‘Home is where the hate is’

SUMMARY

This paper attempts to describe some of the unconscious processes at work within the modern community mental home, using Kleinian and post-Kleinian ideas to look at the concept of home itself in relation to the difference in functioning between the psychotic and non-psychotic mind, and observing the implications this has in terms of the task facing community care staff and home managers. The paper relies on the central hypothesis that the minds of the borderline and schizophrenic individuals who tend to make up the bulk of residents within community mental homes function in a manner akin to that of the early infant prior to the development of internal space via the introjected experience of a containing maternal object relationship. It argues that as a consequence of this the challenge facing staff working in such environments becomes one of replicating maternal containment as the prerequisite to therapeutic aspirations or notions of meaningful change for individuals from within their client group.