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IN A PREVIOUS PAPER (Springmann, 1974 a) I suggested that application of Ezriel's concept of object relations, traditionally reserved for individual and small group analyses, could be useful in understanding and interpreting large group phenomena as well. I demonstrated, with the help of clinical examples, how patients in the large group could be helped as individuals, and as a whole group, to relinquish nonadaptive, pathological, defensive ("required") object relations, and replace them with so-called "avoided" relationships, more mature, reality oriented adaptive ones, which had hitherto to be avoided, because they had been causally connected in the patients' minds with imaginary calamitous results which would come into effect as soon as the avoided relationships became manifest.
I agreed with Ezriel and tried to demonstrate that this therapeutic result could be achieved by "complete interpretations, " which ought to spell out the current required relationship (by no means always consciously recognized and acknowledged as such), to reconstruct the avoided relationship and the imaginary calamity from hints contained in the material, or from any other available source. The therapist could point out and thus sever the causal connection between these last two relationships. I have come to refer to this kind of intervention, which contains all three layers of current object relations as "three level interpretation" (Springmann, 1974 b).
I then came across a sequence of two consecutive, dynamically interconnected large group sessions which demonstrated these points most unequivocally, after the paper on the subject (1974a) had been finished. This might have happened because, having