I will return to this point later, but for now I wish to focus on the basic assumption mentality of these groups. The members of a basic assumption group experience an emotional ambiance that is intense, close, and characterized by a sense of purpose and direction that is felt to be sacred. One corollary of this is that any member of the group who fails to support and partake in this emotional ambiance is expelled from the group. He becomes a pariah, like an atheist at a Church Synod or a diplomat at a military General Staff meeting. They are highly organized in support of specific unconscious beliefs.3 Bion also describe a quite different type of group that he called a work group.
Work groups have a more or less well defined task and a realistic approach to discharging it.
I propose that it is at one and the same time a primitive and a sophisticated type of group. Psychoanalyst and patient are simultaneously linked at the same time by identifications with each other that eliminate their separate identities, and by other links that recognize and preserve their separate identities. This mutual identification tends to eliminate from the life of the group any emotion not supporting the assumptions that maintain the group's emotional ambiance. The task of each in an analysis is to enter into some kind of marriage with the other Since the sophisticated work of analysis is a cooperative investigation, it can only occur in an atmosphere in which cooperation is possible, and cooperation between individuals is possible only where there are distinct individuals. But it is precisely individual distinctiveness that is lost in the primitive dyad.