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This book is part-handbook and part-pioneer history of psychoanalytic understanding applied to social dynamics. Co-editor and principal co-visionary Robert Hinshelwood, in his introduction, proposes its collection of essays as something like the ubiquitous hotel bedside-drawer Gideon’s Bible, but for therapeutic communities – for carer and cared-for alike.
Each chapter documents an aspect of the conceptual development, ideas behind and practical processes of Learning from Action (LfA) – a model for learning and making meaning from experience in group encounters. Rooted in work with non-verbal patients and in thinking about the meaning that can be made from non-symbolic action, it is also a call to collaborate in the cause: to join together in thinking about the significance of community, in response to global and democratic distress. As the editors point out, ‘Action is … a mode of connection which everyone understands, but which in general we take for granted and think little about’ (p. xxviii), and yet ‘we communicate at this hidden level all the time’ (p. 9).
The LfA workshops started in 2000 in Serravalle, northern Italy. They were set up as an experiment by Robert Hinshelwood & Enrico Pedriali, key initiator and driver of the first ten years of the project until his death in 2009. They wanted to see if it was possible to help those working on the frontline in therapeutic communities – many focused on treatments based on medication – to become more sensitive to and interpretative of the non-verbal communication going on between the members of the communities. The first residential gathering invited forty people from differing backgrounds and countries of origin. They came together for three or four days of domestic activity interspersed with reflective meetings and leisure activities. In the twenty years since this first gathering, the workshops have been occurring in different locations roughly every two years.
Each chapter of the meticulous narrative of this evol