Reading about therapeutic communities can be an exciting experience because of a sense of pioneering change and challenge in the face of establishment opposition. Survival is often difficult and administrative values of those who control the purse strings can threaten their very existence. There is also an aura of justice and freedom where injustice has prevailed. This air of excitement and enthusiasm permeates the writings of Martin (1962) in Adventure in Psychiatry and continues in Shoenberg's (1972) updating of the Claybury experience. It features in Wilmer's (1958) vivid account of practical achievements in the Oakland Naval Hospital Receiving Ward, Foudraine's (1974) conscientious efforts to change the social organization of a unit for schizophrenics receiving private treatment in a clinic in Virginia and Mandelbrote's (1958, 1964) descriptions of change in mental hospitals in Gloucester and Oxford. It also characterizes Maxwell Jones’ writings (1968) with their autobiographical flavour and ‘living learning experience’ and Clark's (1964, 1974) presentation of administrative and social therapy with its emphasis on patient freedom, activity and responsibility. Yet it is the very cult-like nature of the therapeutic community which can be its undoing, raising expectations and hampering the independence and difference which it aims to tolerate.