This article describes therapeutic residential services as essential practices for consolidating the psychiatric reform carried out in Brazil and puts forward a clinical approach based on psychoanalysis. From this point of view, the psychoanalyst's main function is to provide caregivers with ways of dealing with patients in everyday situations, either at home or outside, without reproducing the patronizing attitude typical of mental institutions. The main proposals are to sustain a certain unknowing knowledge as a clinical strategy and the use of the patients' subjective resources as ways of managing the experience of living together.
Therapeutic Residential Services; psychoanalysis; psychiatric reform; subject