« Psychiatry is Like a Village »
Setting up therapeutic theatre sessions at the Point G psychiatric hospital of Bamako (Mali) brings up psychological and ethnological questions. With this double point of view, we analyse the use of traditional theatre (koteba) in a hospital context. By describing the lay out of the project and various sessions, we explain how we used the recurring reference to the village as a metaphorical area but also as a relational system. This reference can help better understand what is at stake in this kind of therapeutic theatre. The therapeutic relationship is indeed part of the group framework and may refer to relations of powers, specific to the Malian context. The reference to the village acts as an interface between care and stage drama, between ethnopsychiatry and ethnotheatre, and can help better understand the potential relational effectiveness of such a therapeutic lay out.