A recent email discussion about the earthquake in Mexico and people’s reactions to it have caused me to spend a little more time thinking about how political and media ecospheres are virtual environments were large group behavior, for better or worse, emerges.

In the 1990s, I was working within a complicated matrix management structure for a large international bank. To increase my effectiveness, I hired an organizational consultant to coach me. Her doctorate was in psychoanalytics as it applied to organizations, particularly in the tradition of Tavistock, Wilfred Bion, A.K. Rice and others called Group Relations. I became fascinated by Group Relations and read extensively on the topic, as well as attended various Group Relations experiential conferences.

A key part of Group Relations experiential conferences is the large group. The attendees of the conference gather with tasks like “learning through experience how groups function, how leadership in groups takes place, and how the participants can become more effective leaders within their organizations and communities”. It was fascinating to watch people in the group take up roles that they might otherwise not have taken up, due to pressures from the group as it reacted to the anxieties of the group.

I became particularly interested in this as it took place online and was invited to write an article about the Internet and the Large Group for the Journal of Group Analysis back around 2001. Technology has changed a lot since then, and there are many more people online now than a decade ago, but still people have similar reactions as members of large groups online.

With this long introduction out of the way, let me explore a discussion on the mailing list of group psychotherapists that I participate in. One person noted, “This is an unsafe world. Don’t you think it’s becoming less and less safe every day?” A graphic in the Los Angeles Times provided a good illustration of this. The first two months of 2010 showed fewer earthquakes of magnitude four or greater than the previous four years, but more earthquakes with a magnitude of six or greater. Looking at U.S. Geological Survey data, the first two months of 2010 showed over twice as many magnitude six or greater earthquakes than the average from 1900 until the present.

Others suggested that the daily media blitz, focusing on the ‘disaster du jour’ is what makes things seem worse. If anything, the media ecosphere with its focus on, “If it bleeds, it leads”, may be creating a dangerous feedback loop in the large group of media viewers. The ‘disaster du jour’ is what boosts viewership, so media corporations seek out the disaster du jour, which feeds the group’s anxiety addiction.

Yet with a large group at a Group Relations Conference, there are ‘consultants’ to the group that will, from time to time, share observations about what is going on with the large group. Perhaps bloggers can take on some of this role in questioning what the traditional media is doing, and if it is feeding some sort of anxiety addiction. I flirted with this idea a few years ago in my blog post, Are bloggers Group Psychotherapists?.

I ended that blog post with:

Ultimately, bloggers are no more group psychotherapists then they are journalists. Yet just as bloggers can learn a lot from journalists, they could learn an awful lot from group psychotherapists and could help bring innovation and healing to problems that our towns, cities, states, countries and world faces.

This returns me to my reaction to the email discussion. There, I suggested that the real issue is perhaps not whether or not the world is more or less safe than it was in previous years, but how we deal with anxieties that it might be less safe. It seems like much of the political discourse these days is focused on people’s fears about this world being less safe. In fact, the discourse may in fact be contributing to a less safe world, just as a large group, running wild with its anxieties can become a more dangerous place, without someone helping people contain the anxieties.

So, my question to bloggers, journalists and politicians, are you able to step up and help contain anxieties instead of fan them? To any group psychotherapists that might read this, can you help people in media and politics learn how to contain anxieties and process them into more helpful reactions? Can you help transform our media and political ecospheres into safer holding environments?

What do you think?