The concept of stories of life returns to a plurality of practices fitting in various fields of the practices social, literary, personal, of research and intervention in social sciences. This article with for goal to try to describe them and to locate them in the various stakes and debates to which they are attached.

Stories of life like social practice

Each one among us makes history of life at various times of its existence. Such friend who returns from a voyage will tell us his discovery. Such cousin met at the time of a meeting of family recalls us the account of a branch little known. Such man taken in hitch-hiking undertakes to recall us an astonishing course. These various oral practices are multiform and tangle up in networks of causes and reasons varied from which releases itself like dominant strong the understanding need to find and to give a Sens to the series of the events lived by a Sujet. Always within the framework of a discrete social practice, not reaching yet the developed statute of cultural production, one finds the eminently personal practice, written this time, of the Diary. Some of these documents, like the newspaper of Anne Franck, randomly of a discovery or of exceptional historical circumstances reach the edition.

Stories of life in the history

Biography with the Autobiography

• the socratic bios or the lives of the philosophers

• the confessions of Saint Augustin
• the Tests of Montaigne
• the confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• an example of radical autobiography has strong historical value: Memories of a low Breton peasant of Jean-Marie Déguignet

Stories of life like method of research in social sciences

Accounts of life, stories of life, approaches biographical, these concepts refer to steps implemented by the researchers in social sciences. The ethnologists are among the first there to have recourse and they make known their work with the general public thanks to certain accounts become famous. One can quote in particular:

• Sun hopi: The autobiography of an Indian hopi of Gift C. Talayesva
• children of Sanchez of the anthropologist Oscar Lewis
• the horse of pride: Memories of Breton of the country bigouden of Pierre Jakez Hélias.

This various work uses the account of life as privileged method of description of the conditions of existence of women and men in a culture specific to a given moment of their history. These accounts, which they are caused by the researcher, like the two first or although they are autobiographical as for the Horse of pride conceal a very strong heuristic value at the same time by their authenticity and the complexity which they give to see. In a study devoted to the stories of life in the field of the social sciences, Christine Delory Momberger locates them in a filiation with the German Romantisme and the understanding philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey.

The sociologists of the School of Chicago, in the years 1920, them also will use the stories of life to try to include/understand the processes with work in the phenomena of immigration, the delinquency and the deviance. the Polish peasant in Europe and in the United States of Florian Znaniecki constitutes a work founder of the American Sociologie, it is based on the analysis of accounts of life received from this population of Polish migrants of rural origin come to massively populate the cities of the north of the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Pierre Bourdieu, after having denounced what it will call the illusion biographical and declared that " the curse of sociology is to have to make with objects which parlent" to him also recourse to the accounts of life at the time of a collective research will have which it will direct to the beginning of the year four twenties and which will be published under the title of the misery of the world .

In the field of psychology, one can quote the memories of a neuropath of Daniel Paul Schreber, document autobiographical which will be used as a basis for the study of the Psychose for many authors of which Sigmund Freud. For Vincent de Gaulejac, the approach of the stories of life makes it possible to avoid the double pitfall " concept without life and of the life without concept in research in sciences humaines".

A clinical step of intervention

Starting from a study carried out on the autobiographical account of Annie Ernaux, the empty cupboards, Vincent de Gaulejac released the concept of neurosis of class. This author who in addition proposes workshops of stories of life with various actors of the medical and social field speaks about a work of personal Implication which it locates at the articulation of psychic and of the social one. The approach considered is described as clinical Sociologie. The group of history of life can be defined like a dialectical space of coproduction of Sens. This author speaks about clinical sociology, because carried out work is based on the social conditions, histories, economic which contribute to support the psychic saving in a subject. " Freud forgot that Oedipus was roi" is a joke which one allots to this author. He also quotes the words of Charlie Chaplin which says that the misery which he known in his childhood a determinism in its eyes constituted more important than the sexual instincts than he could have tested for his mother. But clinical sociology does not disavow the contribution of the psychoanalysis. On the contrary, it tries to find the joints in an account between the psychosexual determinisms resulting from the triangulation oedipienne and their contextualisation social-history.

Methodological framework of the groups of history of life

1. Analysis of the request, centering on the object of search

2. preliminary Contract of operation and regulation
3. Work of emergence of values starting from exercises and explorations (Research on the origins of the first name, Photolangages, Representation of parental projections, Research genealogical mentioning the place and the characteristics of the various protagonists, Draftings of novels symbolic systems, Life lines…)
4. Tavail of stating of its history of life
5. collective and individual Work on the statement

the analysis of the request is one moment determining where the speaker will help the speaker to specify what justifies it in this work. One of the difficulty will be to make sure that the subjacent motivation is not a request concerned with a therapeutic device. This question crosses the step of the stories of life whose methods often bring them to the border between therapy and psychoanalysis. (One can read on this subject the work under the direction of Christophe Niewiadomski and Guy de Villers: Concern and care of oneself, Bonds and borders between history of life, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis with the editions Harmattan). In rule general, the workshops of history of life strictly speaking do not have therapeutic aiming but lie within the scope of a work of elucidation of its personal history in comparison for example with a course of formation. It perhaps proposed with a group of voluntary adults in formation to carry out a work of expression of their educational and formative course. The aiming here is more formative than strictly therapeutic but one suspects well that certain courses are not stripped of a suffering which was perhaps never elaborate. The device is likely to reactivate these sufferings, just like it allows the subject which registered there to put them remotely and to give them a new direction. There is in this case, unquestionably, of the therapeutic effects which will allow, perhaps, about differently considering his report/ratio with the training and will give him, perhaps, the occasion to engage positively in a new step of formation. Within the framework of the proposal by the speaker of a group of personal development such as for example " the report/ratio with the argent" , it is also important during a preliminary discussion with the participants to specify their request and to make sure of a sufficient homogeneity of the group in comparison with the question of the limit therapy/history of life.

preliminary Contract of operation and regulation For the experts of the stories of life, this moment is founder of the operation of the group. It is a question for the participants of determining the operating rules which will make it possible to carry out work on its personal history in a psychological climate of security. One half-day, sometimes a whole day perhaps devoted to the collective development of this contract which will act as framework controlling the speeches, the relations between participants, the role of the organizer, the nature of the interventions of each one, the later use of the productions. It is important that it is the group which defines its own rules of operation. The organizer has of course its word to say but it is desirable that it lets initially the group work on these questions: What will enable me to make the account of my history in confidence in this group? What do I wait of this group? What would be for me a brake with my participation? Which common rules is one given to function? Who will be guaranteeing respect of this contract?

Tally ethical of the groups of history of life

• enlightened Voluntariate of the participants
• Respect of the confidentiality
• No use of the productions at ends of research or publication without agreement of the authors
• Non violence symbolic system of interpretations
• Pluralité of the theoretical references
• the last word on its history belongs to the enonciator who is regarded as the expert (his own experience)
• Nécessité for the organizer to have carried out to him even a work on his own history of life

Limits and risks of the step

One of the risks of the approach of the stories of life would be its systematization in various fields of the social intervention. Didier Fassin for example could note how the attribution of certain social securities could be sometimes conditioned so that it with named the register of the petition. The user of the social services can feel summoned to still say his history and still so as to obtain an financial aid or social that the only stating of its condition objectifies would have is enough to justify. But the need to say its history is strong when one is vis-a-vis a benevolent figure. " All the history of the suffering claims revenge and request the récit" known as Paul Ricoeur, how to include/understand the other apart from its history but also, how not to lock up there?

Stories of life like step of working of oneself

What, in the past, characterizes the fact of writing its " mémoires" is the membership of an elite, policy or intellectual. The participation in outstanding historical facts legitimates the author who in a certain manner is perceived like making work of public utility while giving to see interior the history of great events or by delivering his glance on such " large personnages". But the work of Montaigne and later that of Rousseau considered as founders of modernity, open the way for what will become at the twentieth century a exercise which is democratized. The word on oneself and by extension the writing on oneself founds and brings up to date a subject which wants to be free. " What will I make of what one did of me? " such is the fundamental interrogation of the existentialism posed later by Jean Paul Sartre. Consequently, it is not any more the " large événement" who governs the legitimacy of the biographical writing but on the contrary his radical " qualitativity subjective". Undoubtedly that it is important little to know what science will do of a writing like that of Anne Franck or of president Schreber. Anne Franck writes well for another, but this other it is the interlocutor which it needs to survive, to give a direction to the test which it crosses. One can say as much Daniel Paul Schreber of it. In these " memories of a névropathe" he invents him even like subject free in a founding document of resistance to the legal institution and psychiatric. One can say that Freud, Gilles Deleuze and well of others needed the writings of Daniel Paul Shreber to support their theses on is delirious paranoiac. The author, did not need them like scientists to him, to invent itself such as it makes it in his act write. Of course, it needs a reader, but this one is not necessarily Science. It is enough for him to another, human, which can read it so that its work of writing takes direction. In this direction, this writing exceeds the readings which can be about it made with the categories of psychology or psychiatry and it is undoubtedly not for only one still requires of the students in psychoanalytical private clinic of reading Schreber in the text before reading interpretations which could make such or such erudite author. These examples show and reaffirm the practice of the history of life like an anthropological constant founder. These accounts exist before even as a third comes to request them. They undoubtedly testify to the emergent quality of the conscience and the radical creativity of imagination. The account that a subject is done of its history is taken in the other large ones and small accounts of collectives, families, various groups of membership. It is taken in a given culture and the constraints of the language always miss to fully give an account of the complexity and the plentiful energy of the life. No life can be said fully. No account of life can claim to exhaust the truth of a subject. It is well what must return to us humble and careful compared to these practices. The respect and the listening of silences are worth sometimes much more than one account which would pour side of the consent and which one could by the various plays of the social places, to extort from its author.

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