On the origins of clinical sociology in France: Some milestones

Abstract

Clinical sociology emerged in France in a continuous way in the 1980s and was affiliated with psychosociology and the work of the Laboratoire de Changement Social (Social Change Research Center) (LCS) at the Université Paris Diderot. In Geneva, in 1988, a workshop was launched within the Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française (International Association of French Language Sociologists, AISLF) on the initiative of Robert Sévigny, Gilles Houle, Eugène Enriquez, and me. A working group that included these members also became a permanent research committee within the International Sociological Association (ISA) in 1992. The first clinical sociology conference organized in France was held at the Université Paris Diderot in the same year. Co-sponsored by the AISLF and ISA research committees, the conference brought together more than 150 researchers from over fifteen countries. An account of these events and the papers they produced were published the following year (Gaulejac and Roy, 1993). © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.