But Peter Higgs found the school physics syllabus “very boring” and, appreciating the irony, admitted, “I never won a prize for physics at school”.

If the quantum equations are set up independently in these locations in different gauges, the dynamics of my electron and that in another continent or on the moon must be consistently accounted for; the results must be independent of the local choice of gauge. In 1947, in his pioneering work on re-normalizing QED, American theorist Julian Schwinger proved that for this gauge invariance to occur there must be some connection linking the various electrons and allowing us to compare the situation at the different locations. In quantum field theory, this connection consists of particles. The maths implied that the connection cares about direction—it is a vector—and the associated particle acts like a boson because of bosons’ ability to act cooperatively, in this case by building up the vector field connecting the electrically charged particles. So was born the concept of the gauge boson, which in the case of electromagnetism is the familiar photon.

The connection must be able to act over very large distances, and in quantum field theory this equates to the gauge boson having no mass. In summary, Schwinger had proved that gauge invariance implies that an electromagnetic force necessarily occurs between electrically charged bodies, and that this force is carried by a photon of zero mass. That a photon has no mass and travels through the void at nature’s speed limit is fundamental to Einstein’s special relativity theory. However, according to QED the vacuum is not empty because the photon is immersed in a sea of virtual electrons and positrons, which ensnare it, interrupting its flight. As QED implies that an electron at rest gains an infinite energy—or mass—because of these interactions, how does a photon manage to avoid a similar fate?

By carefully examining the formulae in QED theory, Schwinger concluded that gauge invariance in QED underpins this phenomenon of the massless photon. This link between gauge invariance, the existence of a force, the vanishing mass of a photon, and the ability to make QED viable thanks to re-normalization was a profound result, which in the course of time would have far-reaching implications.

Peter Higgs has managed to avoid much of the pace of modern life. In addition to having no television in his Edinburgh apartment, he does not use the internet and is not accessible by email—historically emails sent to him at Edinburgh University would be administered by departmental assistants. He has no public mobile phone contact. Other than personal visits, Higgs has been accessible only by me first leaving messages on a landline answerphone to agree on times for a conversation, or by sending letters through the post.

All atomic particles belong to one of two families: fermions or bosons. The names honour two scientists, Enrico Fermi and Satyendra Bose, who in the early days of quantum mechanics studied how particles behave when in large groups. Fermions are the basic seeds of matter, such as electrons or quarks, which in quantum mechanics are like cuckoos: two in the same nest are forbidden. Bosons are like penguins: large numbers cooperate as a colony. Bosons can accumulate into the lowest possible energy state—an effect known as Bose-Einstein condensation, after the two scientists whose work explains this phenomenon. This extremely low-energy state is manifested in weird phenomena, such as the superfluid ability of liquid helium to flow through narrow openings without friction; in superconductivity; and, if the six theorists were correct, Higgs bosons condense to produce a weird substance—today known as the Higgs field—that fills the universe.

Two millennia after Aristotle argued that the realization of “nothing” is untenable, the Higgs field is in effect a physical confirmation of that philosophy. According to Higgs’ theory, a truly empty vacuum devoid of all matter would be unstable. Add the Higgs field to this void, however, and it becomes stable. This may be counter-intuitive, but that is part of the theory’s magic.

For theories of the fundamental forces, gauge invariance broadly means that the strength of the fields must be independent of the definitions of the potential. For gravity, when an object falls from a table, the speed at which it hits the floor is the same whether that table is on the ground floor or in a room at the top of a high-rise building. It is the change in the gravitational potential—the height from the tabletop to the floor—that matters, not their individual absolute elevation.

Higgs discovered too that his first physics teacher, Mr Willis, had thirty years earlier also taught Paul Dirac.

Most children who have no siblings learn social politics from their interaction with playmates and school friends, but Higgs’ early education in Birmingham had been as much from home as from school and, secluded from much wider merrymaking, he had to find ways of self-entertainment. His father’s bookshelves contained several texts on engineering from his student days at Bristol University. Thanks to this home library, Peter taught himself basic trigonometry, algebra, and calculus “before anyone at a school I went to taught it to me”. He attributes his dedication to mathematics as a direct result of his circumstances: “Physical health problems enabled me to forge ahead of my contemporaries, in maths especially.”

Some, uncharitably, dismiss Higgs’ singular success as luck. Without doubt fortune was involved here, as it is in many discoveries, but being in the right place at the right time is not enough; having the preparation to be able to act on serendipity is also important. Higgs’ story is a scientific analogue of the wisdom expounded by golfer Gary Player. After he holed a remarkable putt to win a major tournament, someone remarked, “Gary—that was lucky!” Player supposedly replied: “And the more I practice, the luckier I become!”

Drug addicts frequently live with an internal world full of chaos and uncertainty.

Drugs are often used to escape from the experience of this terrible turmoil. Reality becomes distorted, while they convince themselves that, for example, the drug has a beneficial effect on their lives, that it saves them from loneliness, despair and so on. The reality of the damage that the drug does along with the damaging life-style needed to maintain the addiction cannot be tolerated for long. Knowledge of the internal and external chaos is defended against by an assault on truth and reality, which in turn adds to the internal chaos. Those who work with drug addicts are also subjected to this assault on truth and reality; they have to make professional decisions, while living with uncertainty about what is really going on.

There is an important difference between the terms authoritative and authoritarian. Authoritative is a depressive position state of mind (see Chapter 1) in which the persons managing authority are in touch both with the roots and sanctioning of their authority, and with their limitations. Authoritarian, by contrast, refers to a paranoid-schizoid state of mind, manifested by being cut off from roots of authority and processes of sanction, the whole being fuelled by an omnipotent inner world process. The difference is between being in touch with oneself and one’s surroundings, and being out of touch with both, attempting to deal with this unrecognized shortcoming by increased use of power to achieve one’s ends.

Authority refers to the right to make an ultimate decision, and in an organization it refers to the right to make decisions which are binding on others.

According to Wilfred Bion, much of the irrational and apparently chaotic behaviour we see in groups can be viewed as springing from basic assumptions common to all their members. [...]

Bask assumption dependency (baD) A group dominated by baD behaves as if its primary task is solely to provide for the satisfaction of the needs and wishes of its members. The leader is expected to look after, protect and sustain the members of the group, to make them feel good, and not to face them with the demands of the group’s real purpose. The leader serves as a focus for a pathological form of dependency which inhibits growth and development. [...]

Basic assumption fight-flight (baF) The assumption here is that there is a danger or ‘enemy’, which should either be attacked or fled from. However, as Wilfred Bion puts it, the group is prepared to do either indifferently. Members look to the leader to devise some appropriate action; their task is merely to follow. [...]

Basic assumption pairing (baP) BaP is based on the collective and unconscious belief that, whatever the actual problems and needs of the group, a future event will solve them. The group behaves as if pairing or coupling between two members within the group, or perhaps between the leader of the group and some external person, will bring about salvation. The group is focused entirely on the future, but as a defence against the difficulties of the present. [...] The group is in fact not interested in working practically towards this future, but only in sustaining a vague sense of hope as a way out of its current difficulties. Typically, decisions are either not taken or left extremely vague. After the meeting, members are inevitably left with a sense of disappointment and failure, which is quickly superseded by a hope that the next meeting will be better.

The proposal was that it should be ‘to enable patients to live out the remainder of their lives in as full, dignified and satisfying a way as possible’, [...] This definition would mean that all the various professionals involved in patient care could see their particular work as contributing to a common purpose, rather than having conflicting and competing aims.

This change in task definition had major implications. It invited re-examination of practices previously taken for granted, such as the nurses’ emphasis on safety as a priority, with its consequent depersonalization and loss of dignity for patients.

In many work situations, the chief anxiety which needs to be contained is the experience of inadequacy.

Whether or not there is an external consultant, it is necessary for members to learn not just to listen to the content of what is brought to the discussion, but also to allow the emotional impact of the communications to work on and inside themselves.

When we recognize that our painful feelings come from projections, it is a natural response to ‘return’ these feelings to their source: ‘These are your feelings, not mine.’ This readily gives rise to blaming, and contributes to the ricocheting of projections back and forth across groups and organizations. However, if we can tolerate the feelings long enough to reflect on them, and contain the anxieties they stir up, it may be possible to bring about change. At times when we cannot do this, another person may temporarily contain our feelings for us.

Aberrant baD gives rise to a culture of subordination where authority derives entirely from position in the hierarchy, requiring unquestioning obedience. Aberrant baP produces a culture of collusion, supporting pairs of members in avoiding truth rather than seeking it. There is attention to the group’s mission, but not to the means of achieving it. Aberrant baF results in a culture of paranoia and aggressive competitiveness, where the group is preoccupied not only by an external enemy but also by ‘the enemy within’. Rules and regulations proliferate to control both the internal and the external ‘bad objects’. Here it is the means which are explicit and the ends which are vague.

There are two main dangers in seeking to apply a purely psychoanalytic perspective to institutions. The first is that it may lead to attempts to develop members’ ‘sensitivity’ and insight into their own and the institution’s psychological processes, while ignoring the systemic elements that affect the work. In this case, instead of bringing about useful and needed change, their heightened sensitivity may add to members’ frustration and have a negative effect on the institution.

The second is the risk of what has been called ‘character assassination’, in which psychoanalytic theory is misused to disparage character and impugn motives. This can lead to attributing institutional problems to the individual pathology of one or more of its members. It can also lead to consultants’ undertaking or presenting their work in a way that pathologies the behaviour and functioning of the institution and its individual members without giving due regard to the effectiveness with which the conscious real-world tasks of the organization are being pursued.

Like individuals, institutions develop defenses against difficult emotions which are too threatening or too painful to acknowledge. [...] But some institutional defenses, like some individual defenses, can obstruct contact with reality and in this way damage the staff and hinder the organization in fulfilling its task and in adapting to changing circumstances. Central among these defenses is denial, which involves pushing certain thoughts, feelings and experiences out of conscious awareness because they have become too anxiety-provoking

[...] we may be able to hear only the distress of the molested child, and not the communications about excitement or triumph, which we find more disturbing. The painful story is therefore not fully understood by either, and so gets repeated endlessly.

What needs attention is the listener’s own experiences, or countertransference (see Chapter 1), as the story is told. This conveys the essence of the trauma, how painful it was to be there, and can make it possible to discover the exact nature of the pain. The capacity to hear the message accurately requires the ability to pay attention to all aspects of one’s experience, and depends on many things.

The consultant who undertakes to explore the nature of the underlying difficulty is likely to be seen as an object of both hope and fear. The conscious hope is that the problem will be brought to the surface, but at the same time, unconsciously, this is the very thing which institutions fear.

Freud argued that the members of a group, particularly large groups such as crowds at political rallies, follow their leader because he or she personifies certain ideals of their own. The leader shows the group how to clarify and act on its goals. At the same time, the group members may project their own capacities for thinking, decision-making and taking authority on to the person of the leader and thereby become disabled.

Freud found that there was often resistance to accepting the existence of the unconscious. However, he believed he could demonstrate its existence by drawing attention to dreams, slips of tongue, mistakes and so forth as evidence of meaningful mental life of which we are not aware. What was then required was interpretation of these symbolic expressions from the unconscious. Ideas which have a valid meaning at the conscious level may at the same time carry an unconscious hidden meaning. For example, a staff group talking about their problems with the breakdown of the switchboard may at the same time be making an unconscious reference to a breakdown in interdepartmental communication. Or complaints about the distribution of car-park spaces may also be a symbolic communication about managers who have no room for staff concerns. The psychoanalytically oriented consultant takes up a listening position on the boundary between conscious and unconscious meanings, and works simultaneously with problems at both levels. It may be some time before the consultant can pick up and make sense of these hidden references to issues of which the group itself is not aware.

It was discovered that groups of workers supposedly doing similar jobs in separate coal mines in fact organized themselves very differently, and that this had significant effects on levels of productivity. This led to the concept of the self-regulating work group, and to the idea that differences in group organization reflect unconscious motives, which also affect the subjective experience of the work. It was through this project that the ‘socio-technical system’ came to be defined.

Depressive position is never attained once and for all. Whenever survival or self-esteem are threatened, there is a tendency to return to a more paranoid-schizoid way of functioning.

In his short but seminal paper, ‘Hate in the Countertransference’, Winnicott (1947) discussed the hate inevitably felt by psychoanalysts for their patients, and by mothers for their babies. He stressed that the capacity to tolerate hating ‘without doing anything about it’ depends on one’s being thoroughly aware of one’s hate. Otherwise, he warned, one is at risk of falling back on masochism. Alternatively, hate—or, in less dramatic terms, uncaring—will be split off and projected, with impoverishment of the capacity to offer good-enough care.

It is only with the provision of a containing environment that the institution can settle down to working at its task. Members need time to get to know each other and their roles in a task-oriented setting; ‘chats’ during coffee break or lunch-time are not sufficient, as they invariably shirk the most difficult issues of the day. It is only with time and ongoing work that staff can reach the important stage—personally, professionally and institutionally—of having the freedom to think their own thoughts, as opposed to following the institutional defensive ‘party line’. Only then will they be able to develop their own style of work, and contribute fully to the task in hand.

Contribution of Melanie Klein: In play, children represent their different feelings through characters and animals either invented or derived from children’s stories: the good fairy, the wicked witch, the jealous sister, the sly fox and so on. This process of dividing feelings into differentiated elements is called splitting, By splitting emotions, children gain relief from internal conflicts. The painful conflict between love and hate for the mother, for instance, can be relieved by splitting the mother-image into a good fairy and a bad witch. Projection often accompanies splitting, and involves locating feelings in others rather than in oneself. Thus the child attributes slyness to the fox or jealousy to the bad sister. Through play, these contradictory feelings and figures can be explored and resolved.

[...] Early in childhood, splitting and projection are the predominant defenses for avoiding pain; Klein referred to this as the paranoid-schizoid position (‘paranoid’ referring to badness being experienced as coming from outside oneself, and ‘schizoid’ referring to splitting). This is a normal stage of development; it occurs in early childhood and as a state of mind it can recur throughout life. Through play, normal maturation or psychoanalytic treatment, previously separated feelings such as love and hate, hope and despair, sadness and joy, acceptance and rejection can eventually be brought together into a more integrated whole. This stage of integration Klein called the depressive position, because giving up the comforting simplicity of self-idealization, and facing the complexity of internal and external reality, inevitably stirs up painful feelings of guilt, concern and sadness. These feelings give rise to a desire to make reparation for injuries caused through previous hatred and aggression.

True leadership requires the identification of some problem requiring attention and action, and the promotion of activities to produce a solution. In basic assumption mentality, however, there is a collusive interdependence between the leader and the led, whereby the leader will be followed only as long as he or she fulfils the basic assumption task of the group. The leader in baD is restricted to providing for members’ needs to be cared for. The baF leader must identify an enemy either within or outside the group, and lead the attack or flight. In baP, the leader must foster hope that the future will be better, while preventing actual change taking place. The leader who fails to behave in these ways will be ignored, and eventually the group will turn to an alternative leader. Thus the basic assumption leader is essentially a creation or puppet of the group, who is manipulated to fulfil its wishes and to evade difficult realities.

A leader or manager who is being pulled into basic assumption leadership is likely to experience feelings related to the particular nature of the group’s unconscious demands. In baD there is a feeling of heaviness and resistance to change, and a preoccupation with status and hierarchy as the basis for decisions.

In baF, the experience is of aggression and suspicion, and a preoccupation with the fine details of rules and procedures. In baP, the preoccupation is with alternative futures; the group may ask the leader to meet with some external authority to find a solution, full of insubstantial hopes for the outcome.

Members of such groups are both happy and unhappy. They are happy in that their roles are simple, and they are relieved of anxiety and responsibility. At the same time, they are unhappy insofar as their skills, individuality and capacity for rational thought are sacrificed, as are the satisfactions that come from working effectively. As a result, the members of such groups tend to feel continually in conflict about staying or leaving, somehow never able to make up their minds which they wish to do for any length of time.

In a misguided attempt to avoid fanning rivalry and envy, managers may try to manage from a position of equality, or, more commonly, pseudo-equality, often presented as ‘democracy’. The term is used as if everyone has equal authority. The hope is that rivalry, jealousy and envy will thereby be avoided; the reality is the undermining of the manager’s authority, capacity to hold an overall perspective and ability to lead.

The basic disposition of the consultant is important, too. The sense of security in the group is greatly encouraged by the consultant’s restraint from judging and blaming, and ‘knowing’ too much too soon, or seeming to believe in quick solutions.

The perceived power or powerlessness counts more than the actual, both of which depend on the inner world connectedness mentioned previously [...] an individual in a state of demoralization or depression may well have adequate external resources to effect some change, but feel unable to do so on account of an undermining state of mind. In this case, power is projected, perceived as located outside the self, leaving the individual with a sense of powerlessness. By contrast, someone who attracts projected power is much more likely to take—and to be allowed to take—a leadership role.

Schizoid splitting is normally associated with the splitting off and projecting outwards of parts of the self perceived as bad, thereby creating external figures who are both hated and feared. In the helping professions, there is a tendency to deny feelings of hatred or rejection towards clients. These feelings may be more easily dealt with by projecting them onto other groups or outside agencies, who can then be criticized. The projection of feelings of badness outside the self helps to produce a state of illusory goodness and self-idealization. This black-and-white mentality simplifies complex issues and may produce a rigid culture in which growth is inhibited.

Talking about a shift from a paranoid-schizoid position to one in which there was a preponderance of depressive anxiety the shift in emotional climate does not, however, result in freedom from anxiety. Instead, our fears of what others are doing to us are replaced by a fear of what we have done to others

Task-oriented teams have a defined common purpose and a membership determined by the requirements of the task. Thus, in a multidisciplinary team, each member would have a specific contribution to make. Often, the reality is more like a collection of individuals agreeing to be a group when it suits them, while threatening to disband whenever there is serious internal conflict. It is as if participation were a voluntary choice, rather than that there is a task which they must co-operate in order to achieve. The spurious sense of togetherness is used to obscure these problems and as a defence against possible conflicts. Even the conflicts themselves may be used to avoid more fundamental anxieties about the work by preventing commitment to decisions and change.

When under the sway of a basic assumption, a group appears to be meeting as if for some hard-to-specify purpose upon which the members seem intently set. Group members lose their critical faculties and individual abilities, and the group as a whole has the appearance of having some ill-defined but passionately involving mission. Apparently trivial matters are discussed as if they were matters of life or death, which is how they may well feel to the members of the group, since the underlying anxieties are about psychological survival.

In this state of mind, the group seems to lose awareness of the passing of time, and is apparently willing to continue endlessly with trivial matters. [...] Other external realities are also ignored or denied. For example, instead of seeking information, the group closes itself off from the outside world and retreats into paranoia.

[...] individuals are drawn to one profession or another partly because of their unconscious pre-disposition or valency for one basic assumption rather than another. As a result, they are particularly likely to contribute to the interdisciplinary group processes without questioning them.