Pascale Ruffel is an intercultural psychologist (Toulouse le Mirail) and a clinician (Paris VII). She is oriented by psychoanalysis. She has worked in various places (Youth Judicial Proctection, associations, nurseries, parent/child reception centres, Psychological and Medical Centres, etc.) in working-class neighbourhoods and has been particularly interested in the question of transmission in migrant families and the impact of exile on the interweaving of family relationships.

For the past eight years, she has been working with refugees at the Centre Nantais d’Hébergement des Réfugiés (Nantes refugees’ shelter). From this experience, she wrote a book Les ancêtres ne prennent pas l’avion published by Joca Seria in October 2017. In it, she talks about the singularity of encounters with these exiled people and what this regenerates and invigorates in the relationship to language, for them as well as for her.

She is a therapist associated with the Centre de Ressources et de Consultation Transculturelle of the University Hospital of Nantes.