La guérison psychique du cancer : place des psychothérapies psychodynamiques dans la psycho-oncologie française

Abstract

The aim of any psychotherapy is generally to modify the mental functioning of patients tormented by psychological disorders, or more widely, by any type of psychological and/or relational suffering, in order to improve their capacity to cope with the adversity of life.Ideally, psychotherapies aspire to get rid of all these troubles.In psychology as well as in psychiatry, different theories confronted each other using different types of arguments thinking that one is better than the other. Several factors can explain and influence the emergence of psychological troubles or psychological suffering. Cancer and its treatments is one of them.The different theoretical backgrounds of psychotherapists are often an obstacle to exchanges between practitioners and/or between countries. In France, these theoretical divisions are present and politically crucial in universities with also an effect on the field of psycho-oncology. The French Psycho-Oncology Society (SFPO) and the review "PsychoOncologie" related to this society try to come up to the different French or French-speaking practitioners' expectations and readers in psycho-oncology, included those who refer to the psychodynamic approach.Actually, how to overcome these clinical and theoretical divisions to improve the global "psycho-oncology" science, when practises and what we could call ideologies are so different in their conceptualizations and in the way they analyse psychological processes?In September 2010, the first issue specifically dedicated to the theme of psychotherapies in psycho-oncology was published (Psycho-Oncol. 4(3):143-220). Different methods of psychotherapy were described. We have introduced [20] that different psychotherapies are based on a theory of personality and psychopathology. Therefore, each one proposes different answers to cancer patients who need this help to get rid of their psychological troubles.In this first issue, Watson and Bultz [22] reminded us that the International Psycho-Oncology Society (IPOS) declaimed in 2010 that distress is the 6th sign in cancer care and highlighted the importance of the screening for distress in cancer patients. In their lead article, they summarized the different kinds of validated psychotherapies applied in psychooncology from an international literature review. In this brief interesting cursus of psychotherapy methods, we observed that there was no mention of psychodynamic or psychoanalytical therapies. In the eighties, Holland and Rowland published the famous "Handbook of Psycho-Oncology" which remains a reference used all over the world for psychooncology. However, to date, the psychodynamic or psychoanalytical approach has neither been described nor been mentioned.Why don't the psychodynamic references generally take place in the international English-speaking literature in psychology or psychiatry and more particularly in psychooncology. This is only done in very specialized reviews?In France, one of the problems is that several psychologists working in psycho-oncology refer to this theoretica...