Thibouville, Grégoire

Group Analysis with Perpetrators of Domestic Violence in New Caledonia - 2011.


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This article shares the experience, in a South Pacific island (a French territory), of setting up a therapy project of collective work with people in a violent situation, i.e., perpetrators of marital and familial violence. The patients are of various ethnic backgrounds, such as Melanesian, Caledonian, Polynesian, Indonesian and French. Their sociocultural level is also very heterogeneous. This raises the question of a non-native practice carried out by the group’s clinician in a Caledonian society fully engaged in the process of social and cultural transformation, where the “social” subject still most often takes precedence over the “individual” subject. The article recounts the progress and development of that space, innovative in both its rules and local characteristics, as well as presenting the country and the structure of caretaking, in addition to the case history of this discussion group. The issues dealt with here are not violence and its treatment, but the establishment of a group plan for transformation and progress which attempts to take the multicultural dimension into account.In the singular context of New Caledonia, the question arises of the importance of thinking about an intermediary cross-cultural space ( etci) for analysis and working through (with reference to André Sirota’s concept of the intermediary cultural space – eci), in order to contain violence and its traumatic repercussions in another way.