The British School also offers a more positive side about power with regard to members of a relationship or group being the target of projections from other people. In his later years, Wilfred Bion identified this positive role. While the later work by Bion is rarely cited, it offers many rich implications regarding the role of leadership and power in a group. According to Bion, a powerful person (on whom much is projected) can provide and serve as a container of the anxiety that is experienced by followers when they can’t personally handle this anxiety. Much as a parent can hold the anxiety of a child while it is growing up, so the leader of a group or the leader in an interpersonal relationship can temporarily hold the anxiety of others, until such time as the anxiety is reduced or transformed, or until such time as the other person(s) can handle and manage the anxiety themselves.
The member of a group on whom considerable courage is projected can readily play this role of container for the anxiety experienced by other people. By serving as a container, the leader can help followers transform or reframe the anxiety and associated, anxiety-provoking objects, people and events. Leaders help with this transformation or reframing through use of the wisdom (dependency assumption), courage (fight/flight assumption) or vision (pairing assumption) that is projected on to them.
The Continental School
Though Quad Two is “owned” by the British school, the Continental school also has much to say about this dimension of human interaction and stakes its own claim with regard to social-critical insights about this quadrant. Q2 is very big and very important for Continental School, in large part because its contents and dynamics are strongly influenced by the power relationships that exist between the parties involved in this interaction. Power strongly influences the content and timing of potential feedback.
