The Retreat,York: an Organizational View of an Applied Group Analytic Approach

Abstract

This article explores the discourse of care at The Retreat, York by examining its birth within moral treatment, Quakerism and the birth of asylums. I develop this further by linking these discourses into subsequent movements, namely group analysis and the therapeutic community movement. Through problematizing this history, I offer a new register for considering care in communities and groups by suggesting the use of the pedagogical concept of ‘figured worlds’. By doing so I aim to offer a contemporary view of moral treatment and suggest this is more important than ever given the nature of austerity in our current socio-economic paradigm at the possible end of British neoliberalist politics.