Socioanalysis and clinical intervention

Abstract

Our team of analysts1 has shaped its path in clinical sociology over more than thirty years through the development of a technical instrument: socioanalysis. The term socioanalysis, which was an early replacement for the longer term psychosocial self-analysis, turned out to have a number of meanings. Socioanalysis can be described in various ways, depending on whether one adopts a pragmatic, technical, or theoretical point of view. From the pragmatic point of view, a socioanalysis is addressed to social entities desiring to work together to improve their control over their own action, or who request help in dealing with problems for which they see no solution. These entities must have sufficient weight in institutional negotiation to be able to contract with the collective analyst constituted by the socioanalysts and to commit their time and resources for the appropriate time period. From the technical point of view, socioanalysis is grounded in its acquired experience of how, in specific conditions, the basic mechanisms governing the action of a social entity are reproduced. Because of this experience, socioanalysis, as a technique, provides insight into the origin, structure, and functioning of an entity under specified conditions. From the theoretical point of view, socioanalysis circumscribes an object-the entity that generates and supports the action. This object contains the elements that constitute the action and the forces that carry it. Its formal definition results from the conditions under which it can be accessed from the different perspectives-internal and external. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.