Wilfred Bion reading Plato, what a combination!
Summarising the ideas of Wilfred Bion on group psycho-social dynamics, in his November 2024 Linked-In paper on ‘Understanding Group Dynamics Through the Lens of Wilfred Bion: A Guide for Leaders’, Rafael Chiuzi, an organisational psychologist, says that, according to Bion:
…. leaders often become the focal point of group projections, idealized as saviors or blamed as scapegoats depending on the group’s emotional state. Managing these projections requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and a commitment to balancing task-oriented and emotional group needs.
There seems an obviousness to the part of the summary I give above, but only because we continually misunderstand what it means to ‘meet emotional group needs’. For it is basic to all psychodynamic thought that the needs pf any organism with consciousness are rarely the same as their expressed wants and sensed desires. And, Bion saw groups as capable of acting like an organism, driven by anxiety to avoidance of confrontation of real challenges and succumbing to the need to recognise the autonomy and creativity of each of its members, and instead succumbing to magical thinking linked to stereotypes of salvation and damnation led by an external representative of them as a whole – a leader. Hence Chiuzi’s warning that leaders are can be too often shoe-horned into being ‘idealized as saviors or blamed as scapegoats depending on the group’s emotional state‘.
The issue here is that the leader, like the good-enough parent of a child, must help ‘contain’ group anxiety; hearing it, understanding its causation and returning the basic problem leading to alleviation back to the thing whose competence in task management is the real engine of change. The bad leader feed the dependency, in the hope of being a ‘saviour’ but in the greaer likelihood of being the ‘scapegoat’. Here is the issue with Sir Keir Starmer.
Starmer is a man yoked to a myth in British politics that the essence of government whatever its aims is leadership, and in particular the appearance of strong individual leadership. The tradition in the twentieth century starts with Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, then veers into parody in Boris Johnson and, heaven forfend, Liz Truss.
Starmer learnt the ropes mainly from Boris Johnson, festooned his appearance with flanking Union flags, encouraging photography from below and into pronouncements linking him to the entirety of his programme, or more lately offshoots of issues he thinks might raise his profile as a leader, such as the safety of women and, in a bli ding act of hypocrisy, the leader of of actions to defeat child poverty, after actually disciplining thise who fought for thise policies before he was forced to appear to lead on them. He once thought he might mimic Elizabeth I in making UK tours of ‘his people’, that are really prearranged propaganda. He continually links his aspirations to the group desires and anxieties of ‘working people’.
He stated his claim to governance on having ‘changed’ the Labour Party, proving it by securing himself from any association with any idea of change beyond that of fostering economic growth. In government, his first acts were to continue to attack what he identified as leftward leaning in the Labour Party, with obscenely unjustified exclusions from Paty process and identity through the whipping procedure. He headed the antagonism not only to not lifting the 2 child gap but the removal of winter heat assurance for elders, his most damaging thoughtless pride in the belief that a good leader courts temporary unpopularity.
Even now, he resists not being identified as a strong sole leader in order to avoid recognising his dependence on forces that should be tied to cooperation and task-sharing communalism. He feeds his supposed authority into policies born out of projected fear in working class communities that falsely identify economic and social ills with immigration, claiming the justice of these fears and their reality.
He will feed the ‘basic assumptions’ that are the basis of group dependency on leadership znd retreat from engagement in commonality, and tje mood has already swung to mean that he has become the scapegoating for ills that he cannot mend, whilst laying the ground for a populist leader like Farage to build the basis of Fascism.
This is tragic for all of us. Caught in his own leadership rhetoric, he has made, I think,, right wing success much more viable. It is a failure in him of both intellectual and emotional intelligence, a travesty of humanity brought about by u thi king intetest in power at the cost of principle.
All for today. I am feeling sick to my heart because I have just discovered that this man who colluded with genocide in Gaza is now contemplating going Trump’s Board of Governance in that tragic area of settler colonial triumph.
All love, though
Steven xxxxx
Steve_Bamlett_blog 