ABSTRACT
Psychotherapeutic group work in the inpatient setting provides opportunities, along with the familiar challenges. This approach has an honourable history in the therapeutic community initiatives of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Bloor et al. 1988; Haigh 1998). This philosophy of inpatient care utilized the therapeutic potential of a number of people necessarily thrown together away from normal life by using the group medium to forge a community out of this circumstance. This entailed group meetings involving both staff and patients and focused primarily on their common life in the moment, following the group analytic tradition of treating the group as a re¯ection of how the individual operates in their life in general. There is a vestige of this approach in the community meetings that continue on wards to this day. The value of these has been recognized, and so they are encouraged by initiatives such as the Star Wards project (Bright 2006).
