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I read this book wearing two hats and had two different reactions to it: as a group therapist I found it both exciting and frustrating; as a sociologist I found it a disappointment. This certainly involves some splitting on my part but I think it also reflects the comparatively distinct areas of reality with which the two areas are concerned.
As a group therapist, my one experience of a large group run along group-analytic lines was as part of the IGA Introductory course some ten years ago. My memory is that I spent most of the nine or ten sessions in a state of near-frozen panic, measuring the distance between myself and the door and wondering if I could make it before ‘they’ got me. People said it became easier after you said something and during the penultimate session I managed to say something. I felt no better.
It makes an awful lot of sense now to see this as the starting point of a development, which if I could have stayed with it would move through hate (I did not experience that possibility at the time but looking back I can see it was there), and, by means of dialogue, to an ‘impersonal fellowship’, the state of Koinonia which gives the book its title. There is much that is exciting and interesting about this book, from people who have now carried research into large and median group processes for a number of years.
There is also much that is frustrating about it. Other reviewers have commented on the style, and I found the attempts at conceptualisation frustrating and confusing, obscuring rather than clarifying. I got much more from it when I gave up trying to learn the definitions of macroculture, microculture, subculture, bioculture, socioculture, idioculture and understand their use. Even when the definitions are comparatively clear, as in the author's contrast of structure and system, the use is confusing. Whilst the book admirably tries to make bridges to other disciplines such as philosophy and sociology, it does so in a haphazard and over-general way