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620 Pierre de Bie
countered in a multidisciplinary dialogue, we must borrow examples from a
single research context.
Reflecting upon the experiments already carried out on collaboration between
different specialists in the field of mental illnesses, in which problem-focused
research was used from the start, and in which work involving several disciplines
is most frequent, Roger Bastide has clearly shown all the difficulties encountered
by a multidisciplinary research team.64
They arise from various factors such as :
a. The institutionalization of multidisciplinary research
Team work can be fruitful only if it is institutionalized: it needs an organiza-
tion and rules for work. Frequently research workers are employed in an estab-
lished organization and have to submit to its rules. In the case we are examin-
ing, the study of mental illnesses, the organizations which undertake the
research
are often old institutions, obeying old regulations (which date in any case from a period
in which no one dreamed of multidisciplinary teams) and which are in addition restric-
tive. And how can something new be set up in an archaic framework? Should the or-
ganization (with its weight of inertia) be prevented from blocking new concepts arising
from the dialogue? In the case of the study of mental illness, for example, one is most
often practically compelled to pass through the whole machinery of the psychiatric
hospital, with its binding regulations and its traditional organization, and to respect
its established hierarchy of statuses. Wil not the work of the multidisciplinary team in-
terfere with the authority of some people, for example, the hospital staff, the social wel-
fare workers, the educators, in relation both to patients and to their superiors, and thus
risk upsetting the more or less precarious balance between services ? Experiments of
which records have been kept in this type of research show that much more time has
been required to make the research acceptable than actually to carry it out -in order to
allay fears, find compromises with the administrative regulations - but also that in the
end the opposition between the various services and the administration was resolved
by joint work, and difficulties overcome by the energies of the combined gro~p.~5
But multidisciplinary research may also impose on itself its own laws and
create its own specific organization. Roger Bastide recalls that for the study of
morbid cases a ‘concentric’ order may be substituted for problem-focused
research ‘for several voices’: ‘At one time, . . . work was done as it were on a
linear pattern: the psychiatrist, as and when the case he was concerned with
offered new problems, called into his study the biologist, the psychologist, and
even sometimes the sociologist. Research work by a team substitutes for this
linear order an order which we may call concentric, that is to say, in which all
the researchers regularly come together in the same room, for example, in
meetings which are held daily (at the end of the day), or weekly (especially for
studying cases) or monthly (especially for merging different perspectives in a
single theoretical or at least conceptual whole)’.
b. Ecological constraints
The organization of research is carried out in a fixed space: the structure of
this space has definite effects on the development and fecundity - or the ac-
cumulation of difficulties - of research. Bastide is here referring to studies in the