Abstract EN:

Social science studies of psychiatry have been mainly interested in the social mandate of the psychiatric institution. The polarisation of psychiatry between psychodynamic approaches and biological approaches in the etiology of mental disorders has given rise to public debates but also within the social science to question of the scientific and therapeutic functions of this medical speciality. This thesis proposes to jointly investigate the transformations of contemporary psychiatry, the professional organisation of the psychiatric hospital, the therapeutic function allocated in Prance to the psychiatric hospital and psychiatric practices by comparing the practices of care in two psychiatric wards: one of psychoanalytic orientation, the other referring to psychopharmacology. The thesis plan is organised around a central hypothesis in that the studied wards form some worlds of care which order and organise entities involved in the definition of care according to the primary aim of treatment pursued by each of them. The first part of the thesis focuses on the medical activity with the study of overall medical organisation and the forms of doctor-patient relationships. The second part of the thesis recounts the genealogy of nursing practice in psychiatry. The third part of the thesis analyses worlds of care in action from three boundary objects of psychiatry that are the "framework", the nurses* interviews and the buildings of the psychiatric services.