[Realities and mirages : psychic and social spaces of reintegration.]

This study, based on a sampling of people who were diagnosed schizophrenic, sought to describe the different types of positive and negative social réintégration. Research combined an anthropological approach with rigid discipline in the gathering of data. The authors examined réintégration from three points of view : social relations, social roles, and utilization of space and time (l'espace-temps). Data shows that people who are constantly rehospitalized feel marginalized and experience rejection, particularly with family and relatives, and that these feelings sharply contrast the relatively normative expectations concerning réintégration. In these cases, the patient's psychiatric environment tends to structure the reintegration process. However, people who have not been rehospitalized are characterized by a dominant type of réintégration that is best described as"posi-tive retreat" ("retrait positif). This characteristic is supported by various psychological, social and cultural hypotheses. Moreover, an intercultural perspective suggests that certain traits in North American societies tend to make people look down on "positive retreat" and view this form of readaptation as negative.