[A meeting with the Therapeutic Community and its creators. A personal retrospect].

Tom Main and Maxwell Jones both died in 1990, respectively 79 and 83 years old. They had pioneered and developed the Therapeutic Community--each in his own way, and independently of each other, but with the same general and guiding principles --Tom Main at the Cassel Hospital, Richmond, Surrey, and Maxwell Jones at Belmont, later Henderson Hospital, Sutton, Surrey, England. Tom Main, who originally coined the Concept and gave it content while working in the Northfield Experiment with ex-prisoners of war during and after the war, was appointed director of the Cassel Hospital in 1945, and stayed there for more than 30 years. To quote Maxwell Jones he made it "one of the most thought-provoking centres of social psychiatry to be found anywhere". Tom Main also led groups of general practitioners and groups for marriage counselling. He published a number of brilliant articles. The Ailment, from 1957, is of primary interest. In 1989 all his articles were collected in a publication called: The Ailment and Other Psychoanalytic Essays. Maxwell Jones left Henderson Hospital in 1959 after 12 years, worked for some years in USA, and was afterwards appointed Director of Dingleton Hospital in Melrose, Scotland. He stayed there for some years before he again left for USA, and spent the last years of his life in Nova Scotia. Maxwell Jones was a prolific writer and published seven books and a large number of articles in different periodicals. Both these men had a lasting influence on hospital management and therapy in other countries.