Category — Papers written at the Cotswold Community

There are clear differences among the therapeutic communities for children and young people. It should be possible to assess the needs of children more accurately and to match these to the therapeutic approaches of the different communities. In this connection I wish in this paper to convey the importance of Winnicott’s concept of “integration”.

This paper is about the work of Isabel Menzies Lyth as an external consultant to the Cotswold Community in its transition from being an approved school to a therapeutic community. The role of an organisational consultant is to work at the dynamics of the whole organisation and how the various parts relate to each other and to the whole. I attempt to illustrate the way this works by choosing five themes, among many, which emerged during the period of Isabel’s consultancy. Although these themes relate to work done in the 1970s, they are still relevant for the Cotswold Community and I believe they will be relevant to other therapeutic communities and the residential sector in general.

This paper is about the management and boundary issues Involved in working with an individual emotionally unintegrated child, a group of such children and the residential therapeutic community as a whole. For children with few and underdeveloped inner controls, the structure in which they are emotionally and physically held is a crucial part of their treatment. The concept of the “organisation as therapist” is an important part of the therapeutic milieu of a residential centre. My argument is that a therapeutic community needs to provide the model of an “integrated treatment system” if it is to support and enhance the individual and group work with children.

This paper is based on a verbatim transcript of a paper presented at a Caldecott College Study Day of the same title. It summarises the principles on which therapeutic communities are based, drawing on relevant literature and the first hand experience of the author who is head of a therapeutic community.