Retrospective study of similarities and relations between American drug-free and European therapeutic communities for children and adults.

This article focuses on the similarities and relations between the European therapeutic community for children and adults on the one hand and the American drug-free "concept" therapeutic community on the other. Both approaches are reviewed in a historical and comparative perspective with special attention to several critical issues: democracy versus hierarchy, self-help versus professionalism, psychoanalysis versus behaviorism and concept versus social learning. These two different TC-approaches can be considered as subdivisions of one modality, namely an environment for social learning in which living together in a group can be regarded as the primary agent of growth and human development. In recent years there has been a tendency towards further integration of these two approaches.