ABSTRACT
Few original and creative thinkers in the psychotherapy world can have been prophets so much without honour in their own countries as Pat de Maré. His vision of a large group meeting with the frequency and regularity of individual psychoanalysis, and analysing itself with the same rigour and the same attention to small detail, was an extraordinary thought. Patrick de Mare began with small groups, then moved his focus to large groups as a profoundly different sort of group with radically different potentials and possibilities. Then he developed his work on the median group as a specific form distinct from the large group. One of his most profound observations is that the sort of dialogue that we need for genuine democracy is a skill, an art that has to be learnt, and that we cannot learn it from books but only by practising it in groups, large, or, at least, median groups.
