Introduction

D. Clark tried to distinguish between a ‘therapeutic community approach’ and the ‘therapeutic community proper’, reserving the latter term for the Maxwell Jones-type hospital communities. There are many different kinds of institutions with claims to the title of therapeutic community; they differ radically in their staffing, their clientele, their social organisation and their approaches to treatment. There is no such thing as a single ‘representative’ therapeutic community. If one wishes to portray the nature of therapeutic community work, this can only be undertaken within a comparative framework since a central feature of therapeutic community work is its variability between different communities. The act of redefinition does not just imaginatively transform the patient’s environment, reconstituting it as an agency of therapy, redefinitions also play a direct therapeutic role in that they cumulatively alter the perceptions of residents, perceptions both of themselves and of their social world. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.