PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE POWER OF ITS REPRESENTATION: a critical psychosociology of psychoanalytic knowledge
Social representations and psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic discourse; Psychoanalysis and power; Social psychology of psychoanalysis
From an articulation between the Theory of Social Representations and Critical Discourse Analysis - in addition to other contributions - the work analyzed the psychosocial processes involved in the representational-discursive construction about the extrapsychoanalytic universe, by a Brazilian Lacanian psychoanalytic institution. Taking materials published between 2004 and 2016 by one of its vehicles of dissemination, the documentary research focused on four instances of the extrapsychoanalytic, thus hierarchized: the “social”; the “science"; the “university” and; the “psy-world”. Reconstituting the history of Freudian psychoanalysis and its further developments by the Lacanian movement, the research described/interpreted how and why each of these social objects were constructed representationally and discursively, with a view to producing a radical estrangement between psychoanalysis and the extrapsychoanalytic, necessary strategic condition for the alleged immunity to social criticism and, at the same time, for its social reproduction, especially at the university and in undergraduate psychology courses. With texts aimed at an expanded psychoanalytic audience - to include university professors and psychology students - the social representations discursively conveyed were read not only as an instrument for disseminating a possible reading of the world, but as means of producing subjectivities in the service of political interests of a certain Lacanian psychoanalytic community. In this sense, the investigation expanded the original approach of psychoanalysis by social psychology, as carried out by Serge Moscovici in his thesis Psychoanalysis, its image and its public, taking it not as a representational object, but as a source of representations of social alterity, necessarily linked to processes of power and ideology. In the end, having explained the importance of taking psychoanalysis as a social object, the research proposed to enrich a little explored field of studies, characterized as a “social psychology of psychoanalysis” or, more specifically, a “psycho-sociology of psychoanalytic knowledge”.