L’interdisciplinarité en pratique : un défi pour les clinicien·nes

Abstract

ContextThe scope for the psychologist's interventions has expanded into the social field, which requires a rethinking of frameworks and plural theoretical approaches in order to acknowledge multiple causalities and complex phenomena. Therefore, research and pedagogy must open to a difficult, but indispensable, multidisciplinarity. ObjectivesWe show that multidisciplinarity is a process, and we elaborate on some of its hurdles. MethodsBased on the authors’ experience as teachers, clinical psychologists, and researchers, this article explores the necessity and difficulties of multidisciplinarity in three areas of work: pedagogy with psychology students; practice in collaboration with social workers, nurses, physicians, etc.; research in collaboration with colleagues specialized in other social sciences. ResultsIn the pedagogical experience, we discuss the stupefaction of a group of Master's students after watching a documentary about sex change; we show some ideological and defensive issues at stake in the attempt at interdisciplinarity and the attachment to the reference discipline. Regarding clinical psychologists, who have to cooperate with practitioners of other disciplines, especially for those practicing in the field of extreme precarity, we show the imbrication of psychic and social suffering, while striving to clearly distinguish multidisciplinarity and interprofessionality. Finally, in the practice of multidisciplinary team research, we explore the processes that enable us, not without conflict, to build an interdisciplinary point of view, and explore their conditions of possibility and their limitations. ConclusionsPsychology needs social science to prevent itself from becoming a closed, self-referential system, and to broaden its concepts of complexity: our objects inform us as much about the external world as about our inner world and the pre-existing models, beliefs, alliances it is caught up in.