Trust Under Strain: The BBC, Traitors, and the Survival of Ophelia

Recently, I have found myself, like so many others, drawn to two stories. The first is The Traitors, where celebrities are siloed in a castle, accuse, betray, and splinter into Faithfuls and Traitors. The second is the fate of Ophelia. More specifically, Taylor Swift’s retelling, which transforms Hamlet’s collapsing lover into a survivor.

In Hamlet, Ophelia becomes a vessel for the anxieties, desires, and conflicts of those around her, denied her own stable subjectivity. In Swift’s version, she endures. The projections remain devastating, but she survives them.

Together, The Traitors and Ophelia’s re‑imagining capture a cultural fascination with how we metabolise betrayal, fragility, and projection in the unsettling experience of knowing something terrible is happening, yet not being sure where the terror originates. Whether in institutions, relationships, or symbolic narratives, these dramas are not trivial.

Groups Under Strain

In a group‑analytic frame, they dramatise what groups know too well: trust is fragile, betrayal magnetic, survival anxiety ever‑present. Institutions wobble for the same reason audiences lean in—because splitting and projection are our shared inheritance.

Many teams, especially in public institutions, hold a quiet fantasy: that they are the reasonable ones, the sane ones, the Faithfuls. It is a seductive shield against a more uncomfortable truth. Institutions are no less susceptible to survival anxieties; they simply amplify them at scale. We are mirrors and amplifiers for one another. The bigger the group, the louder the reverb.

Foulkes saw this in large‑group theory. Bion mapped it in groups under stress. When surveillance, moral demand, or existential threat press in, groups regress. They slip from the depressive position’s painful tolerance of ambiguity into the brittle clarity of the paranoid–schizoid position.

Here the world splits: good and bad, pure and contaminated, friend and foe. Curiosity contracts. Difference becomes an attack on survival. The Traitors stages this perfectly: suspicion spreads, alliances fracture, projection becomes currency. In institutions, the same drama unfolds under banners like “Save the NHS,” “Save the BBC,” “Make America Great Again.” From inside, groups feel morally awake, conscientious, even heroic. From outside, the regression is glaring.

The BBC Example

The BBC offers a revealing case—not a conspiracy or unique collapse, but the timeless behaviour of a team under strain. When an organisation meets topics that divide a nation (trans issues, Israel–Palestine, Trump), anxieties split along the same fault lines. Staff grow frightened of making the wrong call, frightened of the mob, frightened of one another. The fantasy of neutral omniscience fractures; something more primitive takes hold.

Institutional defensiveness is relabelled moral clarity. Critique becomes evidence. Facts are processed first through friend‑or‑foe logic, only then through journalistic scrutiny. The appearance of ideological virtue begins to outrank the difficult craft of representing reality. Nuance is the first casualty.

Bion’s depressive position offers a different task: turning toward the group’s own shadow rather than projecting it outward. Righteousness and certainty are recognised as attempts at mastering fear rather than true knowing. Jung put it simply: “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.” A team can only stop persecuting others for carrying what it refuses to see.

Clinical Echoes

The same dynamics play out daily in multidisciplinary teams across the NHS. Meetings begin with the hopeful premise that shared expertise will yield thoughtful, compassionate care. But under pressure: shortages, impossible caseloads, fear of catastrophic error, survival instincts take hold.

A patient is presented and the atmosphere thickens. Clinicians unconsciously sort into “safe” and “risky” positions. The patient becomes a container for unbearable projections: too chaotic, too needy, too untreatable, too likely to complain, die, or sue. The discussion swings between idealisation and condemnation: protect them at all costs; avoid them at all costs.

In these moments, the patient becomes an Ophelia figure: fragile, overloaded with projections, at risk of drowning in anxieties not her own. Policies are clutched like talismans. A gentle question risks being marked as naïve or dangerous; a query about evidence can cast someone as a villain or asaviour. The room narrows to the safest channels, as if uncertainty itself were contamination.

From inside, the team feels hardworking, even righteous. Beneath the surface, something else is happening: the group is trying not to feel how little anyone knows, how exposed everyone is. Anxiety is evacuated into the patient, into commissioners, into CAMHS, into the colleague who voiced doubt. This is the paranoid–schizoid defence in pure form: splitting, projection, flight into certainty. The stakes are intimate (real lives, real children) so the regression is intense and harder to see.

Shadow, Capture, Survival

Neither the BBC nor MDTs are uniquely ideological or dysfunctional. They are human. They wobble because people wobble. What looks like political capture is often psychological capture. The team becomes a basic‑assumption group organised around dependency or fight–flight rather than work. Disagreement may be vigorous but cannot be transformed into shared meaning. Emotional heat rises, but nothing is metabolised.

The room argues about the wrong thing because the terrifying thing remains unspoken.

This is why Trump becomes a convenient focus. He is external. The storm around him allows avoidance of inner contradictions. Trust eroded not because journalists were malicious, but because they were human and afraid.

Polarisation is often mis‑diagnosed. It suggests two equal positions locked in symmetrical tension. But what unfolded in the BBC was not polarisation. It was asymmetry—similar to the Traitors and Faithfuls, where one destabilises and the other defends. One symbolic framework was introduced with the force of replacement, not coexistence. The older framework was not simply opposed; it was deconstructed. Inside a stressed institution, this imbalance is felt as existential. Difference is experienced not as dialogue but as annihilation.

The rush to the virtuous position becomes a defence against this asymmetry: dissent equals danger, complexity equals contamination, and thinking together feels unsafe. The depressive position, by contrast, demands an inward turn.

Perhaps this is why The Traitors and Ophelia’s re‑imagining resonate now. Both are dramas of survival under strain: in the castle, suspicion spreads until trust is unbearable; in the river, fragility threatens collapse until a song reframes it as survival.

The task is not to banish Traitors or rescue Ophelia, but to recognise that both live within our groups. Suspicion and fragility are companions, not aberrations. They remind us that collapse and betrayal remain possibilities whenever anxiety overwhelms thought. Only by tolerating their presence, by staying in the depressive position even when thinking feels dangerous, can repair and trust begin.