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Based on an examination of paradoxical and conflicting situations encountered in “welfare” institutions, this text testifies to the questions that led its author, a teacher-educator and specialized educator, to undertake a university course in “psychoanalytic studies” and then to engage in research work. It is based on field situations and testimonies of people met in a French Accommodation and Social Reinsertion Center (CHRS) to try to highlight and lay down some analytical markers of certain phenomena and unconscious defense mechanisms that recur in the helping relationship.