This text is the written version of the public defence of my doctoral thesis which took place on September 22nd, 2014 in “Het Pand” in Ghent. It describes an analysis of the functioning of Therapeutic Communities (TCs) using a variety of qualitative methodologies and a psychoanalytic frame for interpretation. An important finding is that the TC approach succeeds in establishing a fundamental change in the emotional and psychic lives of the residents. A state of general numbness – which is characteristic of those who have been addicted for a long time – evolves in the direction of a re-connection to the Other. I have attributed this transformation (process) to the way in which the TC law is managed, that is, to the way in which both the mother- and the father-function are installed. A further step is that the particularity of each resident is allowed to emerge in the process of transformation. I have concluded that the successful processes of transformation in TCs involve both identification and subjectivization on the basis of which an Other life has become possible.
Search
Latest articles
- “I don’t stop; I start again.” The position of the analyst in ‘long term care’By Glenn Strubbe
- Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-sièc…By Hub Zwart
- Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problemBy Evi Verbeke
- The Violence of Right: Rereading ‘Why War?’By Jens De Vleminck
Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Child analysis
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Identity
Institution
Institutional Psychotherapy
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Real
Repetition
Repression
Sade
Signifier
Subject
Sublimation
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
Writing