I approach the Large Group in a manner very similar to how I approach the Internet. Let me explain what I mean by this, why I am saying it and why I think it is important.

I should start by explaining what I mean by the “Large Group”. I’m not talking about a crowd at the mall, at a rally, or even at a party. I am referring specifically to a Large Group as understood in the traditions of Group Relations or Group Analysis, particularly as talked about by group psychotherapists.

You see, I’m on a mailing list of group psychotherapists. It seems like most of the group psychotherapists focus on small groups, say between six and twelve people that meet on a regular basis for therapy. Yet other sizes of groups, median groups and large groups are also sometimes used. I’m not sure what size a group must be to be a median group or a large group, nor have I really managed to understand the difference between the Group Relations tradition, growing out of the work of Wilfred Bion or the Group Analytics tradtion growing out of the work of S.H. Foulkes, yet I don’t believe this especially matters for this blog post.

My first experience with the Large Group was at a Group Relations conference in the late nineties in Massachusetts. I had been working at a large European financial institution and was challenged by the matrix-managed politics around the technology for the firm. I often flew to Europe to negotiate IT strategies and then would come back to the United States and try to get the negotiated strategies implemented.

To help me navigate these waters, I hired a management consultant who had been trained in the Group Relations tradition, and she encouraged me to go to the Group Relations conference. Before I went, she spoke of the conference as an interesting way of testing different ways of reacting to situations. I liked that idea.

I remembered when I had headed off to college and listened to a psychologist at the school talk about how many people head off to college, with the hope of turning over a new leaf, but they rarely did. The phrase about tigers not changing their stripes came to mind.

So, I did not go to the conference expecting to turn over a new leaf, nor change my stripes. It was only a weekend long conference. However, if I could try out different ways of reacting to political conflict, perhaps I could learn a few new skills that would help me in my job, or at least better understand what was going on.

In the large group, we sat in a spiral. Instead of a circle with no start or end, where everyone is equidistant from the center, in the spiral, there is a start near the center and an end further way from the center. Each time the group met, people would come in and sit down. They would make decisions on entering the room. How close to the center do I want to be? Do I want to sit near certain people or away from others?

We would sit quietly, waiting for someone to speak up. Did we want to be the first person to speak, taking a lead in the conversation? Did we want to sit back and offer observations? These sorts of decisions, as well as the types of discussions and reactions were all useful in helping understand large groups, and how each of us react to the people around us. We would explore the effect that the group had on individuals and how parallel processes beyond the group affected the group itself.

On the group psychotherapy list, there has been a discussion recently about a ‘Nazareth Conference’ where “Germans, Jews, Israelis, Palestinians and Others... spent six intense days living and working together at a hotel in Cyprus”. The title of the conference was “Repeating, Reflecting and Moving on” and it was a moving experience for people involved. Yet, this, and some other similar recent discussions have brought up the antipathy or ambivalence that some people have towards the Large Group.

One good friend wrote, “For me there is something sado-masochistic about being in this type of a large group.” I can understand the feeling very well. I’ve been to several large groups since my first experience at the Group Relations conference in Massachusetts. These groups are very challenging even when they have much simpler tasks like understanding ‘Authority, Role and Organization’, which seems like a much more typical title of a Group Relations conference.

This brings me, finally, to the starting point of this blog post. A person brought up the issue of the Internet and Adolescents. One person pondered about the role virtual spaces plays in issues of inclusion, exclusion and identity construction for teenagers.

Another friend on the list, who deals a lot with Internet related issues made the important observation that the interactions teens, and all of us have, online are interactions with real people and so these ‘virtual spaces’ aren’t just virtual spaces. There is important and real communications going on. It is an important point that I think too often gets missed.

Yet this is where I like to push things much further. As teens, and all of us, attempt to define our identities online, we use tools, avatars, status messages, whom we chose to list as friends, and so on as part of our efforts. The decision whom to list as a top friend seems very similar to the decisions of where to sit in the spiral at a large group conference.

It is all the more complicated, because we can present ourselves as something we aren’t. Again, this makes me think of my first Group Relations conference when I tried to react to experiences in a different manner than I normally did in the workplace to find which new strategies would help me be more effective in my job.

How much are people attempting this online? How much should they be, or how could they do this in a manner that could help them learn how to live a more satisfying life?

There is one key feature that the Large Group at a Group Relations conference has that is lacking in the Internet. In the Large Group, there are staff members, working as consultants to help people see what is happening and to keep the environment ‘safe’, although some of my friends who dislike large groups might question the safety of large groups.

Can we do something similar online? The other day, a friend on the list announced his new website. It had some great content and he was congratulated on it. However, from a search engine perspective, it was lacking, and I suggested a few tweaks to make the site easier to find.

While this little exercise didn’t deal substantially with identity construction online, I believe it provides an interesting example of how people, in a trusting community, can explore identity construction online following the examples of the Large Group.

Is anyone interested in running a little further with this? Let me know.