ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the proceeding chapters of this book. The book illustrates in painful detail how both the storm and its substitution affect and infect relations and interactions at every level of the containing institution: between not only patients and staff, but patients and patients, staff and staff, staff and management, management and stakeholders. The idea that countertransference, “conceived as a link between the patient and the responsive mind and sensibilities of the staff”, can furnish a basis for “ongoing concerned enquiry” is not in itself new. However, what gives the contributors’ use of this idea a more distinctive slant is firstly its extension across the whole social field that furnishes the “milieu” in which patients live and interact with each other and with staff.
