ABSTRACT
Organisations, shaped and run by human beings, are deeply influenced by powerful, yet largely unconscious, psychological processes. Anxieties, and defences against them, have an impact on the institutions and might undermine their very functioning. For mental health services, it is, therefore, not just individual patients who may benefit from psychoanalytic understanding, it is the services themselves that can gain a deeper perspective. Under the psychoanalyst Tom Main, its director from 1946 to 1976, it developed into a therapeutic community based on psychoanalytic principles, and pioneered psychosocial nursing as an approach that fosters mutual care and self-responsibility. A group of young people made fun of another teenager by placing denigrating pictures on Facebook, and, in the young persons psychotherapy group, there was often manic excitement with relentless attacks on the therapists. A gang culture had developed among the young people and was getting out of control; the adult patients complained bitterly about them.
