Abstract

Language, like architecture, always tells a tale. It is the story of the men which inhabit it. In this chapter I discuss some of the ways in which the therapeutic community inhabits language, is constructed by language and is revealed to itself through language. In the first part, after my introduction, I will concentrate on some theoretical questions about the relationship between language, the unconscious and community and in the second part I shall refer more directly to language in therapeutic community practice. Writing almost ten years ago, Dr Horst Flegel noted that the thoughts of the late Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, encourage us to try to look down on the therapeutic community “from the ‘higher’ level of philosophy”. With this in mind I shall start with a few introductory remarks about the place of language in contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis.