Conceptions of therapeutic work in therapeutic communities

Therapy is reflexive but not synonymous with therapists' accounting practices. It is displayed and engenders dominance but it is not an institutional rhetoric or a mechanism of social control. Six properties of therapeutic work are enumerated — reflexiveness, interpretativeness, interventionalism, domination, habituation tendencies and selectivity. All apart from reflexiveness are subject to differences of form and extension in different therapeutic communities. These variations in therapeutic work and communities can be empirically mapped. Such a conception of therapeutic work may have applications to therapeutic work outside the therapeutic communities and any other institutional setting. Two data extracts empirically ground the discussion.