Patrick De Mare

Patrick De Mare
Patrick DeMare was born in London in 1916, of Swedish parentage. Educated at Wellington, Cambridge and St. George’s Hospital, he qualified as a doctor in 1941 and enlisted in the RAMC in 1942, being trained at Northfield Hospital by Rickman and Bion for Army psychiatry. He ran an Exhaustion Centre throughout the European campaign, at the end of which he returned to Northfield, joining Foulkes and Main in the Northfield experiment.

After the war he became a Consultant Psychotherapist at St. George’s Hospital, and in 1952 started off the Group Analytic Society with Foulkes. Later he participated in setting up the Institute of Group Analysis and the Group Analytic Practice. He also worked with Benaim and Lionel Kreeger at Halliwick Hospital, the short-lived therapeutic community. In 1972 he published Perspectives in Group Psychotherapy (Allen & Unwin) and in 1974 Lionel Kreeger and he published Introduction to Group Treatments in Psychiatry (Butterworths), which was dedicated to the patients and staff at Halliwick Hospital.

In 1975 de Mare started a large group under the auspices of the Institute of Group Analysis, being joined by Robin Piper in 1976. That ‘large’ group settled down to a steady membership of about 20, and is currently operating as a ‘median’ group. In 1984 he established a weekly seminar about large groups which became a recognised section of the Group Analytic Society in 1986, and which he is currently convening. In 1991 he published KOINONIA: From Hate through Dialogue to Culture in the Large Group, in which he first introduced the Median Group.

Patrick de Mare presented the Median Group at the 1999 seminar-dialogue on Humanity. His approach to group process has been made an integral part of the DuVersity’s Working Group methodology.

Karen Stefano is colloborating on the publication of his collected papers. He died in 2008.