The Therapeutic Community in Private Practice*

In this paper I would like to point out that the recent changes in the type of patient population that reaches the psychoanalyst's office today make it necessary, as I indicated in a previous paper,† for us to shift some of our therapeutic techniques—both those used in the strict one-to-one relationship and those used in group therapy—in order to meet the new needs we come across. Recently, as if in answer to some of these needs, greater and greater numbers and types of therapeutic communities have been springing up—communes inhabited by the young, experimental groups of couples living with and without children, and groups practicing shared family living, among others. I would like to outline some of the approaches and techniques that I have developed which use the advantages of both group therapy and individual treatment and which I have incorporated into the concept of the therapeutic community, but which I apply in a private practice setting.

The concept of communal living is not new to this country. There were community groups here as early as the Bohemia Man groups of New Jersey in 1693 and the Woman of the Wilderness group of Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1700, and later on, in the nineteenth century, there were more well-known groups, such as the Shaker societies in New Harmony and Oneida.

Each of the communities was different. Some had been formed because of political persecution, others because of shared religious beliefs and practices. It is interesting to note that the history of the