The Next Generation of Therapists: Migration, Belonging, and Mental Health Care in France

In France, transcultural psychiatry is a leading approach in supporting the mental health needs of immigrant and minority patient populations. The goal of transcultural psychiatry is to provide access to language interpretation and recognize the socio-cultural dimensions of mental illness. Transcultural psychiatry is also an important training site for budding psychiatrists and psychologists who wish to support individuals whose mental health conditions have been exacerbated by displacement and discrimination. Crucial to this training is a structure of apprenticeship, where apprentice therapists develop clinical and caring skills under the guidance of supervising therapists. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in four mental health clinics for immigrants and their descendants in Paris, I examine the affective and embodied dimensions of becoming a transcultural therapist. I attend to the smoothness and friction between apprentice therapists, many of whom identify as second or third-generation descendants of immigrants, and their supervisors, many of whom came to France as immigrants. Apprentice therapists found it affirming to reflect on their own experiences and forms of belonging in therapy. They also identified how supervising therapists policed their speech and instrumentalized these forms of belonging. I argue that transcultural psychiatry, which is meant to be inclusive of ways of belonging that have been devalued in France, may inadvertently produce exclusion. My analysis reveals how the tensions between apprentice and supervising therapists parallel evolving conceptualizations of belonging—in terms of race and religion—in France.