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Bion and Foulkes: The Group-as-a-Whole

R.D. Hinshelwood
Group Analysis 2007; 40; 344
DOI: 10.1177/0533316407076115

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Article group
analysis

Bion and Foulkes:

The Group-as-a-Whole
R.D. Hinshelwood

This article describes the concept of the group-as-a-whole as used

by Foulkes and by Bion. The differences are noted and their differ-
ent applications to group therapy and to larger working institutions.
The relation of Foulkes’s ideas to the work at the wartime military
hospital in Northfield dominated by Bion’s work is highlighted in a
short letter from Ronald Hargreaves, discovered in the Foulkes’s
archives.
Key words: Bion, Foulkes, group-as-a-whole, Northfield Military
Hospital, group members

Influences on Foulkes and Bion

When they approached group therapy, both S.H. Foulkes and
W.R. Bion viewed the whole field. They took a group-as-a-
whole view.
The ideas in each camp changed and developed over time.
However the changes in Foulkes’s group analysis have been a
good deal less, and Pines (1985) refers to it as an evolution.
Partly, this consistency is to do with establishing training in
group analysis in 1972. Bion on the other hand had two periods
in which he was interested in groups; the first was during and
shortly after the Second World War, until about 1951, with
some revision of his ideas in 1955, after his analysis with Melanie
Klein (see Bion, 1961); and the second phase was in connection

Group Analysis. Copyright & 2007 The Group-Analytic Society (London), Vol 40(3):344–356.
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 Hinshelwood: Bion and Foulkes 345

with his notion of containment, and expressed mostly in 1970

(Bion, 1970). In this article I focus on his earlier phase of
group work, which has given rise to a subsequent tradition at
the Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute. His later work did
not result in a tradition, at least not in Britain. In both cases,
Foulkes’s and Bion’s first phase, their ideas originated in the
rather special circumstances of wartime in the 1940s.
Neither Bion nor Foulkes developed their ideas on groups out
of the blue. They both had influences from which they developed
there own ideas. Both developed their ideas in wartime Britain,
publishing their first papers on groups within a year of each
other (Bion and Rickman, 1943; Foulkes and Lewis, 1944).
Foulkes acknowledged his debt to Kurt Goldstein, who intro-
duced him to gestalt psychology. Goldstein was a neurologist for
whom Foulkes worked as a junior doctor between 1926 and 1928,
and he was interested in neural networks as whole entities.
Foulkes wrote an informal memorandum for colleagues at
Northfield Military Hospital on Goldstein (Foulkes, 1944).
Foulkes trained in psychoanalysis in Vienna, and this was his
major influence; however his alignment with classical psycho-
analysis was not solid, and he did not become close to the
Anna Freud group when in London after the war, taking a
much more independent line of thought of his own.1 When
Foulkes joined the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute in 1930,
he became acquainted with those involved in the Frankfurt Insti-
tute (School for Social Research), but seems never to have been
very involved with political issues, despite their effect on his
life. In Frankfurt, however he became more acquainted with
two sociologists, both of whom were later exiled in Britain.
They were Karl Mannheim (Winship, 2003) and Norbert Elias
(Dalal, 1998). Foulkes seems to have been closer to Elias, but
he trod a largely independent path as a social psychologist,
with a committed psychoanalytic orientation.
Bion’s influences are more difficult to track down, as he was
much less explicit about the derivations of his views. Bion studied
history at Oxford before going to medical school, and he does
display a historiographic interest at times. His experiences in
the First World War (Bion, 1982) are said to have had a profound
personal influence. Later he studied medicine, being house
surgeon to Wilfred Trotter at the University College Hospital,
London in 1930 (or thereabouts). Since Trotter wrote a book

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346 Group Analysis 40(3)

on the herd instinct, it seems likely Bion was influenced in his

views about social groups from that contact (Torres, 2003). In
particular his term ‘valency’ may have originated with Trotter.
Trotter’s book was taken seriously by Freud in Freud’s own
treatise on groups (Freud, 1921), and Trotter was a lifelong
medical colleague of Ernest Jones, founder of the British Psycho-
analytic Society; and he treated Freud’s cancer after Freud
arrived in London in 1939.
Bléandonu (1996) speculated that, when Bion joined the
Tavistock Clinic as a physician in1934,2 he was influenced by
Hadfield, one of the most experienced psychotherapists there,
and central to the eclectic English Tradition of psychotherapy
(J. A. C. Brown, 1961). Bion also moved towards psychoanalysis,
and under Hadfield’s influence, he started an analysis with John
Rickman, who as a Quaker had a strong social conscience and
used psychoanalytic understanding to try to understand social
groups. Shortly after the war – and probably during the war
(Harrison, 2000) – the Tavistock group of psychiatrists who
had been drafted into military psychiatry became acquainted
with Kurt Lewin’s notion of social field theory. Lewin (1947)
had been involved in applying the principles of gestalt psychology
to social psychology and used experimental groups (T-groups) at
his ‘laboratory’ in Bethesda in Maryland.

Their Differences
Foulkes and Bion had these influences in common. It pointed
them both towards the group-as-a-whole, but they approached
their chosen field in very different ways. Foulkes approached
groups as a psychoanalyst with over ten years experience of indi-
vidual therapy. He had qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1930, and
started work in groups in 1941. Bion, under the influence of
John Rickman, approached groups as a social scientist, and
was not a qualified psychoanalyst until after his main work on
groups. Bion was not a psychoanalyst until 1951, by which
time he had completed his Tavistock group research which com-
prised his book (Bion, 1961). Instead, Bion’s first interest was a
more theoretical one, group dynamics, under the influence of
Rickman. He did not feel constrained by doing therapy and
had a freedom to sift through a wider range of ideas. These

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 Hinshelwood: Bion and Foulkes 347

origins determined the subsequent history of their different

schools of thought on groups.
When Foulkes started work as a group psychotherapist he
made a synthesis of gestalt ideas and psychoanalysis (Foulkes,
1946a), and saw the individuals as points within a larger field,
which he thought of (after Goldstein) as a communication
matrix. The individual is the node at the intersections of commu-
nications. The picture of a matrix perhaps resembled the diagram
of a sociometric analysis.3 It is the sum of the communications
between the individuals and gains its character from what they
bring in terms of cultural assumptions about groups, as well as
the specific forms of interaction characteristic of the individuals.
whether ‘normal’ or neurotic.
Foulkes’s principles derived from certain gestalt notions.

The main new features . . . treatment [was] group centred, conductor follow-
ing the lead of the group rather than leading it, object of treatment more the
groups as a whole. Emphasis shifted to present problems affecting the group
as a whole. While the common background of personal difficulties came more
to the fore, individual differences appeared as variations of the same themes.
The total personality and behaviour in and towards the group claimed more
attention than individual symptoms and their meaning. (Foulkes, 1946a: 48)

In his first paper on groups (with Eve Lewis, 1944), Foulkes

detailed four specific therapeutic factors:

1. The group situation fosters social integration and relieves

isolation.
2. ‘Mirror reaction’.
3. Activation of the collective unconscious; condenser
phenomena.
4. Exchange [i.e. between group members]. (Foulkes and Lewis,
1964: 34).

However, Foulkes clearly had an interest in widening the rele-

vance of group therapy to become a set of principles for
approaching the whole hospital. In the context of a large hospital
(Northfield), individuals became foregrounded, against the back-
ground of wider social context. In a gestalt sense such prominent
individuals remained in a relationship with their less prominent
colleagues – a foreground to background relationship. Foulkes
somehow saw the opportunity to link together, through his own

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348 Group Analysis 40(3)

network of communications, these foregrounded individuals, and

thus to create a network that drew the whole of the hospital
system into an integrated net. (Though I use the term ‘system’,
in fact systems theory was not yet currency in social thinking
or group therapy. However, Foulkes and Main were implicitly
drawing on the idea of the hospital as a system as it would
become familiar 20 years later.)
Foulkes’s more conventionally medical approach fits standard
expectations of individual patients. They come for themselves
and the group is a means to discover what’s wrong. Foulkes’s
interventions tend to focus on the way the individual connects
with the matrix. As an individual speaks he is the foreground
of a gestalt, showing up in relief against the background of the
rest of the group. This displaces individual symptoms and directs
the focus to the relationship the individual makes with the group.
In the course of treatment, not only does the individual learn
about his relationships and personality, but the group changes
too. The group becomes an increasingly fluent entity, or matrix
of communication, manifested as a group free-floating dis-
cussion. This is modelled on the classical psychoanalytic notion
of free association, which in the neurotic is frequently inhibited
in its fluidity by the resistances and defences of the individual.
The group discourse is a force for overcoming individual inhibi-
tions and resistance, and exerts some pressure on the individual
to enter the discussion; it therefore promotes some normalization
of the individual.
For Foulkes, individuals come together in groups to pool and
express their individuality in the group matrix. At the level of the
organization Foulkes became similarly interested in the way
groups emerged within the organization – the group is then the
foreground of an emerging gestalt of the whole organization.
Bion’s thinking was that he should think socially rather than
individually. What, he asked, would then be the equivalent of
neurosis in the group rather than the individual?

In the treatment of the individual, neurosis is displayed as a problem of the

individual. In the treatment of a group it must be displayed as a problem of
the group . . . My first task, therefore, was to find out what the pursuit of
this aim would mean in terms of time-table and organization. (Bion and
Rickman, 1943: 678)

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 Hinshelwood: Bion and Foulkes 349

He then said to himself, that that question is the therapeutic

one.
Bion started by observing group aspects of neurosis and
leadership. He therefore moved across this territory in the oppo-
site direction and only put his mind to group therapy after the
war, in 1948 long after Foulkes had commenced his work and
written quite extensively about it. It is unlikely that Bion was pre-
sent when Foulkes gave his talk to the British Psychoanalytic
Society in 1946, because Bion was just entering psychoanalytic
training as a student then (he started his analysis with Melanie
Klein in 1946, finishing in 1952). In any case, he started work
in group therapy after a long experience of his own experiments
in wider social systems. That contrasted with Foulkes’s experi-
ence and starting point.
Starting from the opposite end of the spectrum, Bion saw the
individuals as secondary to the group. Individuals were inher-
ently designed specifically for group life. They are impelled by
what he called ‘basic assumptions’. These unspoken assumptions
are brought out of the individual in a group through some bio-
logical inheritance within the human species. Each individual
has an innate capacity for linking up with other individuals,
and can do so in three forms. These links are called valencies,
and they take the form of three psychological assumption
about depending, about fighting or fleeing, and about pairing.
The individual is first, for Bion, a group animal. Affronting as
this may be to the notion of personal individuality, identity and
personality, Bion thought this was the case and that in groups,
individuals were in fact affronted and at war with their group
nature:

The individual is a group animal at war, not simply with the group, but with
himself for being a group animal. (Bion, 1961: 131)

The group is primary – even psychoanalysis is not an individual

psychology but a pair psychology. For Bion, the group brings out
valencies in which the individual is trapped, and has a fight on his
hands to achieve being an individual.4 The organization tends
towards oppression.
In Bion’s approach, the group itself is badly flawed and an
impediment to satisfying the individual’s wants and needs.
Bion’s style of interpretation then focused on the group and its

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350 Group Analysis 40(3)

problems as a group; the group neurosis. In Bion’s hands the

group-as-a-whole meant the supra-individual level.
For Foulkes, the group-as-a-whole level meant the embedded
relationship of the individual in a group and with the group.
Needless to say, Foulkesian groups have flourished, catering
more closely for the ordinary expectations of patients. The tradi-
tion of so-called ‘Tavistock groups’, which is the Bion tradition,
has not flourished in the same way at all. Bion’s was a stoic call to
group members to invest their energies in struggling with the
group itself, rather than with their own problems. They are
asked to be group animals first. It is often assumed that the Tavi-
stock interpretations of group problems disheartens the indi-
vidual members. They are supposed to feel extra frustration at
being reduced to a part of the greater thing the group. They
regress and reject the group (Brown, 1985; Malan et al., 1968).
Tavistock groups are often felt as a call to investigate social
pathology, when people are all the time suffering their own
neurosis.
The particular link between group-as-a-whole interpretations
and regression in groups is based largely on anecdotal evidence.
However, Mattias Sanfuentes (2003) analysed 26 sessions from
four therapeutic groups, conducted by two group therapists.
A systematic process analysis of taped records showed some
regression after a group-as-a-whole interpretation (GAWI), and
an absence after individual-oriented interpretations (IndI),
using as his criterion an individual’s response that indicated a
K link to the interpretation.

TABLE 1

GAWI IndI

Number of interpretations 30 52
Regressive responses 4 0

This is some corroborative evidence of the link between group-

as-a-whole interpretations of the Tavistock kind and a regression
that disturbs the possibility of insight therapy.
So, Foulkes never lost sight of the fact that the individual was
in the group for treatment, whilst Bion concentrated on the group

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 Hinshelwood: Bion and Foulkes 351

neurosis which he invited the individuals to consider (see also

Brown, 1985). This led to a divergence in the aim for a group,
and ultimately to very different receptions for the two varieties
of group therapy.

Hargreaves’s Letter and Northfield

Some writers (de Maré, 1983; Elizabeth Foulkes, 1990; Pines,
1985), as well as Foulkes himself (1965) have tended to give
Foulkes a prominent place in viewing the hospital as the thera-
peutic entity (named the ‘therapeutic community’ by Main,
1946). But the records of the time do not confirm this. Kennard’s
more sober claim, that ‘Foulkes’s main interest was in the indivi-
duals he treated in his groups while Main focused on the wider
system’ (Kennard, 1998: 54), is not quite true either. It would
appear that Foulkes was interested in the hospital as a whole,
but his ideas at the time (whatever they were) were pushed
aside. They lacked appeal for those more inspired by Rickman,
Bion, Bridger, Main and Hargreaves. We know this because
after the Second World War was over, in 1946, there was a
good deal of interest in documenting the Northfield work and
many of the participants wrote published and unpublished
articles. Foulkes was no exception, sending a paper to the
Lancet (Foulkes, 1946b), and giving a paper to the British
Psychoanalytic Society (Foulkes, 1946a). However an exciting
opportunity arose when the American psychoanalyst, Karl
Menninger, wanted a series of papers from Northfield for the
Journal of the Menninger Clinic. This was organized by Ronald
Hargreaves. Hargreaves was responsible for Northfield, and for
the senior doctor there (Main). But he had his office in London
at the War Office. Foulkes’s ideas for his paper were countered
by Hargreaves, who counselled Foulkes strongly to stick to
group psychotherapy. Hargreaves’s letter still exists, and the
following is the relevant extract:

Dear Foulkes,
Many thanks for your letter of the 28th August. I think it must
have been based on a misunderstanding of my letter of 24th
August.
The Northfield experiment to my mind is not limited to group
psychotherapy; it is the functional integration of group psy-

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352 Group Analysis 40(3)

chotherapy within an attempt to structure the hospital field in a

purposeful and therapeutic manner. Your own work in the field of
group psychotherapy is, of course, in no way derived from Bion’s
concepts.
But the total pattern of the Northfield experiment as I have
summarized it above is part of a long chain of developments in
the Army which originated from Bion’s work with the leaderless
group tests. That is why I suggest that your contribution should
be about that facet of the Northfield experiment to which you
have contributed so much – namely group psychotherapy. The
group therapy in the social sense (as opposed to group psycho-
therapy) should, I think, be described by Bridger and set in
historical perspective in a paper on the dynamics of the group
in diagnosis and treatment by Bion. (Hargreaves, 1945)

The repeated underlining of ‘psycho’ is in the original letter, and

the word ‘treatment’ here is clearly used in a broader and more
superficial sense than ‘psychotherapy’. I quote this letter to
show how Foulkes was clearly seen in a restricted role as the
investigator of group psychotherapy. In fact, Foulkes accepted
this restriction and wrote about group psychotherapy (Foulkes,
1946c).
In contrast Hargreaves attributed the important thinking on
the social field of the whole hospital to Bion and his work at
the war office, where Hargreaves would have had a closer
acquaintance with that work. Foulkes’s use of gestalt principles
in the wider social field seems to have been unrecognized at the
time, and to have only been of interest to his direct followers
later (see Brown, 1985).5 In that sense, Foulkes was directed by
his military commander to concentrate on group therapy,
which he did (Foulkes 1946c).

Conclusions
Both Foulkes and Bion approached group therapy by looking
at the group-as-a-whole, and it is likely that both were influenced
by the gestalt psychology of perception, as applied to social
psychology. However, they looked at the group-as-a-whole in
different ways. Foulkes was interested in the group as a gestalt,
the individual being a foreground pattern of relationships
within a whole matrix which forms the background. It drove

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 Hinshelwood: Bion and Foulkes 353

attention towards the relations of the individual to the group,

and the individuals’ neurotic symptoms faded out of the interest
of the group and the therapist. Bion instead saw the group as a
field, rather than a matrix, retained the notion of neurosis, but
saw the group as the site of the neurosis, giving therapeutic atten-
tion to the group’s neurosis.
There is a sense in which Foulkes and Bion approached groups
from the opposite direction. By the time they came to group
therapy, Foulkes was an experienced psychoanalyst and saw
the group as a set of individuals, whose interactions became his
focus; whereas Bion’s experience was in a large organization,
the British Army, and he focused on the group as an entity in
itself, formed by the potential eclipse of the individual within
the group processes. Hence, Foulkes applied individual psychol-
ogy to groups; Bion applied organizational psychology to
groups.
The following summarizes, the contrasts in these two group-as-
a-whole approaches. Despite the different psychological origins,
they coincided roughly in the same place and the same historical
period.
Foulkes’s approach arose from a model of individual neurosis
that is implicit in psychoanalysis. He developed in the direction
of facilitating fluid group discussion, focusing on the individual’s
relations with the group, evolving a group atmosphere of involve-
ment (and maybe harmony), and a ‘normalization’ of the indi-
vidual towards the group culture.
Bion came with his experience of organizational problems and
approached the group with a new-found notion of a ‘group
neurosis’. This might be called a ‘social pathology’, and he invited
his group members to join him in ‘curing’ the group, whilst
managing their disharmonious experience of being group
animals.
Over more than half a century, time has been the judge of
which method works best. We lack careful comparative studies,
but we know the effects of the ‘market-forces’, in Britain, at
least. Foulkes’s method focuses more gratifyingly on the indi-
vidual and his relations. At the same time, it may involve a
degree of frustration because the group brushes aside the indi-
viduals’ personal and individualistic symptoms, asking him to
focus instead on his group relationships. One of the important
aspects in the comparison of these two methods is the place

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354 Group Analysis 40(3)

allowed for the patient’s narcissism. Narcissism is particularly

affronted by membership of a group in which the patient has
to find himself a part of something larger than he is. Foulkes’s
method allows that narcissism to a greater degree than the Tavi-
stock method. It does so by focusing on the individual’s relations
with the group. For the individual that is gratifying, though for
the therapist, the patient’s relations are merely part of the gestalt
of foreground-background in the group. Not surprisingly, this
has resulted in a continual expansion of group therapy, including
a broadening international acceptance.
Bion’s method, prioritizing the group problem, and reducing
the individual’s problems to the general problem of being a
human in a group, directly confronts the patient’s own wish to
be special. So, Bion’s more stringent approach has led to a decline
and almost extinction of his method at the Tavistock for the last
20 years or so. However, the Tavistock approach has given rise
instead to a flourishing method of understanding organizations
which has also a broadening international appeal. This is called
the group relations programme at the Tavistock Clinic and Tavi-
stock Institute in London.
The upshot of the different origins of the approaches to groups
has after 60 years led to divergent uses of the methods. Both were
founded in psychoanalytic ideas applied to groups, but the one
that came from individual psychoanalytic practice has survived
as the treatment method of individuals; the one that arose from
tackling an organizational problem has given rise to a con-
sultancy method for understanding organizations.

Notes
1 Foulkes’s paper ‘On Introjection’ (1937), his first paper to the British Psycho-
analytic Society, contributed to the debate at the time on Melanie Klein’s
theory of the depressive position. However his stance is rather neutral
between Melanie Klein and the classical position, which became represented
by the Freud family when they arrived in London in 1938.
2 It is known that Bion ‘treated’ Samuel Beckett during 1934–5 (Knowlson,
1996), as one of his first psychotherapy patients, and Anzieu (1989) has
speculated that Bion was strongly influenced by this encounter with the play-
wright.
3 In fact, Foulkes did read about Moreno and sociometry whilst at Northfield.
Hargreaves sent Foulkes a number of articles, and copies of the Journal of
Psychodrama and Sociometry, and encouraged Foulkes to give a talk to
others at Northfield about it – which Foulkes did. Sociometric analysis of

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 Hinshelwood: Bion and Foulkes 355

groups was becoming widely used during the Second World War, and was
employed in analysing the leaderless group tests at the WOSBs (War Office
Selection Boards).
4 Turquet (1975) developed the problem an individual has in preserving his
personal identity in a group, and especially the larger group.
5 Foulkes never had experience of working with organizations or large groups,
after Northfield – see E. Foulkes, 1990: 249.

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R.D. Hinshelwood is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and

Professor at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.
He has published widely on groups, organizations and therapeutic commu-
nities. Address: 373 Smeeth Road, Marshland St James, Wisbech, Cambs.
PE14 8EP, UK. Email: bob@hinsh.freeserve.co.uk

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