Trauma et culture : influence des facteurs culturels dans la rencontre traumatique et perspectives psychothérapeutiques

Abstract

It exists a very strong interpersonal variability of psychological and psychiatric consequences after a trauma. In the present article, we suggest exploring the cultural dimension, its influence in the traumatic process and the potential emergence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the importance of its taking into consideration during the victims’ psychotherapeutic care. Individual ecology is linked with collective ecology of the community, in its rites and traditions, its lifestyle, its system of representations and values, and its spirituality. An event then turns out to be traumatic for an individual according to the meaning given to this life experience, estimated through the prism of cultural codes it has integrated and which are part of its subjective life. However, it would seem that the hegemonic western models of evaluation and diagnose post-traumatic disorders do not integrate enough the cultural characteristics, as well as recent psychotherapies forms.