ABSTRACT
According to the Lacanian formula the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan 1999). The premise of this chapter is that as every community is formed by the word, language is the primary focus for the therapeutic community, as it is for psychoanalysis (Lacan 1960). Thus the task of the therapeutic community can be summarised as one that leads the patient to articulate the truth of his being (Heidegger 1990; Lacan 2006). 2 This truth of being embraces the truth about his desire and it is the community which enables him to name his desire, and thus to bring it into existence (Lacan 1977). As art also functions linguistically it has the potential to access unconscious desire and as a result can be an important instrument in a therapeutic community, bringing into consciousness, in a contained way, those deep layers of irrationality that we find in psychosis but which are not limited to the psychoses (Cullberg 2006):
[T]he question of truth conditions the phenomenon of madness in its very essence, and . . . by trying to avoid this question, one castrates this phenomenon of the signification by virtue of which I think I can now show you that it is tied to man’s very being.
(Lacan 2006: 125)