Analysing the relationship between Biographical Events and the Current Structural Functioning of Personality (en collaboration avec L. Schiltz (CRP-Santé).

We present the general structure of a multi-annual research project. Our general expectancy concerns the possibilities of arts psychotherapy as a means of launching the blocked process of subjectivation with people suffering from exclusion, precarity and marginalization. The research project follows a complex research design with a sequential strategy, the first part consisting in an integrated psychosocial and clinical study using a mixed methodology. We constructed special rating scales for the analysis of the data of a semi-structured biographical interview and also for the holistic interpretation of the Rotter Blank Sentences Test, separating the associations to sentences beginning with the third and first person. The correlations between two sets of variables (biographical interview and Rotter test) were computed for the total experimental group (N=206), and for clinical subgroups. We shall analyse the matrices of correlations (Spearman's Rho) with the help of optimal scaling procedures (OVERALS). The links between traumatic biographical events and responses to the 3rd, respectively 1st person items of the Rotter test are interpreted in terms of unconscious versus conscious psychological processes and allow us analysing the expression of defence mechanisms and coping strategies. The results of the study are discussed in the light of the recent traumatogenic hypothesis of borderline functioning.