The standardization of conducts carried out by the Therapeutic Communities

Abstract

In this article we analyze the subjective consequences resulting from hospitalization in a network of Therapeutic Communities (TC), based on the voices of the graduates. It is a qualitative research, through semi-structured interviews with ten subjects. The results are presented by examining the therapy carried out in the TC. The participants described it as based on deprivation of freedom, the media and social life, making it clear that the objective is to promote total isolation and produce the standardization of conducts. The researched network is configured as a total institution because it was idealized to offer hospitalization to drug users, who are seen as subjects unable to take care of themselves and who present a high degree of danger to everyone around them, which is why they need to be cloistered and severed from their social coexistence. Those institutions are anchored on four pillars: discipline, work, coexistence and, especially, on the religious approach, in order to promote the annulment of past subjectivities, their singularities and desires in favor of a new subjectivity – one that is immobilized in accordance with the prerogatives that thrive in those spaces, which makes them similar to the predominant confinements in the old asylums.