ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how doubt is managed in the institute. It describes strategies by which doubt is successfully deflected off the system onto other receptacles; strategies offering routes down which practitioners may channel misgivings away from the ‘system’ so as to protect it from censure. The chapter demonstrates through three case studies instances when these strategies are enacted—that is where trainees’ doubt, being unsuccessfully deflected off the system, settles on the paradigm itself. In such instances trainees may ‘dissent’ from the orthodox position. The chapter shows that the way in which institutes have historically dealt with such dissent, and how such dealings have shaped over time the whole structure of the therapeutic community. While many dissenters, breaking with the orthodoxy, founded schools that often became mirror-images of the bounded orthodoxy which they opposed, other dissenters, once heretical, have been reintegrated back into psychodynamic mainstream.
