Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm

Abstract

The authors describe their experiences as members of an international online study group, initiated before the COVID-19 pandemic to read aloud and discuss Bion’s (1965) Transformations. The three separately authored essays and commentary included here reflect the multifaceted phenomena in which images and voices in Zoom rectangles are transformed into shared emotional experience, the O of the group in Bion’s language. These observations show how group members translate online experience into a felt sense of being with others, and suggest that oscillations in the sense of being inside or outside the group demonstrate the dialectical and constantly changing nature of the analytic field in an online group.

Keywords:

• Bion
• groups
• online group
• basic assumptions
• invariants
• transformations
• intersubjectivity
• analytic field

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to Cecilia Taiana, who in 2019 founded this international online study group, and to Giuseppe Civitarese for his ongoing consultation to the group.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors do not have any relevant financial or non-financial competing interest.

Notes

1 One exception is Vives and Blanqué (2014) who describe a virtual Group Relations conference. They posit an “@-factor, [where] even if people have not seen each other, they arrive to a degree where they feel familiar” (p. 46).

2 Although beyond the scope of this paper to review the development of this theoretical model, we note that the term Bionian field theory, broadly speaking, refers to its proponents’ application of Bion’s ideas, focusing on the intersubjective dimension of psychic life. Here, we integrate the concept of intersubjectivity with Bion’s early work on groups, considered by us to be the foundation of his work described in Transformations (1965).

3 By groupness we mean the feeling of belonging when in a cohesive work group. This differs from Bion’s (1961) notion of groupishness, the striving for group membership that co-exists with hatred of the group.

4 These three essays are elaborations of an IPA panel presented by the authors in 2021, with added commentary on each essay by the other two authors.

5 We note a synchronicity between the complex harmonies, syncopated rhythms, and use of improvisation in jazz and the use of intuition in psychoanalysis.

6 Although Bion does not use the term intersubjective, we as others find it inherent in his theories of projective identification and container-contained. Intersubjectivity is a central idea in Bionian field theory and a useful concept in interrogating the shared emotional experience of O in the online group.