Mobilising social and symbolic resources in transcultural therapies with refugees and asylum seekers: The story of mister diallo

Abstract

Psychotherapies with refugees and asylum seekers are a challenging task for health professionals. Therapists do not only have to face the difficulties of transcultural communication, they also have to confront the omnipresence of social and administrative problems these patients struggle with. They equally have to adapt their technique to the dynamics appearing in therapeutic work with victims of deliberate violence. In this article, we first propose a brief discussion of these problems, their impact on the psychotherapeutic work and our strategies to deal with them. In the following part, we illustrate our approach by a case study. © 2007 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC. All rights reserved.