It was said of Graham Greene that what interested him
was the plight of decent men in foreign parts and the foreign parts in
decent men! (The Daily Telegraph, 16th July 1999.) This may serve as a
useful analogue for us in our consideration of the place of nature in a
therapeutic community, because we might seriously conceive mental
illness and psychosis in particular as a foreign land, a wilderness, a
terra aliena. But we are also now much more aware than ever
before that questions of ecology, of how we treat the earth, of green
issues and of the tension between the city and the countryside are
political concerns as well as having relevance for our mental well
being.
There is a short-hand view of the problem of nature and
mental life that gets wheeled out from time to time, particularly by
psychoanalytic commentators on literature. The short-hand view runs
something like this. Nature is seen and thus experienced, either as a
wild and dangerous place or as a relaxing and harmonious place. How you
conceive it will effect how you experience it and it all depends not on
the countryside per se but on the subjective world of your
feelings which are projected onto the tabula rasa of nature.
Although this view fits conveniently with some ways of reading
psychoanalysis, it is a misleading and facile view which tells us little
about the natural environment. Usually this view makes great play of
some ideas in Rousseau, without doing much justice to that
over-sensitive and emotional political philosopher. His idea of the
noble savage, Romanticism’s natura mater and psychological
conceptions of instinct and adaptation often permeate this view.
There is, however, a longer literary and philosophical
history to the relationship between man and nature than that,
particularly among the Stoic writers, with their preoccupation for
living in harmony with nature which might practically be called the
foundational idea of Stoicism (Long, 2001, 1971; Sandbach, 1994).
Certainly by Xenophon’s time "countrified" had come to mean uneducated
and uncultured. Xenophon was inclined to rusticity and it is in his
Qeconomicus that an entirely new spirit emerges (Marchant, 2002).
Here, probably for the first time in literature, the full impact of the
conflict between city and country, between culture and nature is made
explicit and his love for the country which comes out has little in
common with the sentimentality of Aristophanes. Xenophon’s book shows
the land to be the imperishable root of all human life.
The rift between man and nature lies at the core of
every human community in the sense that human society rests on what was
known in the classical world as paideja (Jaeger, 1971). It is a
difficult word to translate. Modern expressions like civilization,
tradition, literature and education do not really cover it and yet they
all refer to aspects of it and it is only when we apply them together
that we get near to it. These words need to be taken as a unity and
possibly ‘culture’ is the nearest we can get to express this unity. Not
in the simple anthropological sense in which it is most frequently used
today, to denote the entire complex of all ways and expressions of life
which characterize any and every nation, even the most primitive.
Paideia means culture in the sense of value. It is an ideal pursued
by a community, self-consciously and I think comes fairly near to what
Lacan meant by the symbolic.
Architecture — the way we organise space — is one of
these cultural forms and one which has an immediate resonance with our
internal world. The interplay between the external and internal location
runs through many of the papers in this issue of the Journal, which is
concerned primarily with the relationship between people and places in
TCs. The paper by Teresa Howard discusses her attempts to take the
unconscious into account in architectural design over a 25 year period.
Although not referred to explicitly, her approach resonates with some of
the notions about architecture as a way to "organise emptiness" that
Lacan discussed in his Ethics. Two of the papers, those by Bill McGowan
and Jenny Grut, were originally given at the Annual Conference of
Community Housing and Therapy (CHT) held at the Royal College of
Psychiatrists in February 2001 and entitled Ecology and Therapeutic
Communities.
Jenny Grut’s paper is very much in the form of a talk
and describes her work as a psychotherapist with victims of torture.
When she delivered the paper it was accompanied by a number of slides
showing her working with patients on the allotment and it was extremely
moving. It is a personal account and I think Jenny’s passionate
commitment to the work comes through in the text. Jenny’s work mirrors
that of a TC because she is not seeing patients in a consulting room,
but outside, working alongside them growing fruit, vegetables and
flowers — and she runs therapy groups, so there is a lot of overlap with
TC work. We have also included a review of a book about Jenny’s work
which she co-wrote with Sonja Linden. Bill McGowan’s paper on social
ecology is an erudite review and commentary on the way in which notions
of space and location have been understood in different societies, with
particular reference to issues of public health. He develops this by
introducing concepts from Bion, Winnicott, Laing and others which
connect our interior world with the environment.
The Conference and these papers contributed to a small
group of staff and clients from CHT organising a camp for themselves and
Terry White and his colleagues have written an account of the camp, more
or less in the form of a diary, which we have included. I was struck by
the way in which staff tensions about the raison d’etre of the
camp came to the fore. I think readers who work as TC practitioners will
be interested in hearing how the thing got organised, and it would be
wonderful if other communities were inspired to follow suit or indeed,
join in with future camps which Terry will be running.
We are particularly pleased to be able to publish, in
this edition, two short pieces from the PETIT Archive and Study Centre
by Richard Crocket, with a truly fascinating introduction by Craig Fees.
These are important from an historical point of view. The two pieces are
in the form of memoranda, written when Dr Crocket was Director of the
Ingrebourne Centre in the early 1970s. The memoranda were sent in
response to a national programme to build new psychiatric units within
District General Hospitals. Although the programme did not go ahead,
these memoranda initiated a dialogue with the architects.
In my own paper I have tried to explore some 1of
the ways in which ecology brings us back again to the theme of language
and thus has relevance for TCs, as they above all else take seriously
the notion of community. All the papers published here remind me of the
amusing rhetorical question posed by Lacan: "Do bees know geometry?" It
is a question I often ask our staff, in order to stimulate the little
grey cells! Recently, one bright spark came back to me, quick as a flash
with the reply, "Only those who have been in group analysis!"
John Gale
Guest Editor
References
Jaeger, W. (1971) Paideia, The Ideals of Greek
Culture Vol III (trans.) G. Highet, New York, Oxford: OUP
Long, A.A. (1971) Problems in Stoicism, London:
The Athlone Press
Long, A.A. (2001) Stoic Studies, Berkeley:
University of California Press
Marchant, EC. (trans.) (2002) Xenophon, Oeconomicus
The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass, London: Harvard
University Press.
O’Hagan, A. The Daily Telegraph of 16th July 1999
Sandbach, F.H. (1994) The Stoics, London: Gerald
Duckworth
