In 2019, soon after the Archive and Study Centre closed, then-PETT Trustee Bob Hinshelwood suggested I write a book about it, and proposed we work together on a special issue of the Therapeutic Communities journal. With the special issue in mind we recorded an interview with one another in March 2019, and had an editorial meeting in August. Neither the book nor the special issue ever materialised, for a number of reasons, some of which I expressed in an email to Bob in June 2020:
I wonder how anyone has ever come to write about something that has never been written about before? And once you have begun, when does it ever stop?
Something which could be said and illustrated by this current piece of work, "Goodbye to all that".
I then went a bit deeper. I noted how a discussion with the Mulberry Bush about the old pettrust.org.uk website, which they had recently taken down,
starkly exposes how very different the Archive and Study Centre was from any place else that called itself an archive, and how its realisation of therapeutic community succeeded because it was invisible, as a matter of principle. Articulating what was meant to be observable but not seen exposes what my entire training and practice kept intentionally hidden. Even as a stagehand I respected the magician's request not to look behind the curtain which made a trick of levitation believable...
This was a reference to a draft Introduction I attached with the email (here).
I then went on:
The core of the special issue must still be case studies, to make the obvious observable in action....And there must be an historical tally, to demonstrate all of this in the work of the Archive and Study Centre in the spades which seem to me to make it obvious. But a quasi-aggressive act is needed, in which the curtain itself is torn back, and the mechanism shown. I don't think the interviews we've done do that, because I approached them from entirely the wrong direction. I think an introduction has to be written which tackles it head on.
I've said over many years, in an internal echo of a conversation with the late Ronald St. Blaize Molony, colleague of both R.D. Laing and Richard Crocket, that I am not particularly transgressive; and it goes against the grain. But...
In any event, here is an introduction to that Introduction.
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