As part of our ongoing content, we feature authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Today, we are excited to bring you our interview with Manon Arminot and Lara Haghiri Ghazvini!

What is your article “Cultural Countertransference of Young Clinicians Facing a State of Possession: A Cultural Case Study” about?

The article is a case study about a patient that displayed a state of possession during a session of the transcultural therapy group, in the Avicenne Hospital (Bobigny, France).

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

Manon : I am approaching my final year of residency in psychiatry and I specialised in child and adolescent psychiatry. I am currently writing a paper about the links between learning disabilities and psychopathology.

Lara : I am a psychiatric resident leaning towards my fourth year. At the moment I am specializing in addictology and working on my thesis. It investigates the experience of the disclosure of sexual assault that occured during childhood in the population of adults with immigrants parents.

What drew you to this project?

This project was developed over different stages. The transcultural therapy group has open spots for a few students every semester. It is during their first group session that Manon and Lara witnessed the possession state studied in the article. The experienced therapists (Marie-Rose Moro, Thierry Baubet, Théo Mouhoud) asked them to work on their countertransference after seeing them deeply puzzled after the session. A first meeting with the therapy group was organized to talk about Manon and Lara’s work. The exchanges between the students and the experienced therapists led to more questions and finally to the project of writing an article about this case.

Manon and Lara : The main thing that drew us to this project was curiosity. We wanted to understand what happened and why, and were curious to discover more about the patient and her symptoms. As psychiatric residents we also wanted to be able to have the means to help patients that show similar symptoms.
What was one of the most interesting findings? Thinking about the case through the cultural counter-transference lens shifted our clinical understanding of the case. It showed us that thinking about the patient, individually and as a group, can deeply influence his clinical evolution.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Manon : I am currently reading “Beloved” by Toni Morrisson. I recently discovered “Out of the Blue” by Dennis Hopper, a heartbreaking movie about violence and trauma.

Lara : I am currently reading “Our share of the night” by Mariana Enriquez, an Argentinian novel in the steps of Gabriel Garcia Marquez “One hundred years of solitude”, regarding its intergenerational study of trauma through magical-realism. I was also moved recently by “The Fly”, by David Cronenberg.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

It would be continuing to involve students in therapy groups such as the transcultural group : they learn from it but you can also learn from them. As new generations of patients and therapists arrive, transcultural psychiatry has to adapt itself and evolve.