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In the closing paragraphs of this interesting book, the author quotes Bion as saying:
Characteristics in the individual whose real significance cannot be understood unless it is realized that they are part of his equipment as a herd animal and their operation cannot be seen unless it is looked for in the intelligible field of study - which in this instance is the group.…' (Bion 1961, p. 133)
Hinshelwood extends this by saying that no group exists without having the equipment for being a community and contributing to a system of sub-groups within a community.
He says: ‘In this sense the group and its individual cannot be understood unless the pieces of equipment for life as a community - especially dramatisations, barriers and bridging - are looked for’ (p. 263). By the time one arrives here, one has fully understood dramatisation, barriers and bridging since these are the terms used frequently by the author in his explorations of the inter-personal and group phenomena which he describes in the life of a therapeutic community.
Every psychotherapist should study this book, let alone every new psychiatric trainee or psychotherapy trainee of whatever discipline.
On first sight of the title, one might think, ‘Ah! at last someone is going to tell me!’ With this in mind, one might start reading the book and become initially disappointed and think that it is a book just about therapeutic communities; that would be a grave misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what the author has given us. Using his experience in a therapeutic community, he has built up, from the clinical to the theoretical, a much wider and more important view of the relationship between the individual and the group in which he functions and beyond that.
From his extensive clinical experince in the setting of the therapeutic community Hinshelwood, borrowing from Main (1977), is concerned with the ‘gel’ which makes some communities work while others are not so good. Main's ‘human folkways’ is an essential conc