"One of the things we recognised quite some time ago in the Archive, and one of the things an archive can help to do is, is build in a reparative function, re-establishing relationships, creating new communication..."
I'm proof-reading Helen Moore's excellent transcript of the recordings of the day-long "Celebrating Us" event with which the Planned Environment Therapy Trust marked its ending back on November 24, 2018.
There is a specific context for this comment - a former child from a children's therapeutic community speaking about how damaging it was to leave the community, to be severed from it and all the deeply-built relationships he had developed there. So I responded "Can I just say, that's one of the things we recognised...."
I was emotional and not at my most articulate, but I went on to say, with editing, "We have people here who can speak better about this.... And we need to go to lunch, I know; we also probably need to get warm [quiet laughter][it was a cold day, in a cold marquee] ...but there are people here who, who have found this place ("Yes"), and I’ve learned from them that has a reparative function." And ended "one of the things that I discovered, and discovered precisely what you've said, that that severance is really incapacitating …
3/3/2019