Lighting fires: On creating large group dialogue in organizations and society [CLGD]

Abstract

This paper describes the process of designing, setting up and conducting a pioneering series of workshops to introduce Patrick de Maré’s thinking and practice, often referred to as the ‘Large Group Course’. Although described in this way, the pattern of lectures, seminars and supervision alongside either therapy or experiential groups, in discrete sessions, usually associated with group analytic training is not followed. Instead, the workshops are conducted entirely as a Median Group in various forms including a seminar, two group consultations and several experiential sessions with the addition of two sessions of social dreaming each weekend. As the learning is intended to be experiential, apart from an extensive reading list, the curriculum is not specified in advance and there is a very limited didactic component. The ‘course’ was designed with the ‘Matching Principle’ in mind: an approach I encountered and worked with on the MA in Therapeutic Child Care at the University of Reading, (Ward, 1998:77). Elements of practice are imported by participants, to reduce the usual gap between training and practice so that the role of the unconscious is more directly brought to light. As the intention is to encourage ‘outsight’ into the socio-cultural forces that have invisibly shaped us, as opposed to insight (de Maré, 2012: 129), participants are given the opportunity to embody connections between their personal experience and the socio-political context as a step towards visualizing and working experientially with the social processes they encounter every day: the ‘Larger Group in the mind’. Always implicit in the work of the Larger Group is learning to notice and reveal hidden discourses, the voices of those with usually excluded histories: ‘subalterns’ or the indigenous and dispossessed in society, particularly people from or in colonized societies, who are excluded through hegemonic structures (Spivak, 1988). This is a key element of the work that needs to be experienced to be understood. As people join from across the world from many backgrounds and cultures, the inevitability of being faced with completely different perspectives and world views challenge those of us from the western world to question our privilege and thinking.