Values and Practice in the Therapeutic Community

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of putting ideology into practice. The radical idea of the therapeutic community within psychiatry in the 1950s never became completely translated into action. This ideal-real discrepancy is explored for a major therapeutic community established in the 1950s, Henderson Hospital, and a comparison is made between staff and patient treatment values and their evaluation of the helpfulness of actual group practice over an 18-year period. It was hypothesized that the gap between values and practice would widen under the impact of informal social processes, distorting the transfer of ideology into practice. The results confirm this hypothesis, which is explicated by reference to the generation of group norms and informal social processes, such as leadership "careers. "