Ifirst read Bion's Experiences in Groups (I961) fifteen years ago. The three groups, Fight-flight, Dependency and Pairing, highlighted for me the styles of three Australian political leaders, Malcolm Fraser, Jim Cairns and Gough Whitlam, who seemed to share between them much of the action in Australian politics in the 1970s. I enlarge on this here and extend the application of Bion's Basic Assumptions to the analysis of political eras in other parts of the English-speaking world.
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