Social plastic at work: structure for dialogues in a therapeutic community

Abstract

Purpose – Reports about therapeutic communities usually focus on specific therapeutic activities: the various ways of the community functioning correctively, the communal-personal dynamics of the community, the dramaturgically graspable problems and the operating and integrative function of the staff. There is relatively little attention paid to the features of the structure composed of the systems of norms and values of these communities. The purpose of this paper is to focus on this normative dimension of the culture of a therapeutic community. Design/methodology/approach – The authors wish to show this focus with the developmental process of the system of values, rules and norms of the therapeutic community of Thalassa House in Budapest, thinking mainly in self-psychological and ethical paradigm. Findings – The way of operating values, norms and rules – the systems of metanorms – creates the cognitive matrix in which members of the community are both acting and perceiving parties, simultaneously suffering and interpreting the communal occurrence of self-pathologies. It develops the cooperative potential of the community along this “ethical” dimension. In the view, the structure of rules, norms and values operated in the culture of relationships of the community, as a consciously elaborated collective agent, has a specific effect in the healing of self-pathologies. Originality/value – In the view, the efficiency of the actuation of norms depends primarily on the emergence of metanorms, that is of the ”how” of the application of norms. The values of the metanorms can be found both in the circumstances of the birth of self-according to the attachment theory and in the world of dialogical ethics.