Therapeutic Community Democratic or new rationalization of the operation of psychiatric power:

historical references of its emergence

Abstract

In the midst of the growth of formation of Therapeutic Communities in Brazil, as well as of researches that seek to understand their logic, order, practice and functioning, this article intends to present a sketch of two authors and their ideas, taking them as reference notes on the directions of contemporary TCs. Maxwell Jones and Franco Basaglia ideas are presented to reflect on how their trajectories in different institutions and psychiatry models have promoted debates that consider the concepts of democracy and rationalization for psychiatry and the emergence of Therapeutic Communities. A criticism made a case that theoretical speculations would eventually transform TCs into modern, streamlined institutions and therefore integrated into the system, without eliminating power relations. From questions like these, we analyze points placed by both. Whether in the decentralization of the power of psychiatry or in the community dialectic ambiguity, the theoretical models proposed by the authors, presented in this article, highlight the contradictions of institutions within psychiatric hospitals and give us clues to understanding TCs.