Bratter still loves quoting Bratter.
Bratter may enjoy quoting Bratter, but Bratter et al may not do their homework very well...
Confrontation in self-help therapeutic communities
During World War II at Henderson Hospital in the Belmont Social Rehabilitation Unit in England, Rapoport (1960), a sociologist, was the first to describe group psychotherapy to be "reality confrontation." Shankman (1978) provides a description of the self-help therapeutic community (TC), as illustrated by Casriel (1963); Bratter (1978); Bratter, Collabolletta, Fossbender, Pennacchia, and Rubel (1985); Glaser (1974); Sugarman (1974, 1986); and Yablonsky (1965), in which recovered persons act as catalysts and responsible role models:
The TC might best be described as a school which educates people who have never learned how to live or feel worthy without hurting themselves and others. The therapeutic community helps people who have tried again and again to get what they wanted from life and have continually defeated themselves. The principle combines the basic and universal human values of knowledge, love, honesty, and work, with the dynamic instrument of intense group pressure, in order to recognize and help correct personality defects which prevent people from living by these values. The results lie in rehabilitation so that the individual may reenter his or her community as an independent and productive person (p. 156).
[/color]
The earliest therapeutic communities that I have seen described would be
the Northfield Experiments in the UK (Tavistock) in 1939 and 1942, whose primary objective was to
get soldiers off the military psych ward and back onto the battlefield (instead of being released to go home, as many assumed they would). Therapists on this ward saw their primary responsibility to be
the rehabilitation of the soldiers as a group back into functional fighting men, not the men as individual patients needing to be healed.One of the most important achievements of social psychiatry during the Second World War was the discovery of the therapeutic community. The idea of using all the relationships and activities of a residential psychiatric centre to aid the therapeutic task was first put forward by Wilfred Bion in 1940 in what became known as the Wharncliffe Memorandum, a paper to his former analyst, John Rickman, then at the Wharncliffe neurosis centre of the wartime Emergency Medical Service (EMS)...
The opportunity to test the efficacy of the therapeutic community idea arose in the autumn of 1942 at Northfield Military Hospital in Birmingham, when psychiatrists were invited to try out new forms of treatment that would enable as many neurotic casualties as possible to be returned to military duties rather than be discharged to civilian life...
While Bion and his colleagues at the WOSBs (Bion, 1946) were coming forward with new ideas about groups, some serious problems were affecting military psychiatric hospitals dealing with breakdowns in battle and in units. The withdrawal of psychiatric casualties back to base and then to hospital seemed to be associated with a growing proportion of patients being returned to civilian life. It was as if "getting one's ticket," as it was called, had replaced the objective of hospital treatment--to enable rehabilitated officers, NCOs and men to return to the army...
From "The discovery of the therapeutic community: The Northfield Experiments" (Chapter One), by Harold Bridger, in
The Transitional Approach in Action, edited by Gilles Amado and Leopold Vansena; Karnac Books, 2005 (Tavistock)