Abstract

Considering the homogeneous nature of the group (traumatised war veterans at Northfield hospital) that first led Bion to study the group function and the contribution of the social and primitive mind to cognitive processes and psychic evolution, the contribution first examines the etymological and historic notion of homogeneity, going on to compare it with the main psychoanalytic models that have used it in their theoretical treatment as an element significant to the psychic mechanism; and, finally, this dimension (of indistinction) is observed as a function that contains its own reciprocal (the fluctuating impulse toward individuation) and that will tend to behave in psychoanalysis as a “probe” (Bion, 1970) by means of which exploration of the unknown object, knowledge of the object and the birth of the unknown object that explores and is explored all take place in unison.

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