Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

96 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
also anchored in this way, as are spiritual experiences and
understanding for strangers. This takes place with the indispensable
participation of all the senses, body movements, feelings and ritual
experiences that are made conscious and expressed through music,
words, art and the creation of order.
The vertical growth of man (the individual and the kind)
must thus be anchored in original physicality – in the senses, in living
and becoming aware of the unconscious body, in reorienting the
instincts into relationships and order – so that the vertical growth
upward is not hijacked. Otherwise there is the danger that spiritual
longings will be seized by superstition and by paganism, or that
ideology will parasitize on the spiritual need.
Human culture renews itself not only in every individual but
always and as well in every group, generational and otherwise. If the
possibility of renewal is missing, a natural instinctive force
untransformed by humanity begins to accumulate and can break out
in a primitive destructive explosion.
The human being’s own natural resources, beginning
with quantity, are endangered
Patrick de Maré, a group analyst concerned especially with the large
human group and its ecological perspectives (1991, p. 165), writes of
the connections between the number of members in a human group,
and its possibilities. For an individual to be personally identified with
a group, the maximum number of members is roughly five hundred.
For the last ten thousand years this has been the optimum number of
members of a human settlement. The number five to ten thousand
expressed tribal groupings and the beginning of cities. When the
number reaches over one hundred thousand, the megalopolis begins
to ail, and anonymity prevails over the possibilities of the group;
people are unable to reach each other through their own senses. At
such a time, it is easy for errors to appear (lonely shooters or badly
chosen politicians).
The very idea of democracy is complicated and made more
difficult by a large quantity.
The basic instrument of the human group, communication, is
also endangered. Interpersonal communication takes place at a
distance, in the senses limited to hearing and sound without the
possibility of touch and immediate mutual interaction. The need for
action, the experiencing of rituals and contests, takes place in the form
of fantasies, often as computer games. People come together
predominantly on the internet; groups on the internet even have their