ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy is influenced by the setting in which it occurs. Nowhere among the settings considered in this section of the Handbook is this more true than of therapeutic communities, a defining feature of which is the deliberate attempt to use the characteristics of a residential or day-care organisation in a therapeutic way. They constitute:
a place in which people can discover that they live IN a community. Indeed they are a constant meditation on the different ways in which this ‘IN’ exists – from the fact that one cannot live purely in one’s ‘head’, to the way in which themes and issues that apply through the house are not ultimately located IN anyone.
(Freidman, in Cooper et al. 1989: 73)