[Humanitarianism: the gardener, the truck driver and the "shrink"].

Abstract

The way NGO's intervene can offend "shrinks", who are attached to a slow temporality and suspicious of practices that are for the most part interventionist and that indicate the primacy of act over thought. Yet a certain number of people from our profession engage in "humanitarian activities", taken in, like others, by the effects of an illusional salvation and omnipotence. Yet when "shrinks" are aware of the context in which they intervene they can help establish alliances, create frameworks referred to a third party and seek for meaning. It is these three last points that seem to make their intervention most pertinent.