Care Experiences in Psychosocial Care: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Narratives of Individuals Diagnosed with Schizophrenia

uma análise psicanalítica das narrativas de sujeitos diagnosticados com esquizofrenia

Abstract

The experience of the Hearing Voices Group, developed within a Psychosocial Care
Center (CAPS, in the Portuguese acronym), made it possible to problematize the
tensions between biomedical discourse and psychoanalytic listening in mental health
care practices. Grounded in the perspective of psychoanalytic research and the
French school of Discourse Analysis, this study sought to understand the modes of
subjectivation produced within institutional care relationships, particularly regarding
the medicalization of psychic suffering, the centrality of diagnostic categories, and the
hierarchization of forms of knowledge within treatment settings. Participants’
narratives revealed the ambivalence underlying their relationship with psychotropic
medication, perceived simultaneously as a therapeutic resource and as part of an
experience associated with subjective erasure and identity crystallization. In contrast,
the group emerged as a space for speech, listening, and the collective elaboration of
suffering, fostering shifts in relation to the fixed identifications sustained by diagnostic
labels. These findings underscore the importance of clinical practices committed to
the subject’s singularity and to the shared construction of care within the field of
psychosocial care.