unique', so that he 'remained larger than life to almost all who encountered him'. He has been considered by Neville Symington as possibly "the greatest psychoanalytic thinker...after Freud". Bion's work has left a strong impression on a number of contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, including Antonino Ferro and Thomas Ogden. There is some historical evidence to suggest that the idea of containment may have been suggested to Bion in the mid-1930s, by an encounter with C.G.Jung: Bion attended Jung's 1935 lectures at the Tavistock Clinic, in which Bion was an active participant (asking three questions of Jung about a range of aspects of Jung's thinking). The experience was described by James Grotstein, Bion's biographer and "one of Bion's most influential pupils", as having had a "dramatic impact" on Bion. Group experiments Bion performed a lot of group experiments when he was put in charge of the training wing of a military hospital. Besides observing the basic assumptions recurring in these groups, he also has observed some very interesting phenomena to which he believed may well apply to society. Among his interesting findings was that in a group, the standards of social intercourse lack intellectual content and critical judgement. This observation agrees with Gustave Le Bon's findings about groups to which he mentioned in his book The Crowd. Another interesting observation was that whatever a group member says or does in a group illuminates that member's view of the group and is an illumination of that member's personality. This phenomenon is what psychologists call Projection. If the contributions of the group and its members can be made anonymously then the foundations for a system of denial and evasion is established. This phenomenon is better known as Deindividuation. And perhaps one of the most important findings in his experiments was that whenever a group is formed, it always seeks a leader to follow. The group then searches for someone who has questionable attributes with his or her mental health. Initially, the group will search for someone who is paranoid schizophrenic or someone who is malignant hysteric. If the group is unable to find someone with those attributes, the group looks for someone with delinquent trends and a psychopathic personality. Otherwise, the group would just settle on the verbally facile high-grade defective. Group dynamics—the "basic assumptions" Wilfred Bion's observations about the role of group processes in group dynamics are set out in Experiences in Groups