Meeting a practitioner, not just a tool

In this interview, however, it was not only a matter of talking about a tool. It was above all about meeting a practitioner, a journey, a way of being a therapist.

What strikes you straight away with Stessie Fougeroux is how embodied her way of speaking about her profession is. She looks back with great sincerity on her own story, on her place within her own family, on what made her sensitive very early to psychological suffering, and also on her professional path. Like many clinicians, she went through theoretical frameworks that nourished her intellectually, without always giving her the feeling of having fully found her place. It was ultimately in systemic family therapy that she found an approach able to connect understanding, movement and intervention.

The Mony Elkaïm turning point

Over the course of the conversation, she recounts with great simplicity how important her encounter with Mony Elkaïm’s thinking was for her. Reading him was a turning point. She found there a way of thinking about relationships, beliefs, resonances and the impasses of the bond that echoed her own clinical experience, and her personal one too.

A living therapeutic style

One of the particularly interesting aspects of this conversation is the way Stessie describes her therapeutic style. She speaks of a living, natural practice, shot through with humour, metacommunication, co-therapy and a very fine attention to what is happening in the moment. Far from a fixed or lofty stance, she defends a deeply human way of being a therapist, in which technique matters, of course, but never replaces the encounter.

What the crossed beliefs game really opens up

The interview also gives a better grasp of the logic behind the crossed beliefs game. This tool is not reducible to a playful medium. It opens a space of mutual understanding. It helps each person to identify their own construction of the world, to perceive the other’s more clearly, and to see how certain interactions come, unintentionally, to reinforce everyone’s protections and wounds. Therein lies the whole finesse of the systemic approach: going beyond an individual reading of difficulties in order to think about the relational loops that keep them going.

Thinking “family” inside institutions

Finally, this interview also brings to light an essential question: that of the place of systemic thinking within institutions, and in psychiatry in particular. Stessie Fougeroux points out how difficult it sometimes remains to think “family” in contexts still largely organised around an individual reading of the symptom. Her experience nonetheless shows how far an openness to the relational system can transform clinical understanding.

That is what makes this conversation precious. The full episode — in French — can be watched below.