ABSTRACT
Health Psychology has known a rapid growth as an autonomous field of research since around forty years in the United States, thirty in Europe. The models proposed until now are essentially centred on individual factors affecting behaviour, with a curious neglect of the collective dimensions intervening in public and individual management of health and disease. Among these dimensions, the acknowledgment of culture role is practically non-existent. Yet it was the focus of the initial work relating to the health-disease binomial, and is at the heart of the major contributions that anthropology, history, and sociology bring today to the understanding of the problems linked to prevention, protection, and promotion of health. Three types of reasons call for a reflection on the place that can and must be granted to culture. They are linked to the history of approaches of the health-disease binomial in the human sciences, the opening of psychology to culture, and the development of a multidimensional perspective in order to deal with health practices. After having examined these reasons, I will draw, based on empirical and theoretical contributions, a perspective to integrate the cultural dimension into health psychology, using the resort offered by the social representations approach.
