ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between working on the internal reality and the external reality of patients in patient treatment at the Cassel Hospital. It shows that the combination of working on internal and external aspects of a patient's pathology in a joint effort of therapy and nursing staff can have powerful therapeutic effects and can act against the strong regressive pull that patients experience in a hospital setting. Tom Main, from a slightly different theoretical perspective, wrote about the traditional hospital setting: within such a setting, health and stability are too often bought at the excessive price of desodalization. Main concluded that the hospital itself must become a "therapeutic institution". For the institution to regain its therapeutic functioning, it is important that mutual projections are recognized and that the conflict over what can be expected of patients is turned again into a joint one.
