Verbal Performances and Addict Conversion: An Interactionist Perspective on Therapeutic Communities

Abstract

Verbal interaction in therapeutic communities (TC's) for the treatment of drug addictions are explored here as a source of both the high rate of “conversion” among residents and the reported high rates of relapse to street crime and illicit drug use after leaving treatment. Residents enter TC's with values radically opposed to those of the TC's treatment philosophy but are gradually drawn into behavioral conformity with the TC code. Certain verbal performances demanded of clients appear instrumental to a conversion process in which clients develop self-concepts along the lines of program models, in spite of their frequent early efforts to “game” their way through therapy.

In verbal performances, clients are pressured to use the distinctive language (argot) and implicit value system of the TC treatment philosophy to characterize their own and their fellow clients' behavior before the group. Major vehicles are confessions, confrontations and rituals of stigmatization mounted with the active participation of resident peers. The ways in which residents are drawn into actively playing expected roles in the resocialization of fellow clients are described.

In TC's, dramatic verbal performances are highly compartmentalized in recurring discrete frames or occasions (Goffman, 1974). Each occasion is governed by a particularistic code which is learned experientially through the prompting of the TC peer group and staff. Specific codes of behavior are “learned by rote.” Behaviors appropriate on one occasion meet with censure on different occasions. In TC's the elaborated code or “concept” which joins the dramatic occasions is described as unknowable and not reducible to intellectual understanding. As a result, the resocialization process in TC's appears to be a conversion to this specific institutional setting itself. Such context-tried resocialization is not likely to guarantee the long-term rehabilitation of clients when they leave the TC setting.