ABSTRACT
One type of social group produced by unconscious, song-and-dance communication is characterized by what Bion called basic assumption activity: an automatic and involuntary shared belief in certain ideas supported not by evidence but by their power to produce a sense of security and bondedness. If we imagine a psychoanalysis as a group of two, the work of psychoanalysis consists largely of the study of these basic assumption activities as they operate within this small group. In this view, transference and countertransference are not the past substituted for the present, but the externalization of the internal worlds of the two participants, each making the other an external version of their internal objects. Basic assumption activity—defences against the insecurities that appear in psychoanalytic work—occurs when transferences and countertransference are complimentary. One example of this kind of configuration is the basic assumption activity that we call suggestion.
