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Many of us working in the area of mental health have experienced hospital community meetings at some time or another: those regular times when patients and staff gather to sort out the issues of the day, and at the same time offer therapeutic possibilities. In even the most enlightened therapeutic communities, or especially in enlightened institutions, we will remember the long silences, the desultory short conversations and the pervading sense of purposelessness. Hinshelwood's book gives order and meaning to such a setting where psychic forces seem at their most dense and confusing.
The author sets out to establish a language and a channel through which clinicians can think about groups, communities and institutions in a comprehensive way that has not been attempted previously. He succeeds in fulfilling this ambitious aim He brings together and bridges diverse theories, and illustrates each idea by an example that is clear and alive and often evocative of our own experiences in organisations. To my mind this book has that rare quality of providing a thorough understanding of groups and demonstrating this in practical terms. It is a natural development from another book of wide scope, The Large Group, Dynamics and Therapy (, Ed., 1974), but the new work has the advantage of being a unified work by one author and is more in touch with actual experiences.
Usually there are clear-cut distinctions between the ways in which we approach the individual, the small group and the community group. Instead of emphasising these, Hinshelwood focuses on the similarities. For example, he takes the view that small groups hide certain aspects of interactions between people which are nevertheless always present, and which large gatherings expose. He shows how in the large group we can study most clearly the forming of subgroupings and also the way barriers might then form between the different subgroups. Although every group in which we are placed in life is positioned in