69

The “Welcoming the Newborn and Parenthood” workshop serves as mediation within a French accommodation center for asylum-seekers. Mediation is used, here, as a caregiving tool located halfway between the fields of exile and perinatality. Supported by the group, and with its functions and cultural objects used as mediation tools, this workshop aims towards reinstating a continuity where exile and psychological rearrangements due to maternity have created a discontinuity. Creating links between past and present, the here and the elsewhere, the body and the mind, the mother and the baby, and therefore restoring self-continuity as well as within external relationships, are all indications for investing this mediation group. From various clinical situations, the authors describe how the transitional space created can help enhance parental competencies and reinforce the mother-baby relationship through the hybridization of practices.