Nous pensons que la psychothérapie de groupe peut être un moyen de faire concilier les recommandations en matière de prophylaxie visées par les mesures psychoéducatrices, la dimension vivante de l’expérience retrouvée dans l’attitude phénoménologique et les aspects tournés vers le monde communautaire de la médiation thérapeutique. Pour articuler ces différents domaines, nous abordons les principes de la psychoéducation, les risques que celle-ci peut comporter et les apports de la phénoménologie clinique. L’attitude phénoménologique est particulièrement intéressante pour les groupes de parole qui privilégient l’ouverture plutôt qu’un travail d’élaboration. L’enjeu est ainsi l’authenticité d’une véritable alliance thérapeutique, basée sur des fines régulations de la situation globale de coprésence tenant compte de l’entrelacement de l’implicite et de l’explicite dans les échanges qui se tissent avec les patients. Nous privilégions une démarche féconde plutôt que l’observance rigoureuse d’une méthode qui ne conduirait qu’à une systématisation contraire à l’esprit de la phénoménologie. L’expérience clinique montre que l’accent mis sur la dimension de coprésence au sein d’un groupe permet notamment une fréquentation régulière du groupe, ce qui est un des ingrédients majeurs de son efficacité.

Psychoeducation contains the risk of a misunderstanding in the effective experiences of recognition. We want to show that group psychotherapy can be a means to reconcile recommendations in disease prevention aimed by psychoeducative measures, the vivid and lively dimension of experience found in phenomenological attitudes and aspects, turned to the community world of therapeutic mediation.

To articulate these various domains, we approach the principles of psychoeducation, the risks which this one can contain and the contributions of clinical phenomenology. Phenomenological method is different from what we call collectively clinical intuition which is always implicitly colored by the typical contexts of meanings of what appears (meanings which have a practical and effective reach for example) and stay, in spite of the critical distance which we can put it, stuffed with various emotional and theoretical predicates muddled between them. The phenomenological attitude aims as much as possible to a suspension of these predicates, that these predicates arise from the common sense of everyday life or that they arise from a detailed specialized knowledge, and this to remove the “coats of sense” which settled on the perception.

The group, by its multiple interactions, aims at an optimization of the articulation of the self-relationship with relationship socially adapted to the others. The therapist constantly has to attend to dialectical dynamics which reigns between a certain self-dissolution in the group and a return to oneself from the meshing which build up itself within the group. For certain patients, it is particularly difficult to maintain a just balance between the two moments of identity, the one which is peculiar to oneself and the one which emanates from relations with the others towards which we are normally constantly turned. The interest of this psychotherapeutic work in group is here to offer to each of participants the possibility of holding, with a little more confindence, an existential position within a meshing of social links, that is a capacity to seize oneself as existing among the other beings having themselves an own existence. From there, the subjective capacities of each can be better recognized, what can also give place to adjustment of these capacities with individual aspirations. The active implication of patients, so looked for by psychoeducation, is all the more tangible as we were so able to appeal, by the phenomenological attitude, to what feels immediately and without distance as much in an intimate self-relation as in relationship to the others.

Phenomenological attitude allows not to get stuck in imaginary expert skills, in rational projects of organization and other methodical constructions of the science. This attitude is particularly interesting for group psychotherapy which privileges the opening rather than a work of elaboration. The stake is so the authenticity of a real therapeutic alliance based on fine regulations of the global situation of co-presence taking into account the interlacing of the implicit and the explicit in the exchanges which weave with the patients. We privilege a fertile step rather than rigorous observance of a method which would lead only to a systematization against the spirit of phenomenology. The clinical experience shows that this psychotherapeutic method allows in particular a regular attendance of the group, what is one of major ingredients of its efficiency.