This is number 25 in the International Library of Group Analysis. The two Israeli editors have gathered 15 contributors from 7 countries. The book's title refers to the seminal book The Large Group, edited by Reference KreegerLionel Kreeger in 1975. I am reviewing this book for the non-specialist psychiatrist interested in what may be useful in clinical practice. I might have written a different review for psychoanalytically oriented readers.

Three of the 13 chapters relate to work in clinical settings. Lipgar provides a riveting account of his attempt to create a regular ward-meeting in the most awful imaginable type of back ward that characterised the gigantic American state hospitals in the 1960s, and still exist no doubt in parts of the world. Closer to home, Berke gives examples of projective processes at the Arbours Crisis Centre in London, which do not presume psychoanalytic knowledge. In the third, Tasher describes a German in-patient psychotherapy clinic that has regular large-group meetings but unfortunately I found the writing insufficiently clear to understand fully what was being described.

Two chapters, although not directly clinical, I found very helpful in thinking about the difficult (verging on the impossible) task of leading or facilitating unstructured large-group discussions. In the first, Wilke is most enlightening in his argument that the reputation that unstructured large groups have for being negative experiences for participants has a lot to do with the approach of the conductor. To quote, ‘The conductor's perspective of the large group process as primarily pathological, or as a balance of destructive and creative forces, will significantly shape the experience of the process for the members’. The other, by Island, presents the work of a collective of large-group facilitators in the context of Norway's group-analytic training course. It is the only chapter that does not explicitly or implicitly see the conductor as a brave, beleaguered lone voice (or sometimes a paired voice) in the large group. It makes sense that, in something as large as a group of 30 to 100 people, a team approach is more likely to capture what is going on, and this chapter offers useful pointers. It is odd that there are no contributions direct from therapeutic communities, where such a team approach is the norm.

Of the rest, the best chapter is by Kernberg. To start with he gives the best account I have read (and there are quite a few around) of Bion's famous basic assumptions of group functioning. The core of the chapter is on the collective regression in society as a whole that leads to fundamentalist ideologies, which can be narcissistic or paranoid, and to the group processes that underwrite terrorism. This is compelling and highly topical writing by one of the finest analytic clinical thinkers around.

The remaining chapters range from the interesting, for example, on the differences between large groups in different political climates and on comparisons between being in a large group and belonging to an e-mail discussion group, through to the impenetrable and bizarre. I avoid names here.

Overall, I found this is a very uneven book (as you will have gathered), though impressively international. It shows rather little evidence of having been edited, so the good guys shine, but the ones who needed a reminder that there is an audience out there wanting to understand appeared to get little guidance. I would certainly recommend it to anyone involved in trying to lead/manage/facilitate a large group because there are enough good chapters and because there is precious else available - but only if you already have the book that this volume ‘re-visits’, Kreeger's The Large Group.