RELATIONAL THEMES IN THE INPATIENT COMMUNITY MEETING

The authors present a model of psychiatric inpatient community meeting s run as large group interpretive psychotherapy. They developed this m odel in part from Gill's notion that patients attach plausible meaning s to therapist behavior based on the patient's characteristic and ster eotypical ways of experiencing relationships. The model provides a fra mework for the description of 11 clinically derived ''unconscious rela tional configurations'' that can frequently be detected as organizing ''relational themes'' of community meetings. The authors present two c linical vignettes in which staff detect these themes and interpret the m together with the defenses against them. They then discuss the promi nent negative affective valence that characterizes the ''unconscious r elational configurations.''