Craig Fees writes:
“I was fortunate enough to visit Maxwell Jones a few weeks before his death in 1990. We were sitting and talking in his ‘ashram’ when he suddenly stopped and said “Now, I’ve got something that I really want to share. If you said to me ‘Where can I see what you would regard as a totally satisfying therapeutic community’, I could only name one place. Breda O’Sullivan is in charge...” This was Heronbrook House, near Birmingham, a therapeutic community run by the Sisters of Charity of St. Paul the Apostle. He said it had “an atmosphere which is absolutely perfect and adds what we never had, the spiritual.” He called it a place “of intense freedom”.
He and Breda O’Sullivan met, by chance (or “synchronicity” - Max), when she was doing her PhD. at Boston University. Her thesis (dedicated to her parents, Timothy and Kathleen, “who, in a family of ten children, first taught me the give-and-take necessary to work in any therapeutic community.”) was completed in 1985, and was called “Characteristics of Therapists in a Therapeutic Community: Expected and Perceived Therapist Qualities in a Psychotheological Community”. It argued “that to better understand the therapeutic community we need to accurately and frequently assess the characteristics, training, activities and theories of persons who practice psychotherapy in a therapeutic community.” Based on research in four residential centres of the American psychotheological therapeutic community the House of Affirmation, it was the first “empirical investigation of characteristics of therapists who work in therapeutic communities.” Needless to say, when she and Max met they “spent days talking nonstop about the whole [therapeutic community] concept.” “Breda is a remarkable woman,” Max said, “with this knowledge plus the spiritual dimension. I’m lucky to have met her.”
