The COIRAG National Workshop: history, design and transformations

Abstract

This paper documents and analyses the COIRAG National Workshop from its origins at the end of the most recent period, with a specific focus for the quadriennial 2022-2025, the renewed in-person training device following the pandemic online editions of 2020–2021. After a historical reconstruction of the four successive dispositifs since 1994 – from the professional exchange Workshop among association members to the various configurations of the trainees’ four-year programme – the current format is described: four annual editions by year of training, articulated around Large Group sessions, median groups with a conductor, and leaderless responsibility-and-creativity groups, under the theme “Polis: Psyche/Culture/Society”. Data are presented and discussed, with particular attention to expectations, transformations and learning outcomes. The cross-sectional reading reveals a coherent progression across the four years – from experiential-emotional immersion in year one to professional-identity synthesis in year four – along three developmental dimensions: experiential-emotional, professional-identity, and institutional-communal.  The longitudinal reading documents professional subjectivation. The discussion addresses the extended time as condition for analytic stance, and the political-existential function of the Workshop as a builder of professional community – an internal polis – in the spirit of the “inoperative community” (Nancy).