Mountain or river? — A response to Emma Reicher’s article ‘Approaching the mountain: A journey into the wilderness of large group thinking’

Abstract

Emma Reicher’s article is stimulating and highly complex and fills a gap in the literature on large groups. It is unusual in studying the large group experience from the perspective of a participant, and it also reviews the literature and poses a number of fundamental questions on this practice. The present reviewer has chosen to comment on and discuss three of them: i) who does the large group experience belong to?; ii) the influence of psychoanalysis on the large group practice and theory; and iii) essentialism and contextualism in the conception of the human being. In her conclusion, the author compares two metaphors for the large group, a mountain and a river, and opts for the latter. The image of the river clearly depicts the fluid nature of the large group as a process, which must be experienced in order to be known.