Faire de la recherche en psychologie sur, pour et avec les médecins

“Doing” research in psychology in the medical field represents a true challenge for the psychologists and clinicians who practice in somatic services. Whether it deals with issues about doctors’ training, interdisciplinarity, forensic medicine, or about the progress of ill patients in specialty services, the object of study is fundamentally the same: care, even if it is composed of different realities. The body that the doctor treats, cuts, or heals has, indeed, barely anything in common with the patient subjectivity that interests the psychologist. The doctor and the nursing staff in general must, in order to bear the intrusive and sometimes aggressive acts that their work requires, defend themselves mentally, via sometimes massive strategies that stand in the way of psychologists’ work of untangling and comprehending psychic and emotional phenomena. How, then, is it possible to build (deconstruct?) a common elaboration? How can we consider multidisciplinary work so that it allows for interdisciplinarity and for a form of work “with” that is vastly preferable to a “side-by-side” work?