Contenu du sommaire : Psychologie interculturelle : méthodologies et créations

Assessing intrapsychic appropriation of cultural heterogeneity: The intercultural psychology perspective. This paper's aim is to propose a questioning on the research methodologies in intercultural psychology. As a starting point, we examine the interrogation about the intrapsychic appropriation that any individual makes facing the multicultural dynamics of his environment. To do this, three questions will be developed : why is cross-cultural psychology a suitable discipline to broach the topic of the psychic individuation for people living within the cultural diversity of contemporary societies ? Which approach to culture is the most fitted to account for these processes (etic, emic, emic / etic) ? And finally, does the diachronic approach, rather than the synchronic one, allow a development towards a greater understanding of the targeted objectives ?

The researcher in intercultural psychology: Between objectivity and subjectivityIn my Ph
D research, I tried to understand the process of interculturation through a study about the religious altars Vietnamese residents in the city of Limoges have at home. This study is the result of a certain number of questions I had since my first encounters with these Vietnamese people. In this article, I will describe the methodological approach I used. I will pay particular attention to moments when I was irritated or destabilized during my research. They brought up many questions concerning my status, my position and my own relation to the “other”; as well as the question of my subjectivity and my own counter-transference.

Narrative and research among multicultural families: From telling to passing on to the next generations. Thanks to the Chicago school, people's life narrative has become a tool for scientific research since 1915: it has become a means of psychological investigating, understanding and interceding among excluded groups of populations. Systemic crosscultural psychology is part of this qualitative approach which consists in understanding people, what they go through, their social environment as compared to their life narratives, in which the subject, more than being a mere informer tells his own story while being the most important witness, the most important and unique expert about his life and his feelings. Our study will aim at imitating Paul Ricœur ‘s approach : we will consider listening to people's narratives as a way of investigation enabling them to engrave their life experience in time and, consequently, to become significant individuals. The fact of taking into account their own memories and to link their past to their present as a basis for their future will allow them to structure and harmonize their experience so as to pass it on to the next generation. This study will be based on a method relying on narrative, history, memories, remembering, heritage, commitment and transmission in relation to migrant populations.

Complementarism in clinical intercultural psychology research
This article presents a complementarist method used in research on historical trauma. It is based on a research about the young people who participated in the “riots” in autumn 2005 in France. Within a methodological frame referring to psychoanalysis, interactionist sociology cultural anthropology and history, we used a grounded theory approach in its revised form proposed by Mucchielli, but also elements of the French and Suisse tradition of ethnopsychoanalysis. Results of our research show that these adolescents are struggling with the collective denial of colonial history while being outraged by the reality of their present life situation. The perspectives they express reflect silenced parts of French history.

Bricolage and the creation of hybrid methods. The construction of a multi-referential method in a research about the therapeutic space in intercultural therapies. While presenting the example of a research on transcultural psychotherapies in a group-setting, we discuss the construction of an interdisciplinary method in research in intercultural psychology. The research analyses the interactions in a specific setting for transcultural therapies in France. We tried to understand how therapists and patients co-construct a dialogue about culture, belongings und cultural representations, and how they manage to bring different cultural universes into a dialogue. The methodology integrates elements from interpretative cultural anthropology, ethnopsychoanalysis and grounded theory. Interdisciplinary work demands a lot of creativity which in turn facilitates the discovery and detailed description of underlying processes.

The culture contact into the research procedures. Methodological proposals for the intercultural psychologyTo differentiate the comparative culturalist approach (Cross Cultural Psychology) from the interculturalist coconstructivist one (Culture Contact Psychology) leads to examine the methodological specific consequences of the very same nature of the researcher and the object to the intercultural psychology. Three different researches studying the effects of interculturation on the negotiations success, the professional behavior and the migrant's mental health show its impact on the frame, the relation and the psychic processes. By reflexivity these results are implemented into the intercultural psychology research process as a culture contact between a researcher belonging to one culture and an object belonging to another one. It follows from this a specific methodology and research procedures thickening the culture contact phenomenon.

Personal dynamics and professional identities in changing situations
The introduction discusses the effects of situations experienced by «accompanied» people (those supported by official bodies) (unemployment, early retirement, forced retirement, insecurity precarity, odd jobs) but it also discusses the effects on personnel undergoing institutional change. (burnout, loss of meaning, difficult regulations). In order to better understand the processes involved in the development and crises of identity, the authors suggest three useful concepts: ecological psychology (affordances and capabilities), serendipity and categorizations (of people and their practices) and the limitations of these concepts. The occupational categories are described, their components or dimensions highlighted, and the connections links and contrasts between the professionalization and the dynamics of the person are analyzed. Finally, professional identities are compared with the paradoxical process of identization, adaptation and alienation / liberation of self.

Fragility and social cohesion
In 1985, Marcel GAUCHET talked about the disenchantment of the world. Today, one comes to speak about “society of contempt”. The work of Axel Honneth outlines the struggle for recognition as a useful construct for rethinking the kind of discourse normally associated with Habermas and transformative learning. We are also looking at the thesis of psychanalyst Miguel Benasayag and his «emotion of sadness» (melancholy, fear, despair, envy) that govern people's lives and are meant to lead us to a society of impotence. The transition from powerlessness to strenght means to get to dwell in our situations as much as to learn how to desire otherwise. In front line observer position, Europe has long been perceiving the danger of single dimensionality of the world. Neoliberal society not only alters people's behaviour and thought, it also brings about a new form of subjectivity. Current issues from social cohesion schemes are addressed as well as other social movements that contribute to regenerate us. Within an assumed fragility, it is possible to explore new forms of social engagement. The whole human being expresses himself in each mode of existence. We wish to explore the adventure of boundaries in a bid to celebrate the power to exist and to become creative agents of our own life.