Presenter: Séverine Bourguignon

Description:

In this presentation, I will introduce Les Écouteurs de rues (Street Listeners), a French social innovative initiative founded in 2019. It is simple but powerful. Once a month, for two hours, volunteer therapists set up chairs in the public space of a very popular suburb of Paris and offer free, informal listening sessions to passersby. Branches of the association also exist in three other cities of France.

The project was created to break down barriers to mental health care and to make mental health support accessible. Instead of requiring appointments or payment, it brings support directly into the street, making it easier for people to talk about personal or emotional difficulties in a safe, accessible way.

Beyond individual support and active listening, the association promotes social connection and collective well-being, encouraging people to speak and reconnect in an increasingly isolated society. Volunteer therapists also guide people toward appropriate services if further help is needed or asked for, or can be identified.

Les Écouteurs de rues aims to transform public space into a place of dialogue, making mental health care more visible, inclusive, and human. The street becomes a common and sharing space and not only a place to be solicited or to hustle. It exposes therapists as ordinary people and de-dramatizes therapy, making it simple and warmhearted but nonetheless serious and efficient.

The purpose is also to explore new models of care and mental health, to get the habit of horizontalized relationships in health care, and to build easy gateways toward services and institutions by randomly meeting people and informing them about available services and possibilities.

We will explore:

1. How the association was born and how it works.
2. What is the ethical framework? How do we create safety outdoors? What are the limits?
3. How do we share intimacy outdoors? How do we encourage people who are total strangers to indulge themselves in the public space?
4. How are a certain number of Gestalt concepts addressed within the listenings illustrated with a few clinical examples of listening? For instance: social field, patterns of contacting, awareness, contact boundary, the between, presence, attunement and self-disclosure, dialogue and language, here and now, creative adjustment, co-creation, horizontalism in the relationship, excitement, intentionality and reaching out, experimentation (field work), resonance and field.
5. Political involvement, promoting humanism. Why are Gestalt therapists responding so readily and seeming perfectly suited to this exercise?

Biography:

Séverine Bourguignon is the founder and president of Les Écouteurs de rues (Street Listeners), an association offering free outdoor psychological listenings.

She works with individuals and groups in Paris as a Gestalt therapist, supervises groups of social workers, and trains people in active listening for the French Institute of the North (EGN).

As a former visual artist, she also trains therapists with the use of artistic mediation in therapy and has created a deck of cards about regulation modes.

She is the author of Gestalt articles in the French journal Revue Gestalt, the latest about Winnicott’s use of squiggle in Gestalt therapy.