The process of the therapeutic community
One of the most widely accepted definition of the therapeutic community for drug
addicts is the 1993 Ottenberg thesis of an environment in which ‘people live
together in an organized and structured way in order to promote change and make
possible a drug free life in the outside society…the community forms a miniature
society in which residents fulfill distinctive roles…designed to promote a transitional
process…’6
It must only be a foundation or facility in name. In essence, the therapeutic
community should become ‘society away from society’, a shadow of reality for those
with the determination or even so, the decisive push by family and relatives to
rediscover and re-coordinate that inner creativity self, the social and individual
personality lost through drug abuse. As argued, this type of healing process, its
residential philosophy aside (and this is where architectural design comes in), does
not usually apply to a fixed setting, “but rather to the principles of the care that is
offered…a communal approach which is also democratic, collaborative and
encourages participation…”.7
Thomas Main was the British psychoanalyst who coined this term in the 1950s,
as the response of psychoanalysis to the failure of psychiatry, incarceration
programmes which viewed addicts as mere criminals and stigmatized them as
outcasts or even mentally disturbed through abuse, as well as purely medication
approaches. Strangely enough though the therapeutic community model
developed by Maine and other analysts was based on a world war two
experience in Britain, as army psychiatrists, who had to deal with hundreds of
traumatized soldiers returning from the front, considered, in their desperation
from the failure of the conventional medication or one to one therapy approach,
to apply a group method that would allow those who had suffered severe
distress to overcome their psychological fears and return to the front as
physically and emotionally healthy as possible.