Curative communities. Western clinical practice faced with the therapeutic particularities of traditional healing communities

Résumé 0

In multicultural clinical practice, one regularly encounters patients who belong to or have passed through traditional healing communities. The article analyzes the main characteristics that differentiate these groups from the world of Western medicine focused on the individual’s illness: the marked withdrawal of these healing communities from the wider society, the hyper-sensitivity of their members and their lasting fragility due to their unending dependence on the community and its leader, the strong anguish of relapses and their occurrence in the case of a precipitous departure from the group, the ritual maintenance of these uncertainties… These and other features are developed in the course of an overview of the Moundang women’s healing communities studied by the author in Chad. The article concludes with some proposals concerning the return of these traits in the transcultural therapeutic relationship.