Community psychiatry - a hard look at feasibility. Toward a socioanalytic understanding

Abstract

This paper reviews the concept of community transference and discusses its relation with the use of illusory phenomena in alleviating the discomfort of maintaining object relatedness, and with nonpathological paranoia as a practically universal phenomenon of human groups. The importance of community transference in contemporary psychiatry is discussed and its challenge is described to the community psychiatrist who aspires to a clearer definition of his professional role. Training programs for community mental health personnel are proposed as a pragmatic response to a call for effective parsinomious services, and as a plausible alternative to woolly notions of the large scale preventability of mental illness.