The Production of Subjectivities in a Division of Applied Psychology: Techniques of Self, Mixtures, and Purifications

• In Event: STS and the Subject

Abstract

This paper study the ways of producing subjectivities engendered by psychological practices in the Division of Applied Psychology (DPA) at the Federal University from Rio de Janeiro. To investigate these modes of producing subjectivities we use ethnographical approaches and interviews with psychologists-supervisors, interns and patients from different clinical orientations (psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy, gestalt therapy and institutional analysis). Interns enact complex modes of negotiation that exist among the DPA teams about practices, concepts, and time of therapy that nevertheless results in purification processes: there is a constant criticism of other orientations and option for a dogmatic position of each orientation. Interns rarely stepped beyond pragmatic problems to articulate diverse practices. Simultaneously, patients took an inquisitive position about psychology as a way of seeing the world, a philosophy of life. In this case, patients actively link therapy to diverse practices in a way similar to what Foucault calls techniques of the self (a group of practices and exercises used actively by oneself aiming to transform oneself into an ethical being). In this sense, we can find patients practices as the constitution of diaries, singular appropriations of the discourse of the therapists, and even exercises of self-questioning and problematization of the instances of collective life, such as prejudice, stereotypes and subliminal messages. We can, then, define patients in various ways, but not as passive and patient creatures.

Author

• Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)