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In her classical paper on 'The Function of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety', Menzies Lyth describes the link as it applies to student nurses: 'Although, following Jaques, I have used the term "social defence system" as a construct to describe certain features of the nursing service as a continuing social institution, I wish to make it clear that I do not imply that the nursing service as an institution operates the defences. Defences are, and can be, operated only by individuals. Their behaviour is the link between their psychic defences and the institution' (Menzies Lyth, 1959, in Menzies Lyth, 1988, vol. 1, p. 73). There is a complex and subtle interaction, resulting in a matching between the individual's defences and the institution's. T

he processes 'depend heavily on repeated projection of the psychic defence system into the social defence system and repeated introjection of the social defence system into the psychic defence system. This allows continuous testing of the match and fit as the individual experiences his own and other people's reactions.

'The social defence system of the nursing service has been described as a historical development through collusive interaction between individuals to project and reify relevant elements of their psychic defence systems. However, from the viewpoint of the new entrant to the nursing service, the social defence system at the time of entry is a datum, an aspect of external reality to which she must react and adapt. (Corboy--this is likely to be yet more intense in a prison, ashram, political commune or cult compound)

Fenichel makes a similar point (1946). He states that social institutions arise through the efforts of human beings to satisfy their needs, but that social institutions then become external realities comparatively independent of individuals which affect the structure of the individual' (pp. 73-4). The student nurse has to adapt her defences to those of the institution. The latter are relatively immutable, so she shapes hers until they are congruent with the institution's. The primitive psychicdefences from infancy are brought by the individual to the fraught and literally life-threatening setting of the hospital.

'These defences are oriented to the violent, terrifying situations of infancy, and rely heavily on violent splitting [and, I would add, projective identification - R. M. Y.] which dissipates the anxiety. (These defenses) avoid the experience of anxiety and effectively prevent the individual from confronting it. Thus, the individual cannot bring the content of the phantasy anxiety situations into effective contact with reality. Unrealistic or pathological anxiety cannot be differentiated from realistic anxiety arising from real dangers.

Therefore, anxiety tends to remain permanently at a level determined more by the phantasies than by the reality. The forced introjection of the hospital defence system, therefore, perpetuates in the individual a considerable degree of pathological anxiety.

'The enforced introjection and use of such defences also interferes with the capacity for symbol formation... The defences inhibit the capacity for creative, symbolic thought, for abstract thought, and for conceptualization. They inhibit the full development of the individual's understanding, knowledge and skills that enable reality to be handled effectively and pathological (Corboy--pathological as in unbearable and that threatens to overrun the student's coping skills_ anxiety mastered' (pp. 74-5).

I have quoted this passage - one which will be familiar to many - not to review or to bore you but to invite you to reflect on the appropriateness of this description for understanding how a person comes to think and feel like a racist or a virulent nationalist or a member of a street gang or a religious or psychoanalytic sect. I believe that the mechanisms are the same and that the process of taking in the values as 'a given', adapting one's own primitive anxieties to that group's particular version of splitting, projection, stereotyping and scapegoating, leads to the same kind of impoverishment that nurses experience - of the ability to think and feel with moderation and to deal with reality and anxiety. It is projected into the structure or the Other and given back - not detoxified, but - as an injunction to behave inhumanely (whether toward patients as is the case with the anxious nursing students -Corboy)

How, if at all, does this differ from any other theory of socialisation into a belief system? The answer is two-fold.

Most conceptions of socialisation in social psychology, sociology and social anthropology have a civility and blandness, reminiscent of learning theory in psychology, as if to say, 'This is how Dick and Jane learn to be good citizens, members of the tribe, team-players, or whatever'.

Young tells us"

I believe that it is an implication of fundamental importance that the level of explanation following on from Bion's insistence that Freud missed out 'the ultimate sources of all group behaviour' is that we are dealing with a whole new level of grip. It's done with superglue - cemented or bonded with the most primitive level of feeling that we have.

In the context of what I have been saying, it is now time to ponder a passage from Hanna Segal about the political implications of Klein's views on how hunger gnaws:

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'From the beginning the infant forms some object relationships, predominantly in phantasy. In her view, the outward deflection of the death instinct postulated by Freud creates the fantasy of a deathly bad object... First we project our destructiveness into others; then we wish to annihilate them without guilt because they contain all the evil and destructiveness'

(Segal, 1988, pp. 50-51). When we read accounts of the genocide of the Conquistadors, the Stalinists, the Germans, the Kampucheans, the Americans or the Iraqis, we must ask what has been projected into these people from the most primitive parts of their tormentors. Similarly, when we see the behaviour of drunken Indians or Esquimos or the fawning of black film actors such as Step'n Fetchit or the behaviour of Mafiosi as represented by Brando, Jews like Dickens' Fagin as played by Alec Guiness or Americans as played by John Wayne - then we must note how such projections take root and evoke stereotypes.

Once we have adopted this way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the group process, familiar matters begin to appear in a new light. What are Bion's three basic assumptions which sunder sensible work group functioning - dependence, pairing, fight-flight - but projective identifications? What is the mechanism of becoming a follower, as described in Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), except projective identification of desired parts into the leader, who gives back an identity and frees one from the obligation of being responsible for one's own superego

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What is being a fan of a movie star or a groupie of a rock star other than romantic, idealising projective identification? Main makes just this point: 'Where

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positive aspects of the self are forcefully projected similar degrees of depersonalization occur, with feelings of personal worthlessness and with dependent worship of the other's contrasting strengths, powers, uncanny sensitivity, marvellous gifts, thoughts, knowledge, undying goodness etc. This is the world of the devotee, cults and hero-promotion' (Main 1975, in Main, 1989, p. 106).

It is also a world in which people will do anything a Bagwan or a Rev. James Jones tells them to do - from sexual licence to mass suicide. The same suspension of one's own sense of right and wrong is at work in the followers L. Ron Hubbard in the Church of Scientiology as in the helter-skelter minds of the devotees of Charles Manson, killing rich Californians, and in the convictions of bombers and perpetrators of sectarian murders in Northern Ireland or terrorists from Lybia, though the ideologies of the respective group leaders may have utterly different apparent of real justifications.

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As I have indicated, the use of the mechanism is not always malign or destructive. I can recall an unbearable situation when I felt in imminent danger of being utterly overwhelmed at a Leicester Conference on group relations. I survived by thinking of a number of the men I admire who stood up to intolerable social pressures - Socrates, Luther, Lincoln, Gandhi, Marcuse, Bonhoeffer, King, Mandela. My hallucinated heroes and I formed a group in my mind, which I called ‘The PSÖ D Solidaroty Group’. It was with their support and comradeship (all relations were conducted inside my head) that I survived the most trying exercise of the conference and managed not to leave, break down or act out. Omnipotent, you may say, but certainly effective. At the time it felt like a life-saver. Anyone who has attended a Leicester Conference or similar group relations event will understand what I mean (Miller, 1990) .

and

The example I have just given is of an idealised internal group, with which I was in projective identification of a kind. I now want to speak about another sort of group. You will recall that I have offered two sorts of hope for rescuing us from the charge that psychoanalysis is reductionist with respect to groups and institutions. The first was to look behind Laswell's Formula about rationalising private interests and claiming that they represent the public good. Following Wolfenstein, we discovered how social forces shaped conceptions of private interests and should be considered as an earlier stage in the process. The second basis for hope lay in looking deeper, with Bion and his successors, into how institutional and group values get imbedded - superglued - in the unconscious via projective identification as a way of dealing with psychotic anxieties. I now offer a third way in which groups and group dynamics are at work in the unconscious.



(Armstrong, 1991).

one hopes that further refinements will make it's use more subtle and discriminating in efforts to save people from harm, help those who wield it to resort less often to thrusts and parries and to running through one's fellow human beings.

One of the guiding principles in my choice of examples has been to draw attention to crossover points between individual and group processes. Another has been to indicate places where it is perhaps surprising to find the group and social forces: deep in the unconscious of the individual. Finally, I have been concerned to emphasise the primitiveness and the adhesive, binding power of projective identification. Connections, once made, are not easily dislodged.

That makes it a profoundly conservative mechanism, hard at work at the heart of human nature - in infants, nominal grown-ups, groups, societies, cultures, nations. It is deeply problematic for any hopes former Soviets may have for a Confederation of Independent States, much less for hopes that humankind may entertain for truly United Nations. No wonder it is so hard to change and no wonder that decades of willed, imposed change, for example, in Eastern Europe, can melt away as soon as military repression is remov

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Regarding what goes on at the Desteni farm, Poolman and members of Desteni use the illegal drug Ecstasy on an apparently regular basis at the farm

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Ecstasy usually produces the opposite of paranoia. Under its effect, individuals are more open to intimacy, both psychological and physical, and many therapists administered MDMA to their patients, generally with beneficial effects. The patients were warned, however, not to make enduring relationship agreements until several weeks after the last treatment, because a person under the drug's influence is likely to love everyone and everything.

Until it wears off.

Few adverse effects were noted from MDMA used in therapeutic situations.