Abstract
In the Czech Republic, therapeutic communities have experienced a distinctive development stemming from a tradition of particular interest. From today’s perspective, we can define two major focal points where the therapeutic community approach matured and spread from: one was associated with the domain of addiction treatment, the other with the psychiatric-psychotherapeutic setting.
This said, one may assume that such a situation simply reflects the international development of “hierarchical” and “democratic” therapeutic communities. But it was far from being that straightforward.
The specific situation of communist Czechoslovakia, subordinated to the Soviet ideology and deeply isolated from Western ideas and movements, laid the foundations for a development of its own.