You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this readable book, Dr Martin tells a fascinating story of the transformation of a mental hospital. It is a story which is of special interest to analytical psychologists, who have sometimes ignored the importance of social and group relationships in personality development and in therapy.
The traditional mental hospital involved a benignly authoritarian hierarchy, which was directed towards the care of patients and the control of socially unacceptable behaviour. Martin points out how this structure involved a repressive control and submission to authority, which often led to destructive frustration and degrading dependence. In contrast, he gives a picture of a hospital as a cooperative community in which the patient's whole life is positively therapeutic.
The therapeutic community is designed to put into practice some fundamental principles of analytical psychotherapy. The author regards as the most important of these “the readiness (of the psychotherapist) to accept the patient as he really is with all his contradictory impulses, both good and bad … with sympathetic understanding based upon a real awareness of the same contradictory tendencies in himself, and respect for truth as perceived by the patient without trying to impose his own ideas”. In the community, therapeutic relationships of this sort are promoted, all patients and all staff being “therapists” in varying degrees. The aim is to understand disturbed behaviour in an atmosphere of acceptance rather than to control it; and the capacity to let things happen, allowing people to change in their own way, is more important than the desire to make things happen.
By means of ward meetings and staff groups, an effort is made to ensure the freest possible communication, employment of all staff, potential, and promotion of responsibility of patients towards each other. Great emphasis is put upon the need for the staff to learn from each other and from patients in the recognition and solution of their own problems