Language
The word “Eranos”, in Greek, symbolizes a banquet, both spiritual and material, that lasts thanks to the contributions of each participant. The Hungarian mythologist Karl Kerenyi took the original meaning of the word, which first appeared in Greek literature in Homer's Odyssey, in terms of “spiritual core”
It had to be developed by the participants in an atmosphere of freedom and spontaneity, with songs, poems, improvised verses, or with a symbolic offering to the group. Starting in 1933, a contemporary Eranos resumed and lasted for over seventy years in Ascona-Moscia, on the Swiss side of Lake Maggiore.
Is the result of thirty years of research and development in social sciences and practices, in educational sciences and practices to bring the best in 21st century education.
The practice is capitalized through the contributions of its founder to civil volunteering (Unis-Cité), to social mediation, the training of several thousand mediators including Adult Relay within a platform (IEF), a pioneer in Marseille in the qualification and support of mediators of the Adult Relais system, as well as a commitment to the very first currents of psychology and positive education in France.
The research has already yielded results through a doctoral thesis in educational sciences (Toulouse Le Mirail University) of several books/thematic files on the theme of juvenile radicalities in 2018.
In 2016, we co-directed with the photographic artist Férial, the Visual Arts and Testimonies book “No more, our dead, we are Paris” on the attacks in Paris in 2015, prefaced by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo
More broadly, our work focuses on the deployment of positive psychology as a social and experimental science, which is particularly relevant for intervening on contemporary issues. Both in the challenges of the world of work, in the personal sphere or in the public management of the City.
We thank the neuropsychiatrist very warmly Boris Cyrulnik, for all the rereading, advice and prefaces that he was generous in giving to our various books
How to respond to needs for meaning and initiatory quest young people?
Radical, ideologized and viral offers via social networks encounter young people in need of identity, bearings and meaning in their lives. This speed dating between ideal depressants and online hate marketing presents us with a major challenge: to respond with something else (yes but what?!) , propose alternatives (yes, but which ones?). More generally, while, since the COVID pandemic, the rate of depression among adolescents has skyrocketed as have suicide attempts, how can we make sense in the education we provide? How do you help an adolescent to develop an identity that is both multiple and coherent, rooted and open, that thrives internally and offers his talents to others?
“The Orphans of the Republic”, published in 2018, offers an investigation through the journey of 350 young people followed for radicalization. Beyond the data and analyses that tell the story of youth as well as family and societal functioning, this book is a picture of the anthropological fault that threatens each new generation that will encounter the anti-initiatory rites that we are describing.
At school, in neighborhoods, at work or among our loved ones, we all need to be informed about these issues and to be supported by methodical and practical reflections. This second methodology book, also published in 2018, therefore offers a range of resources to achieve this in a structured and distanced manner, without losing our humanity in the face of an eminently complex question.
The consequences of this global crisis require us to question the meaning and the collective project, through a new story. We feel united and united during this crisis, which is, this time, global. It affects indiscriminately, systemically, multiple dimensions of our personal, family, professional, financial and above all moral, psychological and spiritual lives.
When it comes to the psychosocial and spiritual battle, we are not always armed, far from it. And resources are also not at hand, ready to use, and accessible regardless of social and cultural foundations.
What's more, these resources must be applicable, concrete and help us deal with the complex, even traumatic situations that we experienced during the lockdown phases. These resources are equally prospective, oriented to the difficulties and traumas that can potentially occur.
From the ability to anticipate, which is not just an art of divination, will come our greater or lesser agility in the course, far from being marked out. Better managing existential crises tests our capacity to be hospitable to this world to come.
Well-being, creativity, empathy, altruism, are all resources cultivated over the past twenty years by positive psychology. A discipline that we first learned as a learner since 2013, and now become a rhizome and network around the world, to learn from others and humbly transmit our experience in this field.
Some perspectives on the horizon to draw this path:
The individual or group management of post-traumatic stress or to a lesser extent of unspeakable events to pass in the order of speech. This is in order to be able to put to work his personal reorientation or a professional collective;
The neurosensory approach to stress to prepare for complex post-lockdown situations. Learn to distinguish paralyzing anxiety from legitimate fear. For psychologists, as well as philosophers, the latter is a more malleable and domesticable sensation in order to strive for better well-being.
The “appreciative inquiry” approach to re-mobilize, towards a new organization, another agency lies from the framework of lived experiences. It makes it possible to discern the banal, the futile, right down to the fundamental, in order to refocus the core of the entrepreneurial project. Working on the positive personal life project can adopt the same investigative approach;
A series of modular seminars on resilience, civic connection, parenting and positive education are among our development goals. It is the result of our international experience in Africa and in the Anglo-Saxon world. We are convinced that it is through the transmission of this globalized cultural capital that we will be able to recover from the psychosocial upheavals of this pandemic;
The configuration of individual follow-up in the office uses a long psychoanalytic or short psychotherapeutic intervention framework (see box) that is multi-integrative and multi-referential. In all cases, we will offer you tailor-made support.
Les work topics : the physical, emotional, intellectual, communicational, communicational, relational, relational, artistic, spiritual, religious dimensions can all be invited in our therapeutic work
At the level of axes of work about yourself: overcoming difficulties in the present, better understanding the roots of the past and their influences on current attitudes and decisions, better understanding the favorable scenarios of the future that can be established.
Graphic facilitation exercise, at the Geelong Grammar School in 2019.6th World Congress of the International Positive Psychology Association.© Brandy Agerbeck, Chicago, USA.
At the level of psychoanalytic techniques : brief psychotherapy-inspired therapy will be preferred for therapeutic approaches aimed at short and medium term effectiveness. We will also aim at cognitive therapies (based on learning empathy, therapeutic introspection and coping and resilience techniques) or even specialized therapies that focus on psycho-traumas and dissociative shocks.
At the t levelTypes of support : the latter can be less analytical and more interactive for those who need more interactions (psychotherapy) or even include instructions and exercises as in coaching. The use of positive psychology will balance the work carried out by approaches on strengths, potentials, talents, and the development of abilities to balance and thrive in a sustainable way.
We will work to remedy existential and psychological difficulties leading to discomfort, questions, suffering, loss of bearings and possibly depressive states.
We will also develop personality resilience potentials, safe haven values and beliefs, and sports, artistic, spiritual and religious practices that rejuvenate.
We help the person to project themselves, to have ideals, motivating life projects and to make them a reality.
We understood the strategic importance of being able to feed basic needs, including the values that can be attached to them.
However, a fairly recent discipline has focused specifically on studying how exactly everyone can cultivate their resources: positive psychology. It is important to define positive psychology well and to show that, fortunately, it is not a remake of the positive thinking of the 19th century.
“The science of psychology has been much more successful on the negative than on the positive side. This revealed a lot about man's faults, his illness, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his attainable aspirations, or his full psychological potential. It is as if psychology had deliberately restricted itself to only half of its jurisdiction, and in that, the darkest and nastiest half.”
Maslow Abraham, Motivation and Personality, original ed., 1954.
Taking into account the positive resources of personality had already inspired all the current of humanist psychology in the United States in the 1960s with Carl Rogers At the top of the line who defines this actualizing tendency as being “the inherent tendency of the organism to develop all the potentialities of the person in order to ensure its maintenance and enrichment”.
Rogers Carl, “A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework.” In JSkoch (Eds). Psychology: a study of science. Formulations of the person in the social context (vol3); New York McGraw-Hill, 1959.
Human beings are endowed with self-regulation and self-determination capacities and psychological resources from which they can draw, in particular in a facilitating interpersonal climate.
However, positive psychology is a new current of thought in psychology, which appeared in the United States at the end of the nineties at the initiative of Martin Seligman (professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States), then president of the American Association of Psychologists (APA).
Recognizing that most of the theoretical and empirical work carried out in psychology and psychiatry was systematically interested in the understanding and treatment of psychological disorders, Seligman wanted to focus on the study of the psychological strengths and resources of individuals, who were left behind; especially since he himself was the designer of “learned helplessness”.
The definition of the goals of positive psychology is as follows:
“The scientific study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the development or optimal functioning of people, groups and institutions”.
Gable, S.L., Reis, H.T., Impett, E.A., & Asher, E.R. What do you do when things go right? The intra personal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 2004.
“The field of positive psychology at the subjective level is about valued subjective experience. At the individual level, these are positive individual traits: the capacity for love and vocation, courage, the sense of interpersonal relationships, aesthetic sensitivity, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, originality, future spirit, spirit of the future, spirituality, high talent and wisdom. At the group level, these are the civic virtues and institutions that push individuals towards better citizenship: responsibility, encouragement, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance and work ethics.”
Seligman, M.E.P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M., “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist, 55 (1), 2000.
From this angle, Ilona Boniwell presents three priority areas:
“All the positive experiences experienced by an individual: well-being, contentment, and satisfaction with past experiences; joy and “the best experience” for the present; hope and optimism for the future.”
Identifying the elements that make up a quality life or a fulfilling life involves the study of positive individual qualities such as relational skills, creativity, courage, a sense of forgiveness, perseverance, perseverance, spirituality or even wisdom.
“That of community that encompasses civic virtues, social responsibilities, encouragement to rise up, altruism, civility, positive institutions, and other factors that contribute to the development of citizenship and communities and encourage people to strive for something beyond themselves.”
Boniwell Ilona, Introduction to Positive Psychology, Payot, Paris, 2012.
Ken Sheldon and his colleagues point out that in a world of adversities and uncertainties, the new science of positive psychology aims to “understand, test, discover, and promote the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive.”
The Positive Psychology Manifesto was created at the meeting in Akumal (Mexico) in 2000 by the following authors: Ken Sheldon, Barbara Fredrickson, Kevin Rathunde, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, and Jon Haidt.
As such, Positive Psychology is extremely well placed to deal with protective factors. Recently, the direction towards a model of resilience has received new impetus from the results emanating from positive psychology, as noted by Ann Masten who writes that: “the message of three decades of resilience research highlights the central themes of the evolution of positive psychology.
Masten A.: “Ordinary magic; resilience processes in development, American psychologist, 56 (3), 2001.
It is not a paradigm shift but rather an internal evolution in psychology. The integration of strengths into life stories that are often biased by negativity transforms clinical orientations:
Encourage certain patients” not to think that the sole objective of psychotherapy is to correct their distorted thoughts or to restore their troubled relationships but also to learn from their strengths, their skills, their talents and their abilities to overcome challenges. (...) Psychopathology arises when growth and well-being decrease and when, on the other hand, psychotherapy offers a unique opportunity to realize or revitalize patients' growth potential (...) thinking about the negative parts of one's existence is important but growth requires evaluation, recognition and strengthening of strengths. (...) Emotions and strengths are just as authentic and real as personality symptoms and disorders, and as these strengths enable effective therapeutic relationships, through positive experiences and characteristics. ”
Rashid Tayab, “Positive Psychotherapy: “A Strenghs-Based Approach””, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2015, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2015.
Indeed, the patient's inherent capacities for growth, contentment and well-being can be thwarted by psycho-social and/or socio-cultural factors, in short, complex relationships with the environment.
This is indeed a major challenge due to the prejudices of young audiences towards psychologists and psychiatrists as well as the apprehensions of this same youth to anticipate, a negative evaluation of their person, during a test or an initial psychological diagnosis, regardless of the sensitivity of the professional moreover.
Positive psychotherapy was based on the work of Seligman, who sorted highly subjective notions such as happiness and well-being into five scientifically measurable and manageable components: positive emotions, commitment, relationships, relationships, relationships, meaning and accomplishment, the first letters of each giving word. PERMA.
Seligman Martin, “PERMA and the building blocks of well-being,” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2018.
Feeding these five elements significantly lowers rates of depression and increases life satisfaction in a corresponding way. These last elements are fundamental when we know that out of our sample of 350 young people analyzed in our book Orphans of the Republic (2018), not only was more than 35% followed by a psychologist or psychiatrist and more than 40% were depressed (although this was not necessarily the same).
According to the recommendations of Tayab Rashid (2015), we can distinguish three phases of support:
Explore a balanced patient story through their “signature of strengths.” This is achieved through goals that are significant for the person.
Focuses on cultivating positive emotions and in an adaptive way to deal with negative memories.
The final phase includes exercises that promote the alignment of relationships, goals, and positive commitments.
It is a real rebalancing game that is being undertaken because the ratio of emotions to positive necessary to counteract negative emotions is a movement to create at least three positive emotions for one negative one, according to the work of Barbara Fredrickson.
Fredrickson, Barbara, Positivity: Discover the ratio that tips your lifetoward flourishing, New York, NY: Crown, 2009.
The “interpreter” strategy : in four steps (Tayab Rashid).
Secure psychological and psychological space: write a bitter memory from the point of view of a third person;
Conscious concentration: observe a negative memory rather than react to it;
Reconsolidation in a relaxed state: helping to verbalize aspects that are finer and more subtle than the memory traces of a bitter memory;
Misappropriation: engaging intentionally and concretely in a task that has nothing to do with or is pleasant.
“When I was a kid, my mom told me that happiness was the key to life. At school, when I was asked to write what I wanted to be later, I said “happy.” They told me that I didn't understand the question, I told them that they didn't understand life.”, John Lennon (1940-1980).
“Positive education brings together the science of positive psychology and best practices and lessons that encourage and support schools and individuals to thrive within their communities.”
Norrish, J.M., Williams, P., P., O'Connor, M., O'Connor, M., & Robinson, J., “An applied framework for positive education.” International Journal of Wellbeing3 (2), 2013.
This is the work of the Geelong Grammar School in Australia (Melbourne). This institution was the first to implement comprehensive development and well-being programs for its students as early as 2008.
Alain Ruffion (Institut Eranos), at the Geelong Grammar School in 2019.6th world congress of the international association of positive psychology.
Many precursors in the 20th century such as Alfred Alder, Montessori schools, Célestin Freinet took the lead. But it is time to affirm that positive education is created, on international scientific bases, to establish a culture of non-violence.
Refer to the findings of the UN report by Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, “World Report on Violence against Children”, Publish by United Nations —Secretary-Generalʼs Study on Violence against Childern, October 2006.Available at http://unicef.org
It is not for nothing that Freud ranked education among the three professions that were impossible with politics and care. The criticisms would be centered around the idea that education would thus become behaviourist or even normative.
The establishment of resources related to psychosocial skills in France is still too dependent on scattered initiatives, which are certainly welcomed, but they are not yet institutionalized and even less evaluated.
However, positive education is a discipline, like the positive psychology from which it emanates, is based on scientific experiments, tools based on tangible evidence: the well-being of the child and the effectiveness of learning.
From an early age... proven results
Shoshani and Slone investigated the effect of positive psychology on preschool students on their subjective sense of well-being, mental health, and learning behaviors over an entire school year and their results showed a marked improvement in all three areas of the group compared to the control group.
Shoshani, A., & Slone, M. “Positive education for young children: Effects of a positive psychology intervention for preschool children on subjectivewell being and learning behaviors.” Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2017.
The development of moral feelings in exchange for fleeting pleasures...
Puente-Martinez and his team showed that learning to regulate negative affects was effective in the best management of these affects and that it also made it possible to relate more to eudemonic pleasures, which are more a source of lasting satisfaction than hedonic pleasures.
“In an era where parents (see teachers) can alternately fear lawsuits for abuse of power (rigidity...) and laxity (permissiveness...), the positive approach is emerging as an ideal mixture of attention and firmness. She refuses both the balance of power and the abuse of complicity. From there follows a more or less syncretic preference for respect and care (against neglect and arrogance), for well-treatment (against brutality), for gratitude and congratulations (against reproaches and recriminations), for the valorization of skills (against the stigmatization of weaknesses), for risk and error (against fault and guilt) (...) in short, the liberating quest for freedom positive reinforcements (ʻBravo) would be more effective in the long term, than the alienating fear of negative judgments (ʻZero)”
Filiozat Isabelle, I tried everything, Pocket Marabout, 2013.
“First, a quiz: in two words or less, what do you want the most for your children? If you're like the hundreds of parents I asked, you answered: “Happiness,” “Trust,” “Confidence,” “Happiness,” “Balance,” “Good Things,” “Kindness,” “Kindness,” “Health,” “Satisfaction.” In short, you want the most for the well-being of your children. In two words or less, what do schools teach? If you are like other parents, you answer: “Success”, “Reflection”, “Reflection”, “Success”, “Compliance”, “Literacy”, “Mathematics”, “Mathematics”, “Discipline” and others. In short, schools teach the tools of achievement. Note that there is almost no overlap between the two lists. For more than a century, the schooling of children has been about achievement, a boulevard in the world of adult work. I am all for achievement, success, literacy, and discipline; but imagine if schools could, without compromising either, teach both wellness skills and required skills. Imagining positive education”
Seligman, M.E., Steen, T.A., Park, N.A., Park, N., Park, N., & Peterson, C., “Positivepsychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions.” American Psychologist, 60 (5), 60 (5), 5, 5, 2005.
Ambitions around a professional context
“Beyond all the classical mediums of the written press on television, the graphic novel, for me, is the one that offers the most freedom. Both in terms of narration and in terms of form and colors. As for treatment, in my opinion, there is no one more inclined to tell the world as we see it, with its senses, with its freedom of speech.”
Feurat Alani, journalist, Laureate of the Albert London Prize, 2019.
“Teacher trainer and author of textbooks, I think that this format of video clips are innovative and effective educational resources to promote learning. They have the great merit of making it possible to decompartmentalize knowledge and to combine the contributions of the social sciences beyond their usual audience.”
Cédric Passard, Historian, (Co) Authors at Éditions du CNRS of Paradox de la Transgression (2012), The Golden Age of the Pamphlet (2015), What are we laughing at? Satire and freedom of expression (2021)
“Shouldn't we multiply the number of specific programs accessible on other channels to offer places for innovation, experimentation and renewal of audiovisual creation and expression? When will a major public audiovisual platform bringing our voice and our gaze here and beyond our borders, which will give pride of place to new French-speaking creations, and will also make visible the extraordinary wealth of existing programs, which for the most part seem outdated as soon as they have been broadcast?”
Tribune “for a strong public audiovisual”, call from 150 journalists, documentary makers, artists, call from 150 journalists, documentary filmmakers, artists, Journal du Dimanche, October 2020 [Link].
On the Internet and its algorithm, if we do not know how to search for the right information, we are quickly lost because we are overwhelmed with information. We have trained ourselves by spending hours looking for what may be relevant for “us”, guided by the desire to understand the contemporary world or more simply by the desire to be informed as part of our job as a support function for educational and medico-social action or as a social worker and clinician.
The content and the form... After a good year of documentary research practice, we conclude that the most relevant information is the message transmitted in the so-called “capsule” format that we will try to define as follows:
On the background, in the most condensed way possible by a script, designed and written before capturing the image;
On the form, with a style such as a “graphic novel” to get adolescents out of the playful use of comics and demonstrate to adults that cartoons can have an educational use in a professional activity.
In the abundance of productions encountered, we will then distinguish:
Newspaper cartoons in their function of informing or combating fake news, for the media;
The preventive tool for raising awareness on public action problems, for institutions;
Public interest advocacy, for use by NGOs or civil society associations.
It is also and above all a strategy for capturing audiences and involved/concerned actors: we leave the “niche” of fans of comics, movies, comics in our private life, to move towards meeting audiences in the professional field.
Give ourselves the means to do and think together on shared land. Land that is then experienced differently by everyone, than as an unproductive hobby, or constraint on the activity of work or learning.
By combining content and form, we obtain these “video capsules”, as defined as a new learning tool by the field of training integrating digital technologies.
It is very quickly discouraging for a social worker, if he does not have time freed up professionally to do this work of identifying and discovering digital technology as an educational and therapeutic medium. Support in the support missions of technical advisers makes it possible to support field teams on documentary monitoring or production facilitation, in order to investigate their meaning for professional practice.
Support professional posture;
Use third-party support to serve the educational and clinical relationship;
Learning together to do together;
Combining our knowledge, discussing it and disseminating it;
“To have the right to cite an audiovisual extract (report, program, film) free of charge in another film (or in an exhibition, a show, a DVD), the extract quotation must be brief (less than 6 minutes to find the source), that it is justified “by the critical, polemical, polemical, educational, scientific or information nature of the work” in which the extract is incorporated, and the source of the extract must be indicated (CC). PI (art. L. 122-5 and 211-3)