The cases of the Praxis Group and the Theory Group with which we began this text concerned examples where the conversation in small groups broke down. In trying to make sense of them, the theory of the conversation offered by Gunn (which both these groups were aware of and referred to) seemed insufficient to deal with the crises the groups faced or to understand how they were resolved. To make sense of experiences like those cited in the case studies, we have turned to psychoanalysis — “group relations” — and in particular to the work of Wilfred Bion.¹ Here we found some texts that seemed to speak uncannily to us and to the experiences related in our case studies.

In “The Internal Establishment”, Paul Hoggett, using a case study of a community project he was asked to consult with, gives an account of certain dynamics of group life that are similar to the case of the Praxis Group and the experiences that many people have when they start to question aspects of political groups with which they are involved.²

Hoggett draws on psychoanalytic ideas from a number of sources,³ but especially Wilfred Bion’s idea of an “establishment” within the group, through which to understand what he identifies as a deep structure in collectivities that allows certain forms of thinking and life to exist, but which ruthlessly acts against others.

Borrowing Christopher Bollas’s term the “unthought known”,⁴ Hoggett suggests that groups, like individuals, have aspects which, while known in some sense, cannot really be thought about, for to do so would threaten the group’s illusions about itself. For Hoggett, the fact that groups tell partially illusory stories about themselves is not a problem in itself — it is part of “the creative quality of all social life”.⁵ “Groups” as Hoggett puts it, “occupy that potential space where nothing is simply ‘real’ nor simply ‘hallucinated’”.⁶ Their creative capacity exists in a space they make for themselves through their self narrative. But, as he warns, “the step between illusion and delusion is short indeed”.⁷ The “imaginative fiction” has the propensity to become a “consolatory myth… constantly reinforced by propaganda”.⁸ The story the group presents to others is as much about misleading itself as misleading others. Questioning this story is often experienced as persecutory and shaming, and produces a reaction from what he calls the group’s “establishment”: a “pathological organisation” within the group which guards its “unthought known” against examination and critique, and responds by patching over gaps in its illusions.

Summing up the idea, Hoggett suggests the establishment is “a reactionary and secretive force”, a hidden deep structure, which operates “more like a network than an institution”; that, while capable of acting with violence and terror, it normally relies on “guile, propaganda and patronage”, adeptly drawing upon individuals’ worst qualities, “their desire not to think too much, not to ask too many questions”.⁹

Hoggett suggests that the split between a restrictive establishment and the rebel within a group pushing new thinking is not one of good and bad individuals, but something that exists within individuals themselves.¹⁰ The conflict of which Hoggett speaks is between two universal tendencies in groups and individuals: one towards development or learning from experience, the other towards resisting such learning. As he puts it, in a group every “member, in differing proportions, is both a victim, a tyrant, a rebel and a collaborator — that is, part of the establishment and part of the opposition. The function of the establishment is to police this racket.”¹¹

Hoggett’s typology suggests that “individuals” criticising groups from “outside” can be as much a victim of restricted thinking, and as conformist to a “group in the mind”, as the members of more obvious groups in the world that they subject to criticism. Moreover, Hoggett’s interpretation can be easily extended from formal groups and institutions to the informal milieus and networks that people now tend to operate in, and even loose identifications like “the left”, “anarchism”, “marxism”, “the ultra-left”, or “the movement”, which may have their own “unthought knowns”, their own establishment, their own injunctions against thinking certain thoughts, and their own pathological ways of dealing with dissent.

Drawing on Hoggett, we might say that what happened in the Praxis Group was a failure of the group and its establishment to deal with the change and development that the new ideas represented. The new ideas challenged the group’s “unthought known” regarding the relation of theory and practice and the role of radicals and revolutionary theory. The focus on the new ideas was seen to get in the way of the group’s practical orientation, its existing conception of its purpose. The new ideas were seen as a threat, and action was taken to eliminate their disruptive presence.

The Theory Group formed with an explicit aim of being open to new ideas, and ultimately to reality itself. It was influenced by the same ideas that tore apart the Praxis Group. One danger it faced was that the new ideas that were so explosive to the framework of the Praxis Group would become their own restrictive framework that functions as an establishment. However, the tensions that almost tore the new group apart in its early years were of a different character, related as a shadow to the very positive feelings its open creativity generated.

Interestingly, just as we found in Hoggett’s “Inner Establishment” a description that uncannily matches aspects of the Praxis Group, in his Partisans in an Uncertain World Hoggett offers a way of thinking about what he calls the creative or “Revolutionary Work Group” that resonates strongly with the case of the Theory Group. Hoggett recounts an experience of forming a group with politically like-minded academic colleagues. He describes the excitement, free-flowing creativity, and sense of possibility of the group. Spontaneously bound together by the shared desire and imagination of its members, the group does not require any formal discipline. Noting Bion’s concept of co-operation applied to the work group, Hoggett suggests that, as apt as it may be, it “hardly does justice to the electric-like nature” of the group he is describing, which can be better thought of as a “free association… in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all”.¹²

Similar to Gunn’s account of the conversation, Hoggett finds a model for this peculiar kind of willed group in the accounts given of crowds and other collectivities that form in relation to revolutionary events. He draws on a description of such collectives by Polan (who in turn is drawing on Sartre) who states that they can draw “on an almost electric field of common assumptions and shared norms”, allowing them to carry out their tasks and pursue their goals “with a speed, efficiency, willingness and comradeship that makes formal structures and procedures practically redundant”.¹³ People who have seen barricades thrown up, whether in Paris in 1968 or Gezi Park in 2013, or participated in lower key events of social contestation, will recognise what is being talked about here. Yet Hoggett claims that such a process can also apply to a more willed small group.

Hoggett’s description of the character of his small group and its mutual supportive common purpose as “exciting” and “electric-like” resonates with many people’s experiences of the initial period of a political group or project, whether it be a reading group, publishing venture, or a more immediately struggle-oriented collectivity. What he describes as the problems that such groups encounter also, unfortunately, resonate. He noted that, almost immediately,

...we were each aware of the possibility of betrayal. This was not about defection, of joining “the other side”, for at that moment there were no sides to be drawn; rather it was a fear of one’s fellows not giving of themselves. The creative [or revolutionary] group demands one thing: the generosity of its members … What is feared, then, is not defection but the failure to give generously; for the group this is the one form of dissent which is difficult to tolerate.¹⁴ In the Theory Group, the tension that Hoggett describes seemed to be at work in the conflict around the member who wished to go abroad. It came up at other times around fears that someone might use ideas developed in a collective context to advance a personal academic career. For Hoggett, “This possibility, that one’s comrades may differ in their commitment arouses both psychotic and depressive anxieties, both the phantasy of the disintegration of the group and the phantasy of its disfigurement”.¹⁵ One might add that what one sees and finds unbearable in the other may also represent a part of oneself that one disavows. The anger and hatred directed at the comrade who is seen to betray or sell-out is a way of expelling a part of oneself that might like to act in this way, and it is the way that the other stands in for such parts of oneself that accounts for the passion of the hatred.

As Hoggett suggests, such anxieties — “potentially unbearable feelings of mistrust, betrayal, disappointment and disillusionment”¹⁶ — are unavoidable; the best that can be achieved is their containment. This means that the creation of some sort of establishment (whose function in part is such containment) is inevitable, and the task becomes to create an establishment “which has more the quality of being benign and less the quality of being destructive”.¹⁷ He suggests that the way to minimize the need for this establishment — and to make the one that inevitably is created more benign — is to create a culture or “a way of being” in the group which is generous and tolerant, that which in everyday language, “is referred to through phrases such as ‘it takes all sorts’ and ‘live and let live’”. This is difficult because “the greater the intensity of one’s own commitment the more it cries out to be requited”. However, as he argues, if “the group demands the generosity of its members, then it must adopt a generous attitude in return”.¹⁸

The power of such analyses as Hoggett offers seem self-evident to us. Their illuminating power derives from a combination of Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives.¹⁹ These insights have also led us to turn to psychoanalysis and in particular the work of Wilfred Bion which underpins Hoggett’s work.