Adam Phillips writes in Equals (Faber & Faber 2002): ‘In 1945, just after the end of the War, Lacan came to London as a French psychiatrist to find out about the effect of the War on British psychiatry. His report on his visit, British Psychiatry in the War, was published early in 1947. What Lacan is evidently most impressed by in his meeting with Bion and Rickman, and their accounts of their work in small groups with soldiers, who, for various reasons were debilitated and needed some kind of help.
Indeed, one might think, from a psychoanalytic point of view, that equality – like many of the so-called rights of man, was ripe for ironisation. And yet in Lacan’s paper – even in its tone of idealistic pessimism generated by the experience of war – it is as though he cannot give up on something about the notion of equality. … he is interested in this paper in what might be called alternatives to leadership.
In Bion’s work, Lacan writes, the analyst, as group leader, “will undertake to organise the situation so as to force the group to become aware of the difficulties of its existence as a group, and then render it more and more transparent to itself to the point where each of its members may be able to judge adequately the progress of the whole.” As Lacan puts it, this is a version, to use his word, of forcing people to become equals. Clearly, the aim of arriving at a point “where each of its members may be able to judge adequately the progress of the group,” is to arrive at the point at which the position of leader disappears.
By putting a basic structure of equality in place, and by providing a base-line of sameness, differences can come through. The question lurking here – which seems like a question tailor-made for psychoanalysis – is: Why is hierarchy the reflex response to difference? But Lacan intimates here, at least in his description of the Bion group, the psychoanalytic myth than can make possible the enjoyment, the productive use of difference. If everyone gets to the point of being able to “judge adequately the progress of the group” they must have some shared sense, however tacit, of what constitutes progress; of what it is better for the group to be doing. And yet, of course, we know that too much consensus, just like too little, is the enemy of democracy.
Slingshot