, together with projective identification, denial and idealisation and denigration.

Object relations theory holds particular resonance for those of us in the field of brand consumer connections who are trying to understand why a brand ‘object’ fulfils certain desires (‘needs’ are less common) for certain people at certain times. All items of status or nurture will tend to satisfy a ‘split off’ aspect of a personality.

Theory into practice

In 1948 Bion started ‘taking’ groups at the Tavistock Clinic, aiming to make what was unconscious conscious. “I take advantage of this position to establish no rules of procedure and to put forward no agenda.” (Bion 1968:77)

He observed that groups seemed intent on avoiding the work that had brought them together and wondered why. He referred to these diversions as ‘basic assumption’ activity. The casual observer may believe that the group is working smoothly, even efficiently, yet in reality the group has lost its ability to interact with the outside world, to test its ideas against the evidence and to act rationally.