Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘community’ is rarely treated as a sociological given; it is examined as a psychic achievement, a liminal event, and in some registers an endangered condition. Victor Turner’s sustained theorisation of communitas — following Buber’s Ich-Thou — establishes the dominant axis: genuine community is not a structural arrangement but a spontaneous, unmediated encounter between persons stripped of their social roles, an efflorescence possible only in the liminal interstices of ritual process. Turner is equally attentive to the dialectic that keeps communitas alive: isolated from structure, it rapidly collapses into despotism or bureaucratisation; absorbed entirely into structure, it calcifies into dead convention. Thomas Moore approaches community from a soul-psychological angle, arguing that it thrives in the ‘valleys of soul’ rather than in the heights of moral idealism. The addiction literature — Alexander’s dislocation thesis, the Therapeutic Community literature of Avery, Brazier on sangha — converges on the view that severed community bonds are both cause and consequence of pathological states. Abram extends the concept ecologically, insisting that the shaman’s function is precisely to mediate between the human community and the ‘more-than-human’ community of beings. Religious-psychological voices (Pargament, Kurtz) add that community grounded in shared narrative and mutual witness carries distinctive reparative power. The overarching tension is between community as structure and community as event — a tension Turner identifies as irreducible and constitutive.
Community is where community happens… communitas is made evident or accessible only through its juxtaposition to, or hybridization with, aspects of social structure.
Turner, citing Buber, argues that authentic community is an event of spontaneous I-Thou encounter that can only be apprehended in dialectical relation to social structure, never in isolation from it.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
There is a dialectic here, for the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of structure… no society can function adequately without this dialectic.
Turner argues that community and social structure form a necessary dialectic: the suppression of either pole produces pathological outcomes, whether structural rigidity or communitas-induced despotism.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
The great human temptation, found most prominently among utopians, is to resist giving up the good and pleasurable qualities of communitas… human beings are responsible to one another in the supplying of humble needs.
Turner cautions against the utopian temptation to perpetuate communitas permanently, arguing that structural roles and their attendant responsibilities are equally essential to human social life.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Community cannot be sustained at too high a level. It thrives in the valleys of soul rather than in the heights of spirit.
Moore, drawing on Renaissance humanism, argues that genuine community requires the descent into foolishness and vulnerability — a soul-level rather than a spirit-level phenomenon.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
Such a place, the kind of community we call home, is discovered rather than created, found rather than made.
Kurtz argues that authentic community is not a construction but a disclosure, arising from shared narrative witness in which mutual belonging precedes deliberate design.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994thesis
The traditional or tribal shaman acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment… from the human community back to the local earth.
Abram extends the concept of community beyond the human to encompass the ecological field, positioning the shaman as the figure who maintains reciprocal relation between these two registers of communal life.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
Structureless communitas can bind and bond people together only momentarily… it is interesting to observe how often communitas-type movements develop an apocalyptic mythology, theology, or ideology.
Turner demonstrates that unstructured communitas cannot sustain itself and historically generates apocalyptic ideologies as compensatory frameworks when it fails to institutionalise.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Each of us needs a sangha. If we don’t have a good sangha yet, we should spend our time and energy building one… Without a sangha, you will not have enough support and you will burn out very soon.
Brazier, channelling Thich Nhat Hanh, presents the sangha as a therapeutic necessity — a structured community of practice without which psychological and ethical work becomes unsustainable.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995supporting
The suburbs could not have been better designed to negate psychosocial integration and maximise dislocation. Not only did neighbours have no common cultural roots, they lived in residential aggregations that had no material basis upon which to build a local culture.
Alexander argues that modern suburban design structurally prevents the formation of genuine community, producing the dislocation that underlies mass addiction.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
To operationalize the concept of ‘community as method,’ staff must function at three levels of operations: the community level, the individual resident level, and the level of feelings and emotions.
Avery articulates the Therapeutic Community model’s core methodological claim that community itself — rather than any discrete clinical technique — is the primary therapeutic agent.
, The Opioid Epidemic and the Therapeutic Community Model: An Essential Guide, 2019supporting
Epidemics recede, but society’s drug problem persists, as does the need for therapeutic communities… The recovery perspective is the fundamental rationale for the TC program model, its unique approach, community as method.
Avery positions the Therapeutic Community as a durable response to addiction precisely because its organising principle is community-as-method, a recovery orientation that transcends any single epidemic wave.
, The Opioid Epidemic and the Therapeutic Community Model: An Essential Guide, 2019supporting
Many have established their own families away from the communities and families they grew up in… they look to the synagogue or church to reestablish that larger sense of connectedness.
Pargament documents how religious congregations serve as surrogate communities for the dislocated, providing the relational density that contemporary mobility has eroded.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
The true church, or ekklesia, is that portion of humanity that recognizes its own divine origin.
Hoeller, reading Jung’s Gnosticism, redefines community (ekklesia) as a psychological rather than institutional category — those who share recognition of the psyche’s divine depth.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting
This kind of communitas tends to be more exclusive in membership, disciplined in its habits, and secretive about its practices than the apocalyptic genre just discussed.
Turner distinguishes a ‘communitas of withdrawal’ — disciplined, bounded, and esoteric — as one of the principal modalities through which communities protect their intense interior life from structural absorption.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Communitas is of the now; structure is rooted in the past and extends into the future through language, law, and custom.
Turner articulates the temporal dimension of the community/structure polarity: communitas belongs to the present moment of encounter, while structural community persists through time via normative inheritance.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
What they don’t understand is the spirit of responsible concern that underlies the practice of these tools.
Avery defends the Therapeutic Community’s behavioural interventions by appealing to the communal ethos of mutual accountability that gives these practices their legitimate depth.
, The Opioid Epidemic and the Therapeutic Community Model: An Essential Guide, 2019supporting
The weak and the broken do have much to give — they can heal us because they tap the well of our own brokenness.
Kurtz illustrates, through Vanier’s L’Arche, that genuine community is constituted by mutual vulnerability rather than by the strength or competence of its members.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994supporting
The task of therapy is to reconnect people to their own depths, to one another and to the world.
Brazier frames therapeutic work as fundamentally a task of re-communalisation — reconnecting the isolated individual to self, others, and the wider world simultaneously.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995aside
With Elias, structure; both material and abstract, had begun to replace communitas.
Turner traces the historical displacement of Franciscan communitas by institutional structure, using it as a case study in the inevitable tension between charismatic community and organisational form.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966aside
Physical separation from the larger society, homemade clothing of plain colors, rejection of modern devices, a religiously based agrarian lifestyle… set the Amish apart from others and bond them more closely to each other.
Pargament presents the Amish community as an empirical instance of how deliberate structural separation from the wider society can intensify internal communal bonds and preserve a distinctive way of life.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside