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This article concerns the methods of anthropology applied here to the field of hospital psychiatry. The reflexive feedback on an experience in a PTCA unit in Brussels (Patients with severe behavioural and/or aggressive disorders) allows us to highlight the fundamental roles played by the systematic use of the field notebook in this mental health environment. The practices of classical ethnography that this object symbolises (in situ practices or survey restitutions) are often forgotten by applied research. However, the notebook, which during this research process has become the main signifier of the status occupied by the anthropologist, represents, beyond a classic support of empirical production, an “intermediate space” from which relationships with others (carers and cared-for) are created, woven and played out.