Care Clinic on the Banks of the Xingu River

Regular Section “Clinical Dispositives”
A Psychoanalytic Intervention with the Riverine Population Seriously Affected by Belo Monte
By Ilana Katz, Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker
English

The riverine population of the Xingu River suffered all kinds of human rights violations in the process of installing the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant in the Brazilian Amazon. The radical change in their way of life has constituted a condition of extreme social vulnerability. The article intends to discuss the construction of the Care Clinic, a clinical resource to focus on the psychological suffering, based on the articulated listening to the territorial experience. It is methodologically oriented by psychoanalysis, and involved the offering of face-to-face interaction and testimony to the affected community. It was intended to focus on the alienating character of identity substitution that was present in the territory, as a possible response to achieve, in face of the violence suffered. Between the denial of the impossible return to the lost, expressed in the demand of the discourse of the struggle for the restitution of the past, and the impotence expressed about the physical health problem that immobilizes the subject, psychoanalysis offered a third way of treatment. The intervention demonstrated that in most cases attended, there was a change of position from the subject’s perspective. The ethics of psychoanalysis, which regulates the clinic, found a place in the ‟desire of the analyst”, to support, the performance of this clinic, as it is the only indispensable element in the analyst's work.

Keywords

  • psychological suffering
  • psychoanalysis
  • clinic
  • social vulnerability
  • social trauma
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info