What Do Psychoanalysts Learn From Indigenous Peoples? Psychoanalysts Interview Tupinambás, Baniwas, Payayás, Tuxás, Guajajaras, and Puris.

Abstract

This text is the result of intense work from the Ocupação Psicanalítica [Psychoanalytic Occupation¹] research and extension project, linked to the Graduate Program in Psychoanalytic Theory at UFRJ in partnership with LaPTE -Transcultural Psychiatry and Ethnopsychanalysis Laboratory of the Institute of Psychiatry (IPUB/UFRJ) in conversation with the indigenous authors who co-sign with us the written result of a work that relied on the strength of orality and ancestral transmission. We also counted on the participation of the Psychoanalytic Occupation Nucleus in Bahia, located at the Federal University of Recôncavo Baiano. In the following pages, we bring fragments of the transcription of interviews we conducted with leaders or members of indigenous peoples, Indigenous Health and Mental Health workers, and also with an indigenous person from the Guajajara people and the Maraka'nà village who shared the importance of her encounter with Psychoanalysis through her psychoanalytic process. Despite the loss of the richness of orality in writing, we sought to extract on the following pages the strength of our encounter and our learning from the different people we came into contact with.As a research field, we start with the psychoanalyst's involvement in the political struggles of Brazilian indigenous peoples, in addition to participation in public Mental Health care centers for the indigenous population. Currently, we have also built a clinic that begins in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, providing online services to the Tupinambá population of Ilhéus and recently starting a face-to-face clinic with non-village indigenous people in Rio through the construction of an outpatient clinic for this population in partnership between the teams coordinated by Prof. Bruno Reys and Prof. Mariana Mollica, from both projects. We have visited villages in the greater Rio area, alongside the public defender's office, and engaged with the Maraka'nà Village².We begin this compilation with conversations with interviewed indigenous individuals, such as Cacica[chieftain]* Maria Valdelice, leader and elder of the Tupinambá people in southern Bahia, the first recognized cacica in Bahia and the second in Brazil; Geana Baniwa, a psychologist who completed her master's degree from the perspective of her people, from the Baniwa people inhabiting the Amazon rainforest region in the northwest of the state of Amazonas and the countries of Colombia and Venezuela. Next, we present parts of the interview with Dilmar Puri, from the Goytacá people, belonging to the Puri nation located in the southwest region of Brazil, who became a member of the Maraka'nà village in the city of Rio de Janeiro. We also include Itaynara Rodrigues Silva, from the Tuxá people in northern Bahia, along the São Francisco River, the first indigenous psychologist of the Brazilian Federal Psychology Council (CFP). She works with the Tupinambá population, integrating an interdisciplinary Indigenous Mental Health team. We also compile fragments of our conversation with Chief Juvenal Payay...