[Mental issues of clinical research interviews in an intercultural context]

The interview is an intersubjective meeting in which the stakes are complex. This frequently used method in social and human sciences research brings to the foreground various mental processes. Despite its clear distinction from the therapeutic interview, due to its purpose and the origin of the request, the research interview generates for both the participant and the researcher unconscious phenomena and contributes to the epistemological reflection inherent to the clinical approach.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the mental processes mobilized in the participants and in the researcher, who belong to the same culture of origin during the research interview, may be analyzed in four dimensions: intrapsychique, intersubjective, projective and group.

So as to illustrate the various mental processes that are engaged, a research conducted in clinical intercultural psychology regarding the adaptive processes and the identity strategies of Korean mothers living in France or in Quebec is used. In order to offer maximum freedom of expression to the participants, the interviews were conducted in Korean, and then translated into French. The intrapsychic dimension is illustrated by an example from the interview with a 44-year-old Korean woman met in Paris. Following the Rogerian theory (1952, 1961), we understand that the participant comes to a coherent reorganization of her own conception throughout the interview, allowing her to speak and to think about her autobiography. From the interaction between two subjectivities, the thought and the discourse are involved in the co-construction of meaning. The understanding of the intersubjective dimension is supported by the theory of Winnicott (1971), developed for the transitional space. Like the mother-child relationship in the game device, the mental permeability available to the researcher is supposed to guarantee the development of the interviewee's confidence. The example of the interview conducted with another 39-year-old Korean woman living in Paris illustrates this intersubjective dimension. The analysis of the relationship between the researcher and his object of research will argue the projective dimension. In the quoted research, the researcher is facing a situation in which the participant's problems remind him of his own questionings. The work of analysis, with hindsight and in the after fact, on the position of the researcher and his subjective implication, is necessary to avoid the possible risk of subjectivation. The group dimension has several levels: institutional, national, international or even worldwide. Thus, the intercultural aspect is particularly highlighted in an attempt to present the complexity of the process.

The idea of the interculturality awareness at several levels was highlighted in particular by taking the institutional transference/counter-transference movement into consideration. The transfer mezo level revealed itself as one of the analyzers of the group dimension, such as the motivation for accepting the participation in our investigation. In other words, it requires understanding both the relationship conducted by each individual with the institution, and that conducted by two subjects met within the institution. In the current world marked by globalization, "the geohistory of the clinical encounter" (Derivois, 2010) becomes an interesting tool to understand the complexity of the encounter issues arising from the clinical consultation.