To understand this singular invention, I had the good fortune of a long conversation with Stéphane Bujold, who is carrying on this visionary work today in Quebec. He recounts not only the genesis of the concept, but also the way he has reinvented it at the Havre du Fjord.

A utopia born of a childhood wound

The therapeutic hotel did not emerge from nowhere. It was born of a founding scene: Guy Ausloos, in his fifties, driving with his mother, passes a sanatorium once again. That is where, as a child, he had been placed for six months, on the pretext of an imaginary case of tuberculosis. A euphemism for saying: the family could no longer afford to feed all its children.

This late revelation becomes a key to understanding his work. It sheds light on his sensitivity to disadvantaged young people, on his fight against institutional injustice, and on his refusal to reproduce the pattern of abandonment he had himself endured. For him, that old pain becomes a driving force: those born poor need care, listening and dignity no less than others; they simply have less access to them.

Inventing a place that heals differently

The idea is simple, beautiful and demanding: to create a place where young people in great difficulty could be received as they would be in a hotel — that is, in a space designed for their wellbeing, yet part of a therapeutic dynamic of welcome from the outset. Three principles structure the model.

To this is added a strong conviction: work with the family must begin on day one, so as to avoid loyalty conflicts, abrupt ruptures and the dynamics of exclusion that are so frequent in institutions.

A revolution in the history of institutions

Stéphane Bujold places this concept within a complex genealogy: that of orphanages, Indigenous residential schools, reform schools, and more broadly all the forms of confinement that have marked Western history.

Symbolic violence, abuse, isolation, family ruptures: the traces are still visible. Guy Ausloos’s project is a radical counter-model. A place where young people are no longer broken, where they are not punished, where they cease to be seen as “bad” or “unplaceable”.

The Havre du Fjord: the living legacy

Today, Stéphane Bujold takes up and updates this vision in a centre unique in Quebec: Le Havre du Fjord. It welcomes adolescents aged 14 to 18, often facing complex difficulties combining trauma, addiction, family problems and repeated ruptures.

The philosophy of the place remains faithful to Guy Ausloos’s spirit:

• to welcome is already to care;
• to tame is to create the conditions for a bond;
• to consolidate the bond, so that the young person can safely replay painful relational scenarios and transform them;
• to prepare the separation, the final stage, too often neglected yet essential in restoring the capacity for attachment.

Two major developments have now been added to this systemic base: a sociotherapy attentive to traumatic traces in everyday interactions, and the Brunet method, arising from research at McGill University, which allows for a reconsolidation of traumatic memories with promising results among adolescents.

The therapeutic hotel thus becomes an ecosystem: a space where the teams are cared for as much as the young people, where supervision and training are central, where those who care are themselves looked after.

Why the concept remains revolutionary

Because it asks head-on what it means to care in an institutional context. Because it offers an alternative to the punitive, hierarchical models still all too present. Because it puts dignity back at the centre. Because it links individual care, family care and institutional care as three inseparable dimensions. Because it reminds us that we can only support young people if we take care of the teams who support them.

This conversation with Stéphane Bujold can be watched in the video below — in French.