I . Introduction

The term “clinical” appeared for the first time in 1586, it is mainly used in psychology. It comes from the Greek “klinikos” (= pertaining to a bed) and sends back to the idea of being at the bedside of the sick person. The clinical dimension is a direct observation by an entitled person  (= educated observation) of a clinically significant fact in a given context, to which is added an interpretation to give it sense (subjective elements).

It makes a reference to the supervision but also to the professional’s listening the patients in the clinical cases. It is considered at the same time as an analysis of the practice, a singular modality of the analysis or an explanatory model of the practice. In spite of a visible ambiguity between the analysis and the practice, two principles of the clinical stand out : “one by one” and the concrete (the latter is a perpetual cycle).

The clinical  is a generic name subjected to various explanatory models of the understanding of the symptoms (psychoanalysis, systematics) and of the professional practice: confusions are possible between the psychology clinical  (pathological, psychoanalytical, systematic) and the clinical in a social intervention.

 

Although the psychological dimension plays an major role in the social work, the latter is not one-sidedly psychological: the social intervention has no therapeutic purpose, it reports the environment of the professional practices of the social work. It does not have a social objective either. During a social action we do not take into account only the psychic sphere, or the social character, at the risk of putting under silence important elements. The social intervention is going to focus on the formal, completely organizational analysis. It is going to be more superficial than the psychological clinical which gives a significant place to the unconscious logic first.

 

The clinical has mainly a psychological dimension but not only: it has an transdisciplinary status.

II. Transdisciplinarity

The clinical is a transdisciplinary practice which “aims at the always singular occurrences of a universal (social class, psychic structure, statistical series) that includes many other occurrences, according to a logic that no particular case however weakens. ” (P. 121). The transdisciplinarity can be approached in two different ways.

The ideological dimension sends back to the moral principles, family models, educational ideals etc. In one of the definitions of transdisciplinarity (cf. Plan), the objective is to put forward the omnipresence of these two logics in the strength, the impact and the limits of every mono or pluridisciplinary practice.

 

In clinical, these two dimensions, ideology and unconscious, are the object of an intense work where some of their effects are perceived and known in the professional practice. They are strategic markers of the transdisciplinary clinical and aim at feeding the fantasy of having a full explanation : this approach brings a unique dynamic and experience. 

 

These two logics are omnipresent, effective and powerful in mono or pluridisciplinary training. Despite that, the disciplines try to separate them, which involves the sidelining of one of the two. They appear in an explicit and inseparable way only within the framework of the social intervention.

III. Social intervention

The social intervention is a synonym for “social work” (turned to others): the actions, the intentions placed under the “social” label. In practice, there is a generalization, a deviant extension of the notion of “social work”. It is due to multiple requests and to the separation between the clinical and the social work. Nevertheless, the transdisciplinary clinical allows a questioning of the various clinicals and is subjected to the specificity of the social practices. The concept of clinical systematically contains the notion of social intervention: there is a relation between the social intervention, the social work and the (transdisciplinary) clinical.

In the social intervention, one should not get the clinical and the psychological clinical mixed up. When we “take charge” of someone’s problem, we are not going to focus only in the psychic sphere or in the professional integration: the individual is a social being who is at the crossroads of various disciplines (psychological, sociological, anthropological).

The peculiarity of the clinical is that it can adapt to a specific object: the social intervention.

One of the interests (and one of the great difficulties) of the social intervention is that it presents explicitly the articulation between the logics of the ideology and of the unconscious. In other fields, this system is untold and put foward the social work. The transdisciplinary clinical is going to bring ways of clearance, of reflection in the social work that can invest other fields.

IV Bibliographie

Karsz, S. (2004). Une clinique transdisciplinaire d’intervention sociale. Dans pourquoi le travail social? (pp.115-154).