ABSTRACT
At the core of the therapeutic community approach is the induction of the incoming resident into a new social world emphatically different from the resident’s old world. Residents encounter not just a new physical environment and new social relationships, but new ways of seeing and describing social life and their place in it. The new subjective reality of the resident will be comprehensive in its coverage; it will contain not just new interpretative schemes, but many understandings that are simply tacit, and even some taboos that are unthinkingly absorbed. The social construction, or reconstruction, of subjective reality proceeds piecemeal, not suddenly and all at once: particular perceptions of particular events, tasks, or relationships are altered and by a process of cumulation these individual and situated redefinitions may result in the gradual reconstruction of subjective reality. Relatedly, staff at Ashley did not see disruptions and quarrels as necessarily requiring an intervention to ensure the smooth running of the house.
