Psychoanalysts in a plural world: losses, encounters and collective construction

Abstract

This work stems from the collaboration between psychoanalysts from Brazil and Argentina, who engage in practices with vulnerable populations through agreements with the Departments of Education in both countries. These are intersectoral interventions that transcend traditional clinical frameworks, proposing new tools to interpret the singularities of each experience.

In March 2023, in response to escalating issues of violence, it was agreed that psychoanalysts would be present in schools in Porto Alegre and that at least four meetings would be held between psychoanalysts and educators. Through the analysis of a vignette in which a classroom becomes a scene of violence, exclusion, and stigmatization, interpretive tools are proposed to rethink the frameworks and referents that underpin psychoanalytic practice. The work also reflects on the logic that shapes subjectivities and institutional dynamics. It advocates for the activation of “negative capability” as a means of opening oneself to the unknown, dismantling prejudices, and enabling transformative encounters. The notion of “getting lost” is reclaimed as a pathway to the new, while the categorical logic that classifies and excludes is critically examined. From a perspectivist standpoint, it is argued that each phenomenon expresses a point of view—and that to perceive is to enter into it.

Psychoanalytic intervention is presented as a device of instatement, capable of legitimizing marginalized forms of existence and opening spaces for subjective and collective transformation. The work calls for an ethics of encounter and for practices that shift the boundaries of the instituted, enabling new forms of the common.