Culturas psi: psicanálise, subjetividade e política

Abstract

Psy cultures: psychoanalysis, subjectivity and politicsThis special issue is the result of the work being done by an international study group on the history of psychoanalysis and other branches of psy knowledge. We will explore a thematic double: on the one hand, the insertion of psychoanalysis into local cultures, transforming them and being transformed by them, and, on the other hand, the ever complex, never linear relations between psychoanalysis and other forms of knowledge and practices that constitute what we characterize as psy cultures.We perceive psy cultures as embracing not only the development of scientific disciplines geared to the study and management of subjectivity and the mind, but also all discourses and practices associated with such disciplines, as well as the forms of reception, circulation and dissemination of such disciplines. The use of the term in the plural seeks to emphasize the multiplicity of modes and levels in which psy knowledge permeates local cultures and the great variety of the forms that their diverse reception and implementation have acquired.In the knowledge about subjectivity, psychoanalysis has become a type of hallmark of the twentieth century in Europe and the Americas (North and South), serving as a Weltanschauung, especially in intellectual and academic circles, but also being widely disseminated to a broader audience. At the turn of the twenty-first century we witness the crisis of both psychoanalytic Weltanschauung and psychoanalysis as a discipline. Alternative therapies with a greater or lesser emphasis on the body and, above all, the recent advance of biological psychiatry and the neurosciences seem to be challenging the Freudian approach and the therapeutic devices associated with it.However, it is not only about psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. The psy cultures encompass a broader and more complex universe. Especially in regions such as Latin America (but not only there), where the modernization process has gone down different paths, where Western academic culture coexists with local or even imported traditions (as is the case with the African elements), which also underwent a process of reinterpretation giving rise to all manner of hybrid forms, the construction of psy cultures had specific characteristics.Moving away from the more canonical stories about the spread of psychoanalysis and psy cultures in general, this supplement focuses on Latin American examples and other "peripheral modernities," such as the case of the transition to democracy in Spain, in Italy http://dx